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The Old Sewall House on Howard Avenue; Fiction by Roy Dorman
I Spam, Therefore I Am: Fiction by David Hagerty
The Candidate: Fiction by Henry Simpson
In Pursuit of the Polyphemus: Fiction by Daniel G. Snethen
Through the Eyes of the Turtle: Fiction by Daniel G. Snethen
The Bystanders:Fiction by Kenneth James Crist
Jericho: Fiction by Leon Marks
Tracy's Party Doesn't Go as Planned: Fiction by Rick Sherman
The Breakwall: Fiction by Robb White
The Price of Success: Fiction by Walt Trizna
The Propagandist: Fiction by John A. Tures
Mind the Fire: Fiction by Devin James Leonard
The Munchies: Fiction by E. E. Williams
Fanning the Flames; Fiction by J. M. Taylor
Doctor Grizzly: Flash Fiction by Chris Bunton
A Season With No Regrets!: Flash Fiction by Pamela Ebel
If Awoken, Please Go Back to Sleep: Flash Fiction by John Patrick Robbins
Life: Flash Fiction by Bruce Costello
Mother: Flash Fiction by Phil Temples
Richard: Flash Fiction by Peter Cherches
In Articulo Mortis: Flash Fiction by Jamey Toner
The $12 Special: Flash Fiction by Cindy Rosmus
Crash Course: Extinction 101: Poem by Chris Litsey
D.I.Y.O.A.: Poem by Harris Coverley
Life Buoy: Poem by Wayne F. Burke
Venom and Bite: Poem by Jay Sturner
Walking the Suburb: Poem by Jay Sturner
Among the Living: Poem by Christopher Hivner
Infection: Poem by Christopher Hivner
Wild One: Poem by Ian Mullins
Found Out: Poem by Ian Mullins
murder and discomfort: Poem by J. J. Campbell
subjective at best: Poem by J. J. Campbell
In the Serene River: Poem by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal
Who Does Not Love You: Poem by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal
Abject Lesson: Poem by Paul Hostovsky
Benedict Arnold: Poem by Paul Hostovsky
Looking Around for Something Dead to Roll Around In: Poem by Paul Hostovsky
Disposable Heart: Poem by Wayne Russell
Implosion: Poem by Wayne Russell
Skeeter and Elmer: Poem by Wayne Russell
Hell: Poem by Craig Kirchner
Purgatory Blvd.: Poem by Craig Kirchner
Labyrinths: Poem by Craig Kirchner
Candy-Colored Clown: Poem by Daniel G. Snethen
Harbinger: Poem by Daniel G. Snethen
Whitechapel Jack-Pudding: Poem by Daniel G. Snethen
Dire Wolf Consequences: Poem by Juliet Cook & Daniel G. Snethen
Cartoons by Cartwright
Hail, Tiger!
Strange Gardens
ALAT
Dark Tales from Gent's Pens

J. M. Taylor: Fanning the Flames

106_ym_fanningtheflames_lafleur.jpg
Art by April Lafleur © 2024

Fanning the Flames

by

J. M. Taylor

 

Around the time murder hornets entered the storyline, I turned off my alerts. Like everyone else hunkered down, I’d had enough of force-binging the pandemic plot. The heat wave stretched into its third week, and no matter how much my kids begged, I couldn’t take them to the beach.

“Sharks,” I told them. It was true.

“But we’re so hot!” Our old wooden house froze in winter and baked in summer. The wiring couldn’t handle air conditioners, and fans just pushed the heat in long, humid streams. But who knew they could provide such entertainment?

First they introduced themselves: “Myyyy naaaaame issss Kyyyy-yyyle” and “IIIIII’mmmm Saaaraaaaaa!” They swiped my phone to record their nonsensical conversation in other-worldly voices.

Finally, I had enough of the noise, and suggested a craft project. I was about to make a kazoo from a comb and toilet paper, but my wife Ellie stopped me.

“We have only three rolls left,” she reminded me. “We can’t waste a square.”

