After I lit it, I ran outside, standing in the dark, watching the flames dance.
I watched it eat the memories.
It only took a minute for the kitchen to become a kiln. The cabinets blistered, the fake-wood veneer bubbling and splitting open like wounds. Flames licked up the walls, found the plastic blinds, and chewed through them in seconds.
The smoke was alive, a black serpent writhing along the ceiling, clawing at the drywall, and for a moment I saw my father’s face in it in the flames, gaping and furious, made of nothing but teeth and old nicotine, sneering at me the way he always did.
I didn’t call 911. Let the old bastard’s legacy burn. Let the neighbors wake up to the smell of retribution, to the sound of sirens that came too late. In the middle of the street, I stood and watched my past shrivel and collapse, window by window.
I thought I might feel lighter, but the heat just made the hole in me widen. I wanted to scream, to hurl every curse in the language at the yellow tongues swallowing my childhood, but all that came out was a gurgle.
I slumped against the mailbox, knees buckling, the taste of smoke and whiskey and old shame in my mouth.
The fire tore through the house with a hunger that was almost human. It shattered the windows with a gunshot pop, splintered the porch, and turned everything that ever tried to hold me into carbon and ash. The sound was deafening, a chorus of crackling wood.
“Fuck you, dad,” I slurred, swaying on my feet as I watched the destruction unfold.
The booze caught up to me, and in the heat of the flames, my vision began dancing in and out. I stumbled away from the house, leaving it a shadowed corpse in the dark, not once looking back to see if my father’s ghost was following me still.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my footing and fell. The grass was soft on my cheeks as I let myself collapse into oblivion, the world fading to a quiet buzz, the haunt of nightfall wrapping around me as I lost myself in a dreamless sleep.
31
CAIDEN
Seven yearsold
I used to think about what it would be like to be an animal. Not one of those kittens you see in the calendar at the dentist, or some golden retriever with a bone-shaped name tag. More like a possum, or a rat.
The kind of thing that only comes out after dark and can chew through metal if it needs to. I liked to imagine myself armored up, fur bristled, eyes that glowed.
No one could hurt a possum, not really. You could bash it, trap it, run it right over, but it would still twitch back to life, climb out of the gutter on its idiot little feet.
I told that to my dad once, back when he still paid attention to the things I said.
We were eating breakfast—toast for me, rye on the ragged edge of burned—and I said, “If I could be any animal, I’d be a possum. They’re survivors, even when they look dead.”
He just stared at me for a second, then yanked the plate away and said, “You want to be a fucking rodent, is that it?” He dumped my toast in the sink and turned on the garbagedisposal, making sure I watched it suck down the orange crusts and the buttered crumbs.
I didn’t tell him anything after that. Not about the animals, not about the dreams, not about the nights when I woke up certain that something bad was going to happen, and then it did.
I learned about hate before I learned how to spell it. It lived in the walls of our house, thick as insulation, and every night my father poured more of it into me like medicine. If you could get a disease from a person, I think maybe that’s how I caught mine.
He was the kind of big that made everyone else look like a joke. His friends called him “Bax” in a way that was supposed to sound friendly but always felt like a warning, and he had a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag in the garage, right next to the Snap-On calendar with naked girls getting splashed in motor oil.
The only picture of my mom that survived the divorce was taped above the workbench, but he’d blacked her eyes out with a Sharpie, so she looked like she belonged in a haunted house.
Most nights, he drank. When he started, the rules went all silly-putty: I could stay up as long as I wanted, eat Doritos for dinner, and watch TV with the volume too high.
But drinking made his attention floaty; he’d go quiet for hours, staring at the ceiling or listening to the baseball game on a transistor radio, and then all at once he’d snap awake and notice me again.
“You’re turning into a little pansy,” he’d say. “Your mother made you soft. I’m gonna break that habit.”
The thing about getting hit is you learn to see it coming. The slow wind-up, the way his hand would close around the neck of a glass or a can before it closed around your arm.
I could read his mood the way some animals sense a tornado: in the change of pressure, the static before the blow.
Some days it was just a hard flick to the ear or a pop to the back of the head, but if he was really pissed, he’d grab me by thecollar and shake me until my teeth clacked, like maybe he was trying to rattle something useful out of my skull.
