House Fire
By Brent Fisk
Nothing terrified me more than the dark. It had
a weight and texture that settled over the world
I loved, made the familiar uncertain, misshapen,
and dim. The creak of each dry timber in the
attic was a bone bent toward snapping. After my
mother coughed and closed the bedtime book,
and then the bedroom door, I was certain ghost
wolves and spiders made the darkness home, wore
its blackness like a blood-wet pelt. I imagined it
rip into my belly and drag my body off behind
the moon. There were small talismans against
it—a nubby bear, my covers, the brittle sound of
television in the other room.
Just before sunup, the windows changed, stood
out against the walls. Something stole away, a
soft retreat, and as cars slipped along the road, I
breathed again. My father’s alarm clock rattled to
life, his razor tapping the sink, his hand streaking
the mirror. When he’d go to work, his return was
certain as the scent of sweat and tobacco, machine
oil, spearmint gum.
The dark did not scare my father, and he moved
through it like a wolf himself. I was in no way like
him.
Death is a kind of darkness, an absence—a
thing we cannot see into. On walks I inspected
toads flattened in the road, the core of a rotten
tree, a starling crawling with maggots, but I didn’t
connect the things I studied with life in the way
I did my mother and father, the way I did with
myself. I was fascinated with sleep and dreams
and how the two would weave together, one
often indiscernible from the other. I would watch
my parents, see the eyes tremble behind the lids
and hear their steady breathing. When there was
a storm and the wind would thrash the trees, I
would sleep beneath their bed. They had white
carpet and the room was brighter than my own.
I feared other things: thunderclaps, wasps in the
eaves, inoculations, and loose teeth that fought
that final freeing twist. How pain could fly from
the blue-- the tip of a cigarette I thought was pretty. A length of barbed wire stretched through tall
grass, a finger smashed in a slamming door. But
I did not connect pain with death. I connected it
with blood.
When I lost my grandfather, I was confused,
not afraid. Everyone screwed on their faces
and whispered of the afterlife, its golden streets
crowded with angels. His body so drawn and
ashy, I didn’t know the stranger my family wept
over. They told Cousin Missy he was still at work,
explaining she wouldn’t understand. I didn’t
understand. I got a box of his belongings: a penknife, a whetstone, an old lock and key, the nub
of a red pencil and a log in which he wrote cursive
notes that were a mystery to me. I would give it
to an adult and ask what it said. Grocery lists and
things to do. A brief passage about a dog he saw
swimming in a lake.
Death was like sleep, they said-- something that
happened when you were very old and tired.
At first it made me feel safe, like a light left on
in the hall. But I began to fear sleep, worried I
wouldn’t wake up.
Then one day I walked in on the fragment of
a movie where a chubby-cheeked girl loved some
boy from a nearby town. She stole a canoe to run
away, but it overturned and she slipped beneath
the water. My mother sewed buttons onto a crocheted pillow and chewed her lip. I asked what
happened to the girl and she shrugged her shoulders.
“I guess she drowned,” she said.
It was the first time I knew a child could die.
One morning my grandmother was warming
bacon grease in a cast iron skillet. She cracked
eggs, sunny-side-up, made toast for me and my
brother. She wore an orange house coat and
slippers frayed at the edges. I asked how kids