River Fire

We sat in old chairs on the front porch, a front row seat to the conflagration

River Fire

Before the moon fell into the inferno one night, the trees howled in the fire that someone had started with a cigarette or maybe harsh sparked words against nature in the afternoon. From the house, we breathed smoke and made serious faces at the flames as they first devoured wolves trapped in shrinking circles and then the fence line.

Rest of the family had left for safer outposts months ago, but Grandfather and I stayed on to tend the ashed vestiges this place would one day become. And to comfort one another.

A new season was coming and it was a pretty good bet that folks like Grandfather wouldn’t survive the harsh vetting. He was a representative of an older life that must be eliminated from the books.

I’d seen it before, in other places and other times, but somehow it still took me off guard. A brother I once had said I was naïve and wasted and I went on with my irresponsible ideas anyway.

Grandfather was different, though. He had been in a war, before wars had been declared silent, not worthy of making people upset with their updates, and had killed, he said, enemies both foreign and domestic.

As the fire traveled across the field toward the house, Grandfather asked me if I had cast my ballot and I told him that I had not.

You’re doing alright, kid, said Grandfather. He took a drink, set his glass down.

We sat in old chairs on the front porch, a front row seat to the conflagration. There was still a river between us and the flameline, but one could never tell these days the length to which hell may jump.

They say he’s going to drag us from here, said Grandfather.

I nodded noncommittal. They always say shit like that to keep people up at night. They don’t have popular support, but in perverse reversal may not need it.

They’ve got guns and years of wearing people down. They’ve got lots of short slogans that appeal to the internal reptile. They’ve got writers and cartoonists on the payroll.

Grandson?

Yes?

How old are you now?

More than you, Grandfather, I said. But I don’t know how.

That’s not entirely true. I have a guess, at least. It probably happened while I was imprisoned. Years ago. I had sipped from the wrong cup. Just a metaphor of course; they didn’t care if you drank, only if you spit. I had walked up to the would be president and spit.

A cramped concrete place

Before long, I was inside a cramped concrete place with a single high window and no birds. There were no songs but those I made myself. It’s like I was trapped in a place of solitary learning in my confinement. All my outside teachers were dead or dispersed, and I was forced to take nourishment by the light of a single low watt bulb.

Grandfather? I asked. The porch reappeared. Flames began to get scent of the river water.

Yes?

Maybe we should go to the mountain, I said. To the other side where the snows don’t melt.

Once, a long summer ago, we had done just that. We had fled into the deepcold and July shivered. Something had entered the land that we had refused to fight. Something that harvested light from shadow and shadow from light. We had hidden in the snow until it finally died. When we returned, the house still stood, but it had been blackened.

No grandson, said Grandfather. Once a mistake, twice, cowardice.

A woman climbed from the river and walked toward us for what seemed like three enchanted hours as time slow dripped into the night grass. She had the beauty of a rattlesnake and no hair we could see.

Grandfather once told me that serpents are angels in despised form because they saw a beauty outside heaven and couldn’t find the courage to resist its shape. I always took that as legends we tell to make comfort from pain, but somewhere between the river fire and the porch, I may have calibrated my idea.

Before prison, I had been a snake. I bit twelve men fatal in the jungle that I know of and likely others that died of secondary sorrow. Nobody mentioned angels, or if they did, only in light of the trouble they might cause.

The day I spit they mentioned devils, though. And I doubt they were contemplating their own dark shadowed reflections. I doubt the woman was either; when the veil of compressed time had lifted, she stood before us, lower but somehow higher than our wooden porched eyes. She held a leglong bone in one hand.

Grandfather said welcome but I kept my tongue to itself.

This is yours, she said. Found the year the river overflowed into your grave.

Now I remember, I said. You were there. In the courtroom. When they convicted me.

Only you can do that, she said.

That’s what they all say. They wake in the morning and create new ways to make all of this your fault. The disorder, dishonor. The fabrications of loyalty. The consequences of their actions that will never be suffered.

Why are you here? asked Grandfather.

I must be invited first.

You are.

Very well, said the woman. She sat on a porch step and from her eyes climbed into ours, and into our breath too where the smoke was thickened.

She told us a story of a transformation that had fallen over the entire land. It was if someone had turned off all ears. Bands sang silence.