Ellie scoured the internet for kids’ projects, but after all the emergency home schooling—their last day of school was Friday the 13th of March—we were tapped. The most exciting thing that happened was when humidity tripped the smoke detectors. When the fire trucks showed up, red lights flashing, Kyle thought it was a fun show. The firefighters didn’t agree. They shot me glances for wasting their time. “Didn’t you know that model has a voice warning? No voice, no fire, get it?”

The summer of quarantine stretched out like a desert. Kyle, the six-year-old, ran endless figure eights until he got dizzy or banged into the table. Sara, a year younger but far more mature, shook her head as yet another Kyle collision sent her crayon skittering out of the lines. Sara is very good about staying inside the lines. Periodically, they spoke to the fans. They filled my phone with audio clips.

Ellie had worked at a bookstore before the shut down, and now managed the online sales, but people weren’t reading as much as they claimed, and an indie bookstore that was struggling before was now just hanging on. My job at the restaurant was gone forever, so what else did I have to fill the hours? Frantically trying to file for unemployment, along with everyone else.

We live in an old section of town, block after block of multi-family houses. Before we had to stop talking to neighbors, an old timer told me that when he was a kid, every house had three or four generations living in it. He pointed to my floor, smack dab in the middle of a triple-decker. “The McKennas lived there. They had eight-nine kids, at least. You could never count them, they squirmed so much. Both sets of grandparents, too.”

“You mean over the course of twenty years or so,” I told him. “There’s only two bedrooms.” Kyle and Sara shared a ten by ten room, which was already unbearable.

“No,” he said. “All at once. You got what, an eat-in kitchen, dining room, living room, right? Those days, who needed two places to eat? Your dining room was where the husband’s parents slept. It was their house. The woman’s, probably in the back. Cots everywhere else. They ate at fold up tables, on beds, whatever.”

I thought about the four of us going bonkers. A dozen people in our little apartment? The only escape might have been the old cemetery next door. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those McKenna kids had been conceived there. Andrew Marvell said, “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none do there, I think, embrace.” But he never had a set of in-laws looming over the boudoir.

On one of our long walks, about the tenth time we’d patrolled the same streets, Kyle pointed out a house with three different shingle patterns. I’d never noticed it, either. At first I thought it was just haphazard repairs, but through the layers of paint, I discerned a complex design. For the rest of the day, he and I “collected” designs. One house had a rising sun, another had checkerboard rows like fangs.

When we got home, Kyle and I did some internet research. We learned the names of cedar shingle patterns like square butt and round butt (he used those to great effect on his sister). A deeper dive brought us to elements common to Victorian “painted ladies.” We wrote up a scavenger hunt: bay windows, balustraded porches, gables and finials.

Sara took matters into her own hands, literally. She resurrected the crayon shards and drew our own house with shingles instead of its vinyl siding. She sat mesmerized, using a pencil for the fine detail, then ploddingly filling the spaces with crayon. Kyle, never one to concentrate for long, tugged at her sleeve to come play with him, but she brushed him off. She seemed to have found a new mission, and drew almost without thought.

“Come on,” I told Kyle, frantic to find a new diversion. “We’ll do a science experiment I learned in Cub Scouts.” I filled a bowl with water, and Kyle shook pepper into it, until the whole surface was black.

“Now what?” he said. “You can’t put water on cereal, and pepper makes you sneeze.”

Sara peeked up from her project—each of our floors had a different set of shingles. I noticed they followed many of the complex designs Kyle and I had found online, though we’d seen none of them on our walks.

She shook her groggily, as if she’d just awakened from a trance. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Watch.” I gave Kyle a bottle of dish detergent. “Put a drop in the middle.”

He upended the bottle. A clear trail drooled into the water. Instantly, the pepper retreated to the edge of the bowl, the water swept clean by a single drop of soap.

Sara wrinkled her nose. “You some kind of idjit?”

My head snapped up. “What?”

