We Ride Upon Sticks and a More-Than-Apt Metaphor
Quan Barry's We Ride Upon Sticks is about a high school field hockey team in the late eighties who make a pact with the devil (or Emilio Estevez, in notebook form) under the shadow of the Salem witch trials (they live where they happened). The novel is told in the "we" voice and goes into the heads of each of the team members, but collectively. It's a hell of a good time.
There's this incredibly vibrant voice that is miraculously sustained throughout. It manages to tell all, while still keeping secrets. (The "we" helps with that—and I might examine it in a later column.)
But this vivid voice also does a tremendous job of grounding the story very specifically in 1989, while consistently casting back to the history of the town in Massachusetts—that's what I'm interested in right now. While many techniques are employed, I want to drill down to just one: the use of metaphor to bring disparate parts together, while also just making the imagery pop.
In the following passage, one team member—the religious one—has just lit a prayer candle. It's still early in the book, and she tells herself it's a Catholic thing, a safe thing. But of course it's also witchcraft. Look at the language:
When she finished praying to the powers that be both above and below, she blew out the candle and closed the door, a cloud of smoke silently streaming through the locker’s vents, the effect like something out of a heavy-metal video, as if a sulfurous portal to hell had opened up right there in the corridor just four lockers down from the second-floor bubbler.
First, of course, we get the "powers that be both above and below." It's not only acknowledging that the prayer candle can be taken two ways, it's incredibly irreverent. So we get not just the dueling faith systems but a specifically teenage voice.
And then the description of the smoke is both accurate and exaggerated, even as it alludes to all the things that matter. I mean, shutting a locker door on a recently blown-out candle would probably leak smoke. And yet . . . that fact does seem a bit supernatural. We do a quick double take to make sure the candle is not still lit. Because even though candles smoke a bit after they're snuffed, it just makes it seem like it's still burning.
And then again, it's not just a quick snuff of smoke but "a cloud . . . out of a heavy-metal video . . . a portal to hell." It's hard to know if the bigness of the description is because of the voice's tendency to exaggerate—that 1980's teenage style of talking—or if the snuffed candle is smoking more than is natural—supernaturally so. Again, the comparison draws us to both conclusions—we get heavy metal and we get portal to hell. Heavy metal and hell are already connected, of course, but this description draws that link more distinctly.
Let's talk about that bubbler too. Of course, the term puts us specifically in Massachusetts—not water fountain (what you probably say) or drinking fountain (what I say)—which is important.
But it doesn't have to be mentioned at all—so why use that specific reference? Well, it's not only Massachusetts-specific; the bubbler (or drinking fountain) is an iconic part of high school that reminds of the present-day situation of these characters.
Moreover, the imagery is perfectly appropriate. The opposite of fire—and the classic way to quench it—is water. Balancing the fire with water thus makes sense. But think also of that term: bubbler. It evokes something incessant, something powerful and pushed by an unseen force. I think of geysers or hot springs or maybe just some brook that won't stop—something that comes from the center of the earth—or the pipes of a building. Something hellish after all.
This metaphor holds many things at once—good and evil, past and present, teenage and ancient, fire and water.
But why does that matter? Besides being fun and memorable, it's also creating a particular depth. When any image manages to hold two or more ideas at once—and especially if those ideas are conflicting—it creates a paradox. And a paradox makes your brain do trippy things. Suddenly this image of a smoking locker is not one thing but many, and all at the same time. It's as if we are circling the object rather seeing a flat projection. It's as if we are in the room with it.
I don't want to reveal too much, but later on there will be more locker fires. So, this passage matters in one more way—it's foreshadowing. For that reason it's really worth it to punch so hard with this metaphor. It's not a throwaway; it's warning us of what's to come.