It happened, she said, once an epidemic of earthquake passed. Without disaster, new ones are invented. In this case, it was a disease of deafness. And only one man had a cure. He rose amid the panicked gestures as people begged to be understood.

They had seen the first hand of misery scarred – and the repercussions. They had scooped bread from baskets in the food lines and had broken every promise they carried inside themselves. They were ripe for revenged blame.

Grandfather offered the woman a glass, but she refused. He offered me one too and I sat with the river firelight on my face and the moon covered in soot, and drank. I knew this story. Or at least a version of it. It had the ring of deep truth, one you cannot see but can hear in a clear distant bell.

One day, the woman continued, all communication broke down. Brother killed brother, sister, sister. No one could calculate the cost, but even if they could, they couldn’t share their findings from under the blanket of deaf that had fallen.

What if you were desperate and someone offered you a way out?

What? I asked.

Would you take it?

The woman stood from her step, climbed to the porch, sat on the railing. The fire behind her and the water that had steam died in battle from the river which rose as its cousin mist gave her the look of a prosecutor who sees saliva outside the mouth on the ground next to a would be president a serious offense. As if all unbombed devices didn’t count. As if more violent and more practical solutions hadn’t been considered and dropped.

We had planned for a year. We had taken ideas on the table such as assassination but the word itself was repugnant. We didn’t want a death. Or a small group of radicals with no meaningful means to effect change to blame.

We weren’t even alive. In the same sense as most, anyway. We lived on the fringe where the water is cleaner maybe but the influence short lived. Short loved. Short fused lit into the injustice of the day.

The prosecutor screamed into the microphone in the courtroom where the woman had once sat that I had defiled an honorable institution that demanded payment in the form of punishment. From the altar, the judge nodded.

It would depend on the way out, I said to the woman. Her porch railing creaked.

Of course, she said. But let me tell you what Jacob did.

Who’s that? I asked.

Don’t you remember my story?

Yes, but the fire is into the river bank grass. And I’m scared.

I turned to Grandfather. I mouthed the word snow and he gave me that Grandfather look. Older no longer, I was once again a mere child in the presence of wisdom I couldn’t understand.

Immigrants had made the deafness worse, said the woman. A mantle of foreign silent sounds. Jacob clapped his hands and smiled as he forced them to kneel. He loved his show of delightful force on the fields where they tended his farms.

The woman looked at me. They found your bone, she said. It was aligned with the eastern sky when it edged from the earth.

You’re wrong, I said. All mine are still here, fleshed.

Yet I was in the courtroom, said the woman. Jacob was not.

No. He was not. Spit had spattered his shoe, watered an anger, but it was an anger deep dry rooted that would strangle for a drop of rain. Jacob fled from the beatings that followed to keep his hands uncontaminated.

And this bone is my retribution? I asked.

Between revenge and payback lies justice, said Grandfather.

In fire lies justice, I said, and it’s coming too close.

And if justice lies in fire, surely honesty has been long been turned to ash. The immigrants sang songs from their knees and tapped quiet rhythms with small rocks on hoe blades. Cities smothered as smoke from every firsthand fire gathered. We tried ballot and spit, polite questions and fake anthrax. But the lies wouldn’t die. They stripped their pretense like lover’s underwear for all to see the magnitude of their mendacious splendor, and the truth did not oppose. Truth peered from behind the desks of small silent groups with no funding.

I pointed to the bone. What do I do with it? I asked off to one side. I didn’t know who I addressed.

It will make a fine cane one day, said Grandfather.

Or a weapon. I know. I’ve heard it all before. The great tales of Goliath tumbled. But the land burned faster than our speed of flight, if flight can be considered an option for the earth bound, the earth lamed.

The woman sat on the porch boards, leaned against a post. She was below us again, but still had the look of higher. There can be no more movement in this moment, I thought, because we have evaporated our options. The moon falls into flame.

She held the once fleshed leg bone of myself and a rusted justice scale upon which to weigh it. Grandfather and I looked out at the blaze our world had become.

And though the fire had jumped the river, we still had the yard. We still had each other. Our family ties. Our heritage. And maybe foolish, but we still had hope that one of us could summon the splendor of an extinguishing rain.

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Thanks for reading Dynamic Creed. This is a piece I wrote in recently while letting Christmas go its own way. Hope you enjoyed. Let me know in the comments, please.

Stay blessed.

Victor David

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