“Well, it’s racist, isn’t it? Getting rid of all the black to make room for one blob of white.”

“No,” I stammered. “I mean yes, I guess you could call it rac… Wait, where’d you hear that word?”

“Mommy tells me about racism. You do, too.”

“Did you say ‘idjit’ or ‘idiot’?”

Sara put down her crayon and screwed up her face. Kyle forgot about the pepper, hoping to see his sister get in trouble.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t call people names.”

Her body slumped in shame. Kyle knew to put away the soapy mess on his own. After a watermelon popsicle, they forgot about the whole incident. But her odd word choice lingered with me.

The days grew hotter, and our strolls got shorter and shorter, until we just couldn’t go outside. The humidity squatted on us like a toad, drawing all manner of stink from the walls. At one point, Ellie asked if I’d spilled lighter fluid in the back hall. I investigated, and sure enough, the scent of kerosene wafted out like booze off a wino.

I remembered that Dino, the old-timer, once told me all of these houses had been heated by kerosene, delivered up the back stairs. He said that’s why the lots on either side of our house were empty. “Back in the seventies, when the riots happened, the places went up like fireworks, so many drips soaked into the back stairs,” he said. We opened the porch door to air out the smell, but nothing moved.

The summer wore on. The aged house seemed to leak sound through every cracked board. Zoom calls were the new speaker phone, and no one had learned not to shout into the mic. My ears got tuned into voices. The upstairs folks, a mellow millennial couple, took to playing online D&D. Snatches of legalese floated up from below, where the lawyer took client calls.

Even in the middle of the night, I heard, just above the sound of the droning fan, the lilt of conversation. I could never quite catch the words—it was like trying to hear a static-filled radio broadcast. I figured the lawyer had international clients.

A couple nights later, Ellie and I sat on the porch, hoping to catch a cool breeze. My jaw was aching—I’d been grinding my teeth for almost a month. Our formerly busy neighborhood was battened down for the night.

“I’ve never noticed how quiet it can get,” Ellie said.

“Like after 9/11,” I added. “When they grounded all the planes. You never realized how much ambient sound there was.”

“It’s eerie,” she said.

That reminded me. I reached for my phone. “You missed this the other day.” I played her the voice memos the kids had made.

“Myyy naaameee isss Kyy-iiil.”

“Saaarrrraaa.”

There were four or five others, but not very clear.

“Wait, play that one back,” Ellie said. We listened a few times, unable to quite make out the words.

“Does it sound like, ‘bite the knack’ to you?” she said.

I heard, “life of patch.” Either way, it was an absurd thing for kids to say. We played it back a few more times, the blue glow on our faces, but each time we heard something else entirely.

We were walled up in our own version of Prince Prospero’s castle, locking out the dread plague. I both resented and thanked those restaurants that, unlike mine, had survived by switching to take-out.

Sara’s drawings of the house grew more elaborate. Her latest draft restored the houses that had burned down on either side, and most of the first floor was obscured by an apple tree. Funny thing, exactly where she put it was a spot in the lawn that stubbornly refused to support grass.

But things were getting tense. The kids were burning with cabin fever. Ellie and I played referee in squabble after squabble. Games of Candyland ended in tears and colored cards strewn on the floor. Boredom led to mischief led to graffiti: I found a black stain on their windowsill. It looked like crayon, scaly and round, but it wouldn’t wash off. The more I scraped, the more there was. Kyle blamed his sister.

Sara just shrugged. “Liam,” she said.

“Who’s Liam?”

I saw the gears turning in her head. “Kyle’s friend from school,” she answered. I’d never heard him mention anyone, certainly not in the past six months. I wondered if Kyle even remembered his classmates. Sara is quick with a lie; I won’t be able to keep up with her when she’s a teen.

“That’s the thing about having more than one,” my friend Scott said one night, as we drank in a virtual happy hour. The beer eased the ache in my jaw, but just barely. Each individual tooth throbbed in its socket. “You can never pin anything on them,” he continued. “If you had stuck to one, like we did, you’d have him dead to rights every time.”

