Wax
by Henri Feola
Zine #39 — March 2025
Wax is a speculative short story about rebuilding after a disaster that changes the landscape of the world, whether that be physical, emotional, or existential. One part quiet reflection on post-flood Appalachia and one part projection of dystopia to come, Wax is a story about the malleability of our worlds and how resilient, but also fragile, they are.
I was pretty young when I first saw her.
The big flood of ‘41 had just hit, one of a barrage of disasters sweeping across the then-United States—you remember. I’m sure, even after all these years, you remember: our little house that backed up onto the woods, always full of punks passing through; the shabby herb garden out front; the gas stove we used to boil water after the flooding destroyed the water lines.
I woke up early in the mornings, before you. The potters’ co-op had shut down indefinitely since the flooding hit, so you were out of work. Your sleep suffered without a consistent schedule; I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find you in the living room, face held in the holographic glow of your screen, or sitting on the porch staring at nothing. I imagined you were thinking of your sculptures, but I never asked. You often didn’t want to talk in those insomniac hours.
I drained a pitcherful of water from our water heater, left it filtering through a sieve with a towel draped over it, and went to check on the shitter. With running water out indefinitely, we’d had to dig a trench in the woods—miserably cold if you had to go at night, but beautiful in the mornings.
The air was clear as glass, the sky a bright, vigorous blue like it had been freshly scrubbed. The tulip magnolias were changing colors, green to yellow to rusty orange-brown. A bigleaf magnolia stood over the entrance to the path. It was young, trunk silver and shiny, with leaves the size of platters; now the leaves were thinning and falling, covering the ground in a skin of soft brown mesh.
At the base of the silver trunk, something caught my eye: a big yellow dot like a glob of fat resting atop the leaves.
I picked it up. It was wax: pebble-smooth on top, ridged beneath where it had molded around the carpet of leaves. There was another drop a couple feet away—then another—then another.
Was this one of your midnight activities, wandering around the woods by candlelight? We had headlamps; there was no need to bring a candle into the woods where it could start a fire. I’d have to talk to you about that. And where had you gotten it anyway? I didn’t think we had any yellow candles.
I followed the wax all the way to the trench. The shovel was in the exact same spot I had left it last night—so you hadn’t been going to use the shitter. The trail of dots continued, leading deeper into the woods.
A helicopter chugged slowly overhead. They were a constant presence since the flood, although their purpose remained unclear. The sound made my skin prickle, like a giant creature panting on the back of my neck.
What if it wasn’t you? I thought, staring at the trail of yellow dots weaving through the dense, young trees. Who else could it be? Our neighbors had all evacuated, and there were no supplies out here worth braving the flooded roads or wasting precious gas.
I had to duck and swerve to navigate the scrubby underbrush of white pine, holly, and oak. The needles drew pink lines on my arms. The dots of wax grew closer and closer together; the candle must have been burning for a while.
Ahead loomed a fallen white oak. The flood had downed it; the branches, still heavy with dying leaves, were crushed into dense brambles. Through a gap in the brush, the wax trail continued. A strip of yellow crossed over the trunk—a nearly unbroken line, as if it had been made intentionally.
The helicopter had passed. The woods were silent: no cars on the road, no birds, only the sound of my heartbeat pulsing in my ears. As I came around the trunk, in the massive tangle of the root ball, I saw her.
The red earth had pulled open into a gaping mouth writhing with roots. Nestled within them was a sculpture of yellow wax: a woman, or something resembling a woman. She had no face. Instead of arms, lacy branches bloomed from her shoulders, each one dotted with tiny folded buds. The viciously clear post-storm sunlight suffused her body, so she almost seemed to glow.
I had spent a lot of time looking at your sculptures, and something about her was familiar: your supple lines, perhaps, your reverent attention to detail. But you had never worked with wax before. Where would you have gotten it in a disaster zone? When could you have found the time to make this without me knowing?
I touched her face—a rumpled ball of bark like the gall of an old tree, the way it embraces injuries and intrusions and billows out around them. I peered at her from different angles, wondering if there was something inside, hidden in the center of her, that might tell me what she was. I knew it couldn’t be true, but I had the strange feeling she had come about organically, had precipitated out of the fallen oak like water freezes in the ground and sprouts up in wild, spontaneous sculpture.
You’d always said sculpture wasn’t a human invention.
I made it back to the house before you woke up. The water from the water heater had filtered out clean, and I got it boiling. Once you smelled coffee brewing you stumbled outside red-eyed, taking big puffs from your vape.
You smiled at me—tired, familiar. I knew the way your eyes crinkled up, how your cheeks lifted, the peek of your teeth you always worried about being too yellow. But after what I’d seen this morning, your expressions seemed distant, complex and mysterious, like the weather phenomena of a planet I’d never set foot on.
“I wanna try to get downtown today,” you said, the steam from your coffee fogging up your glasses. “Help dig some stuff out.”
I frowned into my mug. This, at least, was familiar; we’d had this conversation almost every day since the flood hit. “How?” It came out more sharply than I meant it to.
“In the car.”
“With what gas?”
Your glasses unclouded, your eyes behind them narrowed. “I have enough to get there and back.”
