The Fires

S
moke has as many different scents as skin. Part of the pleasure is
not knowing what it will be—sulfurous or closer to incense or air-ier and sweet as I imagine the smell of clouds. Nothing relieves me so
much as burning something old, watching it flicker and disappear into
air. Dresses dance as they go, lifted as if by some music. A photograph
flaps like a wing or a hand waving. Perfumes hiss, then shatter, papers
curl, plaster jewels curdle. Once I tried to burn an old toy—a mechanical duck. When I’d found it at the bottom of a drawer, it reminded me
of the groggy sunrise Easter service and the hunt for eggs in the graveyard. After I set the match to its tail, it started walking pitifully on its
metal legs, and it knocked around the room singeing the walls and linoleum until it burned down to its metal frame and folded with a crackle
and small battery explosion. It is less dangerous to burn things than to
save them.

I
’d poured myself six thimble shots of bourbon and walked the edges of the bedroom touching the walls and windowsills, hoping to work the starry twitches from my legs so they’d lie still. If I let go, I’d fall off the night that was galloping fast. Every time I got into bed, I heard an intruder finagling the catch on the win-1

2 / RENÉ STEINKE

dow or slowly climbing the basement stairs. My heart raced. My eyelids fluttered. I jolted up, walked to the kitchen, ears stinging at the silence, and poured another shot.

The train had gone by three times, rattling into the air. Porter was the kind of Indiana town where the whistle sounded cheerful, not plaintive, but then the wheels chewed ravenously on the tracks.

I listened for the man until he turned phantom again—the trees, the wind.
Ridiculous to be twenty-two, a year past adulthood, and still
afraid of stray noises.
I went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, turned on the clock radio, and fiddled with the ridged knob until I heard the song about lightning and the crashing sea of love, just at the point when the guitar strummed in waves. My bare feet pressed on the cool, grainy floor; my nightgown bunched up around my knees.

I traced a panicky finger over the constellation of glitter in the Formica—two nights of not sleeping, with nothing to do for long, bare hours except worry over the crucial thing it seemed I needed to remember and couldn’t: that blankness revolved in my head like a siren.

Twirling the salt shaker in my fingertips, I groggily felt that if I acted asleep, sleep might come. Sprinkling a little salt in my palm, I dabbed a few grains into the corners of my eyes before I closed them and put my head down on the table. But when I tried to breathe slowly and think of nothing, I began to crave potato pancakes and apples.

Over the stove hung the cast-iron skillet my father had used to make them, crisp and salty in a way my mother and I had never mastered. After he died, the drinking started—secretly at first, from sticky bottles next to the flour in the pantry cabinet, and for the same reason I often couldn’t sleep now: an old sensation that I was falling, or about to fall, from some roof or ledge or stairs.

THE FIRES / 3

Bourbon gave me the courage to loosen my grip. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t fall anymore, but the fall would be pleasant, and it wouldn’t matter so much when I did.

I was about to drift off when I heard a scratch, a mouse or something, in the pantry. I got up to open the door and turn on the light. The colored boxes and gleaming cans glared back at me. I knew I was hanging on too tightly, but this time couldn’t make myself let go.

The landlord had asked me to leave my apartment on Birch Street, and I was staying at my mother’s until I could move into one of the rooms at the Linden Hotel, where I worked. There the insomniacs made anxious trips to the ice machine after midnight, and by morning they were already showered and dressed as if there were some purpose to their being awake so early. When they came down to the lobby to check out, their faces swollen and pale, a lostness about them, I’d keep my voice quiet and slow as I gave them directions or simply thanked them and said good-bye. I knew they’d sleepwalk through the day, just as I often did, wincing at light and hoping not to stumble, all along hearing that murmur:
If you couldn’t sleep last night, you might not get to sleep
later, or ever.

I went back to the metal chair and sat staring out the window at the grass, my stomach hollow from all the bourbon. I got up and opened the refrigerator, peered into the cold light. In the lingering smell of leftover cherry pie lay a quart of milk, a hunk of molded bread, a dozen eggs. I grabbed the egg carton and shut the door.