“You’re very wise,” I told him. “Maybe you can solve another mystery.” I played the fan recordings for him.

I practically looked into his ear canal as he leaned into his computer. After about the fifth time, he said, “What I hear is, ‘light the match.’ But what’s really strange is that it doesn’t sound like Kyle or Sara. Did you sneak in a play date?”

“ ’Course not,” I said, sitting back and finishing my beer. “The only kids she knows are the ones she draws. She puts all manner of them in her pictures.”

“Maybe it isn’t anything,” Scott mused. “Just a form of pareidolia.” I could tell he was proud of that word.

I didn’t want to, but I had to ask what it meant. Scott rolled his eyes, drank some to build suspense, then said, “It’s the brain’s need to see a pattern. Like finding faces in burnt toast. Someone once sold a grilled cheese sandwich that looked like Elvis.”

“So not voices from another dimension?” I joked.

“Oh, please,” Scott groaned. “Spirits aren’t anything except wish fulfillment—memories made real.”

“The house is over a hundred years old. Scores of people have lived here. Some of them must’ve died here, too.”

“But you didn’t know any of them, so there’s no memories.” The Zoom got unstable. After a couple of “Can you hear me now?” exchanges, we gave it up for a bad job.

After that, the summer tanked completely.

The unemployment website crashed if I just thought about signing in. We were living off Ellie’s diminishing checks—the store paid her by the hour, and even though she tweaked her definition of an “hour,” there just weren’t that many online orders anymore. Some days she didn’t bother to log on. Of course, we gave up “supporting the local economy” and tried to economize.

Tension made polite conversations difficult, and the upcoming election and violence breaking out coast to coast gave few neutral topics. Instead, Ellie and I scowled at each other, spoke in unfriendly half phrases. To escape her glares, I made it a project to scrape the black stain off the kids’ windowsill, but it instead drove itself deep into the wood. My hands came away smeared with black. Whatever it was, it wasn’t crayon. It left a gritty residue, like soot.

One afternoon, I poured myself a glass of water then forgot it on the kitchen table. Sara perched at her usual spot, absorbed in the latest obsessive iteration of our house. This time, she put about a dozen boys and girls on the front porch. None smiled. They just stared at the viewer, like old photographs that were less about happy memories, and more like a macabre chore.

I retrieved my laptop for another attempt at filing for unemployment. I came back to find that in her trance-like focus, Sara had knocked over the glass. Water spread across the table and dripped to the floor. She never looked up, even when the glass rolled off the edge and shattered on the hardwood.

“Oh, Liam,” she said.

I admit I lost it. I screamed in incomprehensible rage. She sat paralyzed, like a mouse caught beneath the broom. I have no idea how long it lasted. I do know the fan ended up tossed across the room, the plug ripped from the wall. I think Ellie might have reached over and taken Sara away from the mess. Honestly, I don’t actually know how that scene ended.

What I do remember next was darkness. Maybe not evening, maybe from clouds that had blackened with a month and a half’s worth of baking moisture from the ground. I only dimly recognized I was still in the kitchen, my chest heaving. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was in the house. Then the sky erupted and rain slashed through the window screens, driven by violent winds. At some point hail bounced off the siding like buckshot. The house shook to its foundation. I didn’t know if I heard thunder or blood pounding in my ears. Lightning flashed incessantly, illuminating the shards of glass still spread on the floor.

It took another minute to will myself into action. I had to consciously decide which limb to move. Somewhere far away, voices were talking to each other insistently, but I couldn’t make out any words. They seemed to float on the buzz of the rain and hail.

I made my way across the kitchen, the glass crunching and poking through the soles of my slippers. I closed the window, but already the worst of the storm had passed. Gaining some sense of the world around me, I realized the other windows in the house were still open. Ellie must have taken the kids out somewhere, anywhere to get away from me. I hoped that she’d taken the car, so at least they weren’t walking in this, but I also worried about them being on the road.

