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.”
***