I stared at the ceiling, willing myself to be patient. “That leaves us with an empty tank. We don’t know when the gas stations will open up again. What if there’s an emergency and we have to get to the hospital?”
“There are actual, non-hypothetical emergencies happening right now.” You spoke slowly, your eyes boring into mine—as if I didn’t understand that just as well as you. “We could be helping.”
“Look—” I pressed my fist over my mouth, biting back what I wanted to say: that I was frustrated, too, cooped up here with you and your emotions. I would much rather be with a crew of people who knew what they were doing. “I’ve been in situations like this before, and it’s a lot of waiting, especially early on. We have to move carefully, not make more problems while we’re trying to help.”
“It feels a whole lot like we’re not trying! How are you so calm, when all our friends are downtown? We don’t even know—” You broke off, squeezing your temples.
I could see the pain in your face, and in that moment I didn’t care. A cold anger was building behind my eyes. “Running out of gas and getting stuck downtown isn’t gonna do shit for anyone, no matter how heroic it makes you feel.”
You stalked back upstairs, head down, leaving your coffee still steaming on the arm of your chair.
I cooked breakfast for one: a fried egg and a slimy slice of ham, still edible but suffering from the lack of refrigeration. You could make your own food. I ate quickly, not bothering to sit down but pacing back and forth with my plate in hand—as if frantic movement could make up for my own feelings of uselessness.
Spite soured in my stomach, not helped by the old ham. You needed to grow up and get a grip. If you had been trekking into the woods at night, making a sculpture for no one, it was a waste of time and resources. And if you hadn’t—I didn’t have time to ponder this mystery. I needed to be responsible enough for both of us.
So I never told you.
To this day I don’t know who she was, where she came from. What a bitter mistake, ignoring wonder in favor of more practical matters. Would it have made a difference, sharing this mystery with you? Would you have stayed?
Maybe that’s the distortion of nostalgia, imagining there was one single place where the path of my life branched off, one turn that would have changed everything. But I could have tried. I could have done more to hold us together as disaster pulled us apart. We were both so focused on being important and useful to the relief effort, we saved nothing for each other.
I walked to the fallen oak once again, weeks later, but she was gone.
The cold wood of the bus-stop bench seeped through my jeans and the wool long johns beneath them and the leggings beneath that. Someone had etched in the wood, I miss you Stacy. I traced my fingers over it, as I had many times; the edges of the letters were worn smooth.
Across the street sat a pile of debris, a remnant of the old flood: shredded tires, rotten wood, rusted bits of metal, all the stuff too stubborn to decay back into soil. Even now, only the most tenacious weeds grow from that patch of land.
The government promised a cleanup back in ‘41, a full rebuild. They left a long time ago; disaster and its artifacts stuck around. The same as I did, I guess.
I’m the oldest in this neighborhood. Most of my neighbors are young families resettling after the fighting or fleeing company towns for the relative freedom of the mountains. Many times as they’ve tried, no army or tech corporation has been able to seize this area. The mountains have kept us safe.
The bus lumbered up the hill and I stood to meet it, just as slow and sluggish. My cold muscles felt dense as stone. I hauled myself up the steps, fished around in my bag for a jar of preserves to give the driver. The fare collection machine had been ripped out for parts long ago; currency isn’t much use here anymore, besides importing essential supplies to distribute.
The bus was almost empty, so I took my usual seat: in the middle on the left side, where someone had written in sharpie, keep loving keep fighting, under the window. The bus rocked into motion with a squeal, and I watched the debris pile until the trees obscured it.
These days, I mark locations by memorials. This route took us past the gas station spray-painted, RIP Wren 2067-2089. Past the house on the corner where the arborists live; rounds of trees that have fallen to storms, floods, and disease hang from the balcony. Their toddler likes to clang them against the metal railing.
Turning onto Haywood we passed the monument to the former West Asheville Commune: what used to be a high-end apartment building, now free housing with the faces of commune members painted in loving detail on the balconies. I stared out the foggy bus window at those martyred comrades, their heads wreathed in fruits and flowers. They gave their lives to the fight against fascism and capitalism; they heralded the end of the world you and I were born into.
That must sound ridiculous to younger folks, calling it the “end of the world.” But back then the American empire felt so huge, so all-consuming, it was difficult to imagine a world without it. Anything we could do against it never felt like enough—and we tore ourselves apart over that not-enough-ness.
But we survived that empire. We clawed out a space in it, leaving small fractures for the future to bloom in. Most of us aren’t painted on any walls, but I guess we’re just harder to memorialize—small, anonymous, and plentiful as moss.
Back when the old city government still existed, they commissioned a memorial for the flood of ‘41: a big bronze monstrosity entitled, “THANK YOU FIRST RESPONDERS,” featuring two men in uniform, faces stoic and handsome. Their boots were caked with mud. One was lifting a child on his broad shoulders.
It was up for maybe a week before an anonymous group took it down. They left no manifesto, no explanation, just carted it away in the middle of the night. The concrete base remained untouched, a memorial to empty air.
Every time I go into town I like to pay it a visit. Ugly as it is, that bare concrete cylinder has remained through so much loss and destruction. It’s outlived many of us.
