I Taste Fire
by Brenda Nicholas
When I was five, my father’s girlfriend set our house on fire. My mother shook me from sleep and yelled “We have to get out!” She carried me in her arms and my surroundings hazed together: my mother’s face, photos on the wall, and the pink fuzz of my blanket. Smoke grabbed and choked us as we descended the stairs.
Flames traveled through the living room, reached for us with hot arms and fingers. I opened my mouth and tasted the fire, felt my cheeks flush.
Huddled together on our front lawn, we shivered in the chilly spring air and watched the fire. I thought my parents would break out in song like we did at camp, but instead my father repeated “holy shit” in a manic whisper, my mother stared blankly ahead, and Ginger barked. The pandemonium of fire engines jolted our neighbors from sleep, and they flooded their yards to gawk at us.
***
In a cramped, sweaty room at the police station after the fire, my father was forced to reveal details about his affair with Jennifer Lewis to two cops and my mother. “If hell could talk, I could hear it,” my mother had said later that day with shaky hands lighting her very first cigarette.
My parents salvaged their relationship, soldered it back together for thirteen paranoid years. But the day after I went off to college, my mother moved to France with a French speaking bongo player.