We stumbled, fire burning a trail behind us, our inner darkness inexplicably deepened by the flames at our feet. I’d never heard my mother scream until that night; the choking, gasping, guttural screams of someone who has lost more than life. Devastation cocooned itself within her heart from that moment onwards, a home it would never surrender whilst the beat of life remained.
Falling to the ground we turned around, watching as our house roared in fire and fury, an intensity that dried my eyes into adult life. My mother crumpled up into a ball, burying her face into the damp grass, shielding her reality from the unfathomable agony that would daily assault her when the ash settled.
I sat close and held her, my tiny frame shivering in shock, my eight years on the earth unable to formulate reason or sanity from the inferno of anguish that engulfed our family.
***
I heard my mother and father fighting many times, whispered anger overflowing into unrestrained rage that reverberated through the house, up the frame of my bed, and into my body as I tried to sleep.
My father drank and gambled like a movie-screen-cliché, yet when I found him some mornings, passed out on the porch, stinking of urine and whisky, it didn’t feel much like a well-worn trope.
Mother never mentioned it, a learned silence that pervaded the family house in regard to my father’s misdeeds.
House.
House.
It was a house, never a home.
Every week an item of furniture or a piece of jewellery would go missing. When I was seven, I once came home from school to find that my comic collection had vanished, a collection I had spent years building, using every cent raised from the chores I did on the farm for old Jimmy Lyman. Running into the kitchen, I told my mother that my things had been stolen, and that we needed to call the local police. She was washing up, her straight and rigid back to me, looking out of the kitchen window. When she first answered me, I didn’t hear her, my sobs and outrage smothering all other sounds around me. Eventually, when I went still, she told me that I was too old for silly comic books, and that she’d sold them. Father was taking care of the money the sale of them had raised. My silent shock gave way to anger, my body shaking, unshackled from the numbness I had long suppressed under years of confusion and pain. As I screamed with the unrestrained power reserved solely for children, my head suddenly rocked back, my face hot from my mother’s slap. That was the only time she ever hit me. In a low voice, barely audible, she told me to stop being a baby. She never once looked at me. Turning around, she carried on soaping the dishes.
***
I only recall a single time my father and I played a game together, a moment where we both laughed with genuine joy. It was the early morning, the day already too damn hot for any good to come from it, yet, my father was sober, busy in the yard whittling sharp points onto a bunch of sticks. I sat down next to him, and silently helped him, till we had a whole heap. Fashioning a bow from old piano wire and a thick branch, we set to firing these sticks at a crude target painted on the side of a straw bale in the field that ran along the side of our house. Imagining we were from another time and place, we fired these arrows over and over and over. After a while, we managed to at least hit the bale, but neither of us could get the hang of it. I still recall the tears streaming down my father’s tanned and stubbled face, laughing at his own inability to master the art of archery. He hugged me that day, the only time he ever did, and I remembered feeling happier than at any point of my short existence. Looking back, I wonder if it was a moment of escapism for him, one that lifted him from his problems in a way alcohol never could. I like to think he was truly happy that day.
***
The night of the fire my father was unconscious in the bedroom, a pale ring mark on his left hand where his wedding band had once sat. He’d lost the money he’d raised from pawning it in a poker game, drowning his sorrows with a cheap bottle of whisky. As far as we know he never woke up when the flames erupted around him.
My mother and I never spoke about what happened that night and how the fire started. In her final years, those memories faded with the last pieces of her health.
I had her cremated and scattered her ashes on the land where our house had once sat. I secretly hope that my father and her now dance in the wind, sins and sadness purged in the fires of their own deaths.
Rubbing the skin where my wedding band once sat, I lift the whisky glass to my lips, promising myself again that this will be the last time I drink. The trail of fire that followed me on the night my father died never stopped burning. I’m not sure I’d have it any other way. But then my daughter runs in, her hands cupped together, giggling as an earthworm squirms across her palms. That laugh, and the spark of joy in her eyes, might just be the fire that ultimately saves me and brings me home.
* * *
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rev Joe Haward is an author, poet, and heretic. His freelance work challenges religious and political corruption, with articles regularly featured in the national news site, Byline Times. Writing horror, noir, and transgressive fiction and poetry, he has been published in a variety of places. His debut poetry collection, Heresy, (Uncle B. Publications) will drop in 2022.
Find him at joehaward.co.uk or on Twitter @RevJoeHaward