I moved from room to room, closing the windows. I still heard the indistinct conversation, and watched at each window to see who was crazy enough to be standing outside. Trees were whipping back and forth in the cemetery, and I heard the crack and crash of a falling branch. But I never saw a soul, or where they’d sheltered. The air blew cold, a completely unfamiliar sensation, and I began to shiver. It almost felt good.

I reached the living room, the last set of windows. Despite the rain, the air felt drier, sharper. The sudden change must have been what caused the next turn of events. Nothing else explains it.

A blast of sound, like a foghorn, exploded all around me. Two bursts, then a mechanical voice: “Evacuate! Evacuate!” Another two, then, “Smoke detected. Evacuate!” On and on it went. I was inclined to ignore it, since every time we’d ever had a storm, the crash of thunder set off alarms up and down the street. The rain still blew sideways. But I spotted first the lawyer and then the millennials huddled outside. One of them sprinted down the street and pulled the handle of the fire box. I smelled smoke, and knew I had to leave.

I was soaked to the skin the moment I stepped off the porch. Howling winds buffeted me and echoing sirens approached. I watched the house, and wondered if I saw wisps of smoke or the curtains blowing from the living room windows I never closed. Below one window, the wind had stripped away a section of siding. The gash in the vinyl revealed paint-starved shingles in a distinct sawtooth pattern, exactly as Sara had drawn it. How could she have known that?

The sight revived my worry. Where had my family gone? For the second time that summer, the fire department pulled up to the house as neighbors watched. Before the lead truck stopped moving, firefighters jumped off, hustling equipment into the house.

A minute later, Ellie pulled up. Leaving the kids in the car, she ran and embraced me. We watched as shapes moved about the house. The darkness and the rain and the wind made it difficult to tell what was happening. But I still hadn’t seen the flicker of a flame.

My neighbor Dino, God bless him, joined us, bundled inside a yellow slicker like a fisherman in a gale.

“Everyone ok?” he shouted above the wind and radio voices crackling from the fire trucks. “All get out?”

“We did, Dino. Thanks. But you should go home. You’ll catch pneumonia.”

Just then we did see orange flare up, right there in our living room, but I can’t imagine what might have sparked it. Screaming, the kids jumped from the car, and I took Sara into my arms. I buried my face in her hair, repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Kyle wrapped his arms around Ellie’s waist. Together we all watched as the fire died in a cloud of white foam. The firefighter pushed out the screen and gave a thumbs up.

“I always wondered about that house,” Dino said. “When there’s going to be a fire.”

“Not every house burns down,” I told him. “They got here in time.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “But I mean way back. That Liam McKenna. Firebug, they called him. Set fires in his room, in the window, wherever.”

“That’s the boy,” Sara said. “The one who talks in the fan.”

Dino nodded, ignoring the strangeness of her words. “I been thinking of that boy. It was a hot summer like this one, when he died. Eight years old. All those people in the house, but no one ever seemed to notice him. Maybe that’s why he set fires. Just wanted attention, but we all had something else on our mind.”

***

J. M. Taylor has previously been published in Yellow Mama, ThuglitTough Crime, Wildside Black Cat, and AHMM. He has three novels, Night of the Furies, Dark Heat, and his most recent, No Score. You can learn more at www.jmtaylorcrimewriter.com. 

April Lafleur’s distinctive painting style is inspired by German Expressionism, emphasizing the artist’s deep-rooted feelings or ideas, evoking powerful reactions-abandoning reality, characterized by simplified shapes, bright colors, gestural marks and brush strokes. Masters like Kirshner and Marc come to mind when viewing April’s dynamic paintings.

April has earned an AFA at the Community College of Rhode Island, where she had the privilege of studying with Bob Judge, a masterful painter who has worked as an artist for over sixty years. Her studio is located at the Agawam Mill in Rhode Island.

https://www.aprillafleurart.com/

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