I was going to scramble them, but immediately lost my appetite and just lay them on the table in front of me. I thought of all the people I knew sleeping then, their heads nestled in dreams like those eggs in their cups. I visited each bed, examined the sleeping face, the mouth pressed closed or slightly open, the deep slow 4 / RENÉ STEINKE

breaths or snores, the sprawl or curl of limbs. I wanted to know how they let go so easily, how they managed to spiral so bravely into sleep, unafraid of all they had forgotten.

The dark sky was bluing. Taking the first egg from its bed, I palmed it in my hand, shook it just slightly, and felt the weight of the yolk wiggling in its sack. In the gentle press of my fingers, the shell felt brittle and fragile. I tossed it at the window, and it smacked against the blue-black surface, a toy sun. I threw another one at the glass. It cracked and splashed yellow, then dripped sleepily.

I
t happened later that same August. I was cold at the funeral, and I kept touching the book of matches in my skirt pocket, the plain black cover and the twenty red heads, lined up and full-cheeked like a choir. Flicking my thumbnail at the thin cardboard, I looked up over the casket at the empty cross of pale wood.

When my grandmother had called that Monday night, sobbing so I barely understood her murmur over the phone that my grandfather had died in his sleep, I pretended she was telling the truth. But when my mother and I got there, what really happened was clear from the empty glass vial, the tipped-over china cup on the nightstand, the pinch of white powder blurring the delicate flowers on the saucer’s rim. His small head was turned to the black window, his mouth blue and slack, his eyes serene but plastic, the folds in his cheeks frowning. He had been formal and guarded in a way that made him inscrutable, but now his face lacked wariness, his eyes and mouth vulnerable in a way I hadn’t seen before.

His left arm was flung across the pillow, a scrap of envelope crumpled in his fist. I was afraid to touch his skin, but coaxed the paper out from the tension in his fingers and saw that he’d THE FIRES / 5

scrawled a few lines in pencil, then tried to erase them. Kneeling down to hold the paper in the lamplight, I stared through that fog of smudged marks, but could only make out three words where the pencil had indented the paper: “NOT YOUR” and near the ripped corner, “LOVE.”

I looked up on the nightstand and watched the round clock’s hands tick past frilled numbers. I counted. Behind me, I heard something small fall on the bureau and my mother softly weeping.

I wanted to console her, to weep myself, but instead counted the seconds, my heart that clock, impatient and achingly brass. When I turned around to my mother and grandmother, I felt the ticking dryness in my eyes, a metallic bitterness in my throat.

I quickly turned back to him. Even not blinking from my stare, the tears wouldn’t come. I was a clock trapped behind a flat, oval face, ticking and ticking—what was wrong with me?

My mother, my grandmother Marietta, and I rode in the hearse at the front of the procession, a dozen cars with twittering yellow flags that said FUNERAL. My limbs were shaky, as if my leg might kick the seat, my arm fling out at the driver’s head, but I held still, afraid of what might happen if I moved. “It was a good service, wasn’t it?” my mother said, her voice phlegmy. I’d learned to read her by the angle of her face, her gestures, and the changing shape of her eyes, rather than by what she said. When I watched her this way, she held me at a distance, but she still held me.

She kept smoothing the dress in her lap as if this motion soothed her, her thin mouth strained into a smile. She was worried I might see how much his death terrified her.

My grandmother’s shoulders curled in around her body. As usual, she looked more vivid than my mother, wearing her best dress, nude stockings, and precise red lips so that no one could say she’d let herself go—but there was something mournful in the way she’d made herself up so brightly.

6 / RENÉ STEINKE

We passed the old community theater, an elaborate, stone building with a lion at the greened copper crest near the roof, which, as a girl, I’d used to ask questions:
How many puppies will
the neighbor’s dog have? When will my mother be happy? What did
you see on the street last night?
“Are you okay, Ella?” Marietta asked me. A handkerchief edged with embroidered roses was gathered in the manicured, freckled hand she placed on my knee.

“Sure,” I said, rubbing my eyes, knowing how afraid she and my mother were that I’d start to cry. My forced-back tears made a sparkly, prismed shield.

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