|
|
Rey woke up late to the noise of the smoke-alarm. It sounded often, always without cause, but her father insisted on replacing it himself, despite having more than enough money to pay someone to install a new one. It was a waste of money, he reasoned. His failure to solve this problem caused intense frustration in the groggy, annoyed girl as she tossed around and pressed a pillow over her ears before flailing flat on her back, scowling at the ceiling, fully and furiously awake. She was 15 years old and had nothing to do besides lie in bed thinking of things to do, but couldn’t focus clearly on the lack of anything worth focusing on because of the racket. So, she rose, stretched, and walked to her bathroom. She washed her face, and brushed her hair: the one feature with which she was honestly completely happy. It was thick and brown, and the various hair-care products lining the shower were all five-star, in her estimation. Friends are wonderful and all, but they let you down. A patented, moisture infused conditioner with three different essential oils for maximum hair health and shine never let her down. She stepped onto the staircase, which her father would have you know is genuine cherry-stained mahogany, hand-cut by lumberjacks in British Columbia or somewhere like that. It was then that she smelled something. Was that smoke? She stopped to identify the scent. It was smoke. Normally, it would be poor manners to walk into her parent’s room without knocking and giving necessary time for a robe or any other article of clothing to be put on before answering the door. Her family had a very strict set of norms, and the list of things which permitted those norms to be violated was very short. This time, however, she concluded that she had a sufficient reason to bypass the courtesy, and entered with caution. Smoke pushed out underneath the bathroom door in her parent’s master-suite. She felt the doorknob. It wasn’t hot. She opened the door, and saw flames cascading up the wall next to the double sink on the beautiful marble countertop, where her mother usually left the flat iron. Silas, her younger brother, was in his room playing video games, some first-person-shooter or something. Rey couldn’t remember what he called it. He didn’t seem to notice the smoke-alarm through his high-end, noise-cancelling, premium, over-ear headphones, which he got that year for passing mathematics at William McKinley Middle School. The running joke was that a bulldozer could demolish the house and he wouldn’t notice until it got to his room, and even then he might not hear it until the roof came crashing down. She approached him with steady, reasonable urgency, lifted one side of his headphones and said, “The house is on fire.” Her father was in his home office as she hurried downstairs. “Dad, your bathroom is on fire.” “That’s nice, honey.” “Dad! I said the bathroom is on fire!” “Honey, there’s no need to get hysterical. I heard you.” It would have been unreasonable to expect her father to panic, but Rey was surprised that he didn’t seem to even care. He had always handled things with a sort of nonchalant attitude that felt somewhat out of place at times, but he still handled them. “Are you going to do anything?” “I’ll take care of it when I’m done.” “What? Dad, there’s a fire in the bathroom. We need to call the fire-department! We need to get out of the house!” “I need you to calm down.” Mrs. Wilmington heard Rey yelling and strolled into the study. “Is everything okay?” “Yes, darling. Rey is just being a tad overdramatic.” “No! No, I’m not! Mom, the house is on fire!” “Oh, dear. Honey, would you mind putting that on your list of things to do this weekend? See, darling. There’s no need to panic.” “Of course there’s reason to fucking panic! The fucking house is on fucking fire!” Her mother and father were taken aback by her use of profanity, and sat momentarily in stunned silence, looking at each other and Rey, not knowing what course of action to take. “Rey, you know we don’t use that kind of language.” “I swear, I’m going to freak! It’s a fire. Like, the kind that kills people!” He stood up and walked his daughter to the door of the study with a firm hand guiding her away, while she flailed her arms and continued to yell. “We’ll talk about this later, when you’ve calmed down a bit.” He closed the door. Rey continued to scream obscenities as she ran upstairs to her phone charging on her nightstand and dialed 9-1-1. She was met by a message on the other end asking her to stay on the line, and that an operator would answer as soon as possible. She paced in and out of her room—like a panicked convict measuring a shrinking cell in strides—looking at her parent’s door, and hoping that it was all a terrible hallucination. Smoke began to pour out beneath her parent’s bedroom door and dance up across the ceiling, filling it like water in a pool, until it was deep enough to overflow through the doorway to her bedroom. It rolled in, staining the wall and trim with black streaks of soot. She was finally met by a woman on the other end. “911, what is your emergency?” “My house is on fire!” “Ma’am, this is an emergency number.” “My house is on fire,” she responded again, confused. “I understand that, but this number is for emergency calls only. You can contact your local fire-department by phone or on their website.” “Am I supposed to send them an email saying, ‘Help, I’m about to die!’? What the hell is wrong with you people?” She threw the phone down and ran to her brother’s room. “What’s your problem?” She tore the headphones off his head and pulled on his arm. “Come with me, stupid!” The smoke-alarm screeched still, and sounded as if it was getting louder, swallowing up any other noise, and they both coughed while she led the confused boy down the stairs, out of the haze, through the front door, and onto the lawn. Silas looked up at his sister and yelled, “What are you doing?” “The house is on fire, Silas. Mom and dad won’t listen and 9-1-1 won’t help! Stay out here, please.” “What’s wrong with you, freak?” He pulled his sleeve out of her grasp. “No, no, no. Please stay! Don’t go back in. Please!” Tears cut paths down through the ash on her face, and she fell to her knees on the wet grass. “Please, no. Stay.” He marched back into the house. “Have fun outside, weirdo!” Smoke rushed out from the windows and vents at the top of the house like a slow-cooker, trailing off into the wind as Rey sat on her knees and her tears mingled with the rain that began to fall again, soaking her smoke-stained clothes. She heard nothing from the house but the crackling and popping fire and the piercing whine of the smoke-alarm. Everything inside—the hand-cut mahogany stairs, the marble countertops, her special conditioner—was being consumed. And still she sat there, alone, and cried as strangers and cars stopped to see why a teenage girl was screaming outside in the rain. Nobody would help, and she soon kept quiet as they asked what was wrong and what she was doing. The crowd left, and she sat there until the sun went down and the house collapsed onto itself and her tears stopped flowing. As the morning came, the charred frame of the house stood like a teepee, pulled inward by the collapsed roof, and smoke drifted toward the sky as the embers slowed their burn. Her clothes were soaked by the dew, and she sat up against a maple tree in the yard and shivered as the sun rose and the clouds glowed bright orange. Brushing the trunk of the tree where she and her brother carved their initials when they were younger, she thought of how furious her father was, and how—with time—he grew to love the markings, and later carved them back in when they faded as the tree grew. She remembered her mother lifting her up to see inside a robin’s nest on one of the lower branches, and how she warned her not to touch it because the hatchlings would be abandoned. She remembered climbing up the tree and hiding from her brother one summer as they played, and the smile on his face when he found her among the leaves and fireflies. She wanted to cry, but it was as if the heat had evaporated all the tears she had. She turned from the tree and looked at home when a bird among the wilted leaves on a branch close to the house caught her eye. It looked at her with its head cocked to the side, and began to chirp, mimicking the familiar sound of the smoke alarm, which faintly whined beneath the rubble. |
|
Daniel Drylie lives in southeastern Virginia, where he studies Applied Language Studies at Old Dominion University. Like a creature emerging from the thicket, he can be spotted in the background of blurry photographs at local coffee shops and in chaotic mosh pits. His work can be found in Penultimate Peanut Magazine and Channel Marker. |
|
