Burn Our Bodies Down(14)

It sweeps over me, a panic so wild and sudden I don’t understand it. Gram. That’s Gram’s land, and it’s burning. “On fire?” And then, as the rest of Tess’s words sneak inside: “Again?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Just like before. A new fire for a new Nielsen.”

She says it like it’s a story she’s telling, excited and eager. But this is real, and it matters. It matters that she knows my name. It matters that somewhere out there, my grandmother’s fields are on fire. What if Fairhaven is burning? What if Gram’s injured?

“Is everyone okay?” I manage to ask.

She shrugs. “Will didn’t say.”

I’m too close for it to all disappear. I won’t let it.

“We should go,” I say. “Now. We should go now.”





seven





the sun is high as we follow the main road out of town, Tess riding in front, standing up on her pedals. Eli stays steady; I’m perched on his handlebars, his arms bracketing me. It’s uncomfortable, and I can tell he’d rather I weren’t here, but after the first block I stop holding my body so stiff, stop focusing so hard on keeping my skin away from his, and manage a look around.

Outside the town center it’s more of those houses I passed on the way in, identical and rotting. Paint flaking like shedding skin, beams at an angle, the whole place swooning in the summer heat. Some houses are shut up and dark, mail piled on the porch. Others I can see into the kitchen, can watch a woman pick at crusted food on her apron as her microwave runs, can watch a toddler scream and scream from their high chair, red-faced and alone.

Mom was here. I can picture it, can put her on any one of these porches, in any one of these houses. I wonder if she was born wanting to be anywhere else, or if this place put it into her. If there were already stories about her last name or if the stories are about her.

It’s three more blocks before the town ends. Just like that. One moment it’s houses and streets that might have been tree-lined once, cars scattered like litter, and then it’s gone. Land smothered with crops, and the almost painfully empty stretch of the sky.

“Oh,” I say, before I can help myself, and I feel Eli’s chest jump behind me, like he’s laughing.

Tess said her family still plants, and said my grandmother does too. Or tries. This must be the land, hers or mine. The earth, dark and gritty and dry as we pass, and everywhere the yellow rise of the corn. This time of year it should be chest high and a bright, new sort of green. I’ve seen enough of it around Calhoun to know. But it’s not. And I know what Tess meant when she described Gram’s farm. Because this is all wrong.

The corn is too tall, maybe eight feet, and a strange, flat yellow, like it’s dying even as it grows. I wait for it, for the moment when we hit just the right angle to see all the way down the paths reaching empty and clean between the planting rows. But it never comes. The ranks are long gone, and what’s left is a tangle, stalks knotted together, the smell strangely bitter and almost chemical. I want to shut my eyes, to pretend Phalene has something else to give me, but I can’t. Because there, pluming black and heavy. Smoke on the horizon.

“Come on,” Eli calls over my head. “This is close enough.”

“No way,” Tess says. “Let’s keep going.”

“It’s getting dangerous, Tess.”

“I think you mean it’s getting good.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eli mutters. “It’s a fucking fire.” I don’t think he means me to hear, but I’m glad I do, and when he sends us riding after her, I feel a little better, always more comfortable in the breath of a fight.

He’s right, anyway. Tess is acting like this is all happening a hundred miles from her, like it’s a movie, a dream. It would unsettle me if I didn’t feel almost the same way. Out of my body, all in my head, just wanting and worry.

We keep going. The sky closer and closer, dropping to wrap us in bitter gray, until I can actually feel the fire against my skin, a heartbeat of heat; can hear the rush of the burn in my ears and the wind carrying it toward us as Eli pedals after Tess, her ponytail streaming behind her.

Up ahead, the road widens to a gravel shoulder that juts into the corn. Tess swerves onto it, and Eli follows her, braking so hard I tip off the handlebars.

“Sorry,” he mutters, but I’m not paying attention, because from here I can see the fire. Maybe half a mile out, maybe less. Ripping through the farmland like a bullet, pushed by the wind.

For all the time I’ve spent with a lighter against my palm, this isn’t any fire I know. Wild and bright and red, red, red, and it drifts up off the crops in waves before breaking, crashing in a spray of spark and ash.

“Shit,” Eli says. “Guys, we should go.”

Tess leaves us behind, steps right up to the edge of the gravel. The fields drop off on either side of the highway, dipping to a ditch before stretching out flat. From here we can see over the top of the corn, can watch the fire take more of the earth with every minute.

“Where’s the fire department?” I ask. “Shouldn’t they be here?”

Tess has her thumbnail between her teeth, scraping at the underside of it until she swallows, and I forget to look away.

“It’ll take them a while,” she says, “if they show up at all.” Shoots me a grin, no hint of sympathy or anything close to it. “Nielsen land isn’t high priority.”