You remember that old couple down the street, Emma and Tim or something like that? After the government collapse they started knocking on my door every couple months, selling cheap survival kits and phone gadgets for various multilevel marketing scams. They moved into the east side tech town when it opened up, putting their faith in another overconfident oligarch with a good marketing team.
The project was a flop and the company quickly moved on. Their proprietary technology was embedded in everything they’d built: sleek homes, work spaces and driverless cars, all the investment they’d promised to pour into the city. Rather than pay to remove their products or abandon them and risk the theft of their intellectual property, they bulldozed it all and lit whatever they could on fire. The smoke lasted for days, curdling in the cradles of the mountains.
Emma and Tim are gone now—I imagine they lost everything in the “asset protection process.”
Others went the opposite direction, abandoning any semblance of their former lives. You remember Rob, I’m sure—that old professor we snickered at for being such a neoliberal. He’s gone, too—died in ‘67, fighting the fascists on the western Appalachian front. Gone like the downtown library, the beautiful water oaks along the river, our old woods—so much to remember.
I wonder what you’d think about it all. The you I knew decades ago craved disaster’s teachings. You were so angry, so ready for the complacent to be punished, the comfortable unsettled, the ignorant wisened up. I guess I was, too. But I’ve seen so much disaster since you left, and I’ve learned it’s all just change. Neither good nor bad, only an opening.
Maybe you’ve learned that by now—or maybe you’ve joined one of the fire cults out west, or the doomsday leftist societies. Communication has been unreliable for some time now, but I check all the lefty websites and newsletters when I can, always wondering if I’ll see your masked face in a grainy photo. If I did, would I recognize you?
“Downtown, Pack Square,” the loudspeaker buzzed. We lurched to a stop and the bus hissed hot, humid air as I stepped off.
“Barbecue!” a vendor shouted hopefully in my direction. “Fresh hot barbecue!” A few raggedy-looking dogs were yapping and chasing each other around the vendor’s cart. I jostled my way through the crowd flowing into the square.
Most vendors were open-air, hawking their wares from pop-up tents, the trunks of cars, and blankets thrown on the pavement. I passed a salvager’s table that had some promising-looking scrap metal, and a cart stacked high with tinctures and pill bottles, which I could certainly stock up on—but first I had to stop by the old concrete plinth and pay my respects. An elderly person’s habit, perhaps, but these days I need my rituals.
As I wove my way deeper into the square, I saw there was a small group gathered in the far corner, where the plinth sat. No vendors or buskers, just a cluster of people standing still, apart from the bustling crowd. The din of haggling and conversation grew muffled behind me as I drew closer.
A quiet like a layer of snow seemed to have settled over this part of the square; no one spoke. At first all I could see was backs and heads, shuffling, shifting. For a moment I wondered if the plinth had been taken away or replaced, and the pang in my chest surprised me. Was I that sentimental, hanging onto a stupid piece of concrete? No one even knew what it was for anymore—and what it stood for in the first place was a bizarre, self-congratulatory version of the truth designed by a government that no longer existed.
I pressed forward, my throat tight, teeth digging into my lip. The crowd parted for me without resistance, and I saw.
The plinth was still there, and standing atop it—
oh—
My heart stuttered in my chest—a moment of glorious stillness.
You.
It was the wax woman, from all those years ago.
She glowed golden, warming the cold light in her breadth. Her branched arms stretched out several feet on both sides. The day was warming, but frost still sparkled in the shadows of her chin and brows, the undersides of her breasts.
There was the same meticulous detail I remembered, that reminded me so much of you: the hairs on her legs, the folds of her stomach. The disbelief and confusion I’d felt when I first saw her were gone. I’d seen stranger things: the notebook that fell out of my pack in the chaos of a forest fire, returned charred but still intact to my campsite. The dead neighbor’s house we cleaned, having no way to find next of kin, filled with bizarre paintings he’d never shown anyone. The branch that fell from a healthy walnut on a windless day and struck my friend’s left shoulder, just sparing his lungs and heart.
Survival is strange work; however she had survived and come back to me was no less mysterious than any of our paths. She was here. So many of us were gone, but she was here.
I knelt down slowly on the concrete, the legs of strangers shuffling awkwardly around me. The cold bit through my layers without hesitation; I paid it no mind. I touched the wax—soft and fatty, leaving a soapy sensation on my palm.
You and I were here, somewhere in the heart of her: the years we spent together, our struggles, our joy, everything we gave to this land and to each other—everything we didn’t. I have made so many mistakes; I have turned away from beauty, away from love, so many times. But she came back to me.
Maybe forgiveness, too, was in the wax, soft and opaque and malleable as memory. I pressed my hands to her golden feet, and for the first time in a long time I let myself weep.
About the Author
Henri Feola (he/they) is a writer, musician, abolitionist, and mutual aid organizer based in Appalachia. He is the author of The Veil Between Worlds is Plexiglass: notes, doodles, and poems from an incarcerated forest defender. His creative work has been published in Apricity, Thimble Magazine, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others, and his nonfiction articles have been published in American Scientist.