Fire Escape

On a cold winter Sunday in 1955, nine-year-old Edward’s home went up in a blaze of holy hellfire. They, the family, had all been at church – the ashes to ashes place, the dust to dust place. The whitewashed tomb that seeded ideas of death in the minds of children.

Edward’s father, with a voice flat and firm, told the family to stay in the car while he spoke with the sheriff. Edward, he said, the one who gets up early to read, must have left his lantern burning. Perhaps his kitten – “his damn kitten” – had knocked it over. More words: “Careless…let the church help you find a place to stay…well, there goes Christmas.” Edward and his brothers were quiet in the backseat. Their mother turned to them and turned back, then turned to them again and announced “insurance will cover everything and more, you see.” She drew up and pinned back a smile, then a single chestnut ringlet. Nobody cried, and nothing more of the matter was spoken.

Edward didn’t join his family later in picking through the rubble. His things were safe. Last summer, a salesman had come to the door, and over a sunny pitcher of sweet iced tea spun fantastic tales of destruction, death, loss and regret. Edward’s father signed papers while his mother wrote a check. Late into the night there were whispers from the kitchen. On his way to bed, Edward saw the salesman’s card on the coffee table and picked it up. Bold type on white:

Rich Merrimore, Guardian Fire Insurance

“Because Tomorrow Matters…Today!”

The following morning, Edward packed up his favorite things in a tin lunch pail and buried it in the woods.

Today, not a word about the tomorrow of Christmas, or the ghost of their festooned tree. “Fruit trees will thrive in this wood ash,” he heard his mother say. “When the check comes we’ll buy the lot next door and build a bigger house,” he heard his father say. His brothers kept poking for salvage. The youngest wondered aloud where Santa would leave their gifts, prompting a smack on the back of the head from his father. Edward willed back a swell of nausea. He was sick from the lingering fumes, sick of his mother’s optimism and his father’s stoicism. Of the pallor over everything and of what it all meant.

Edward walked toward the woods and sat in a patch of grass near the tree line. In between his legs he saw an ashy swell. A fire ant mound. It looked like what was left of his house. Glossy red-hot bodies skittered to and fro.

Edward knew that below where he sat hundreds of thousands of ants were working to excavate many meters of tunnel. A world of toil, of common purpose. Edward took a blade of grass and placed it on top of the hole. A larger ant rushed toward it, appraised it, then lifted it over its head and carried it away.

Edward thought of Alice, following not a rabbit down the hole, but an ant. More suitable. No creature except for man is in more of a hurry. A memory: his brother Daniel thrusting the head of a hose into an ant hill and turning it on full blast. If Alice had been in there, he thought, there wouldn’t have been much of a story. Dead, as it were, in the water.

Or perhaps she’d have taken Edward’s blade of grass and sailed the waters to her next adventure. We never know where we’ll end up, do we? Edward recalled how sick he’d felt, seeing how the ants had panicked in the flood, but also, how quickly they’d coordinated to rebuild, that had given him hope. They did not wallow. They simply worked. Anything can be rebuilt, he’d thought back then. Anything.

Edward looked over his shoulder at the skeleton of his home. He watched his family, their sweaty bodies black and gleaming in the dusk, continue to search for what might be saved. His mother lifted a strand of pearls to the sky.

Fruit trees will thrive in the ash.

Anything can be rebuilt.

Was it true?

Edward closed his eyes and let his body sink into the ground. Down into the hole, twisting through the catacombs, down, down, down, deeper and deeper he crawled.

If someone needed him, he thought, they could come and find him.

But no one ever came.

And though his eyes never did quite adjust to the darkness, he never once looked back for a flame.

KELLI DIANNE RULE is an author of dark fiction who claims roots in the backwoods of Florida. Recent writings may be found in Heavy Feather Review, Whale Road Review, Magazine1, JMWW, Luna Station Quarterly and The Avenue Journal, among others. Her work has been dramatized on Creepy Podcast. Her short story anthology, Florida, Deep and Dark, is currently in the works. www.kellirule.com.

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