FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #2

All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother - my father's mother - came to live with us.  At least that’s how I saw it from my then-seven-year-old eyes.  I was suddenly and without ceremony transferred into the lower bunk of my older brother’s room.  Momma said that my bedroom was less drafty than Philip’s, plus as the youngest child, I had no decision-making authority or clout to speak of.  My meager collection of hand-me-down clothes was carried over to a cleared out drawer in Phil’s dresser.  Thed, my limp-armed teddy bear, plopped into the dark corner of my lower bunk.

Grammie was installed into my former room.  She seemed so old to me, her wispy white hair, her pale skin with all the blue veins, and her walker.  After Grandpa died, Momma said she aged a dozen years.  I asked her how someone could get older more than one year at a time and if I could age a dozen years too.  I longed to be a grown up then.

We lived in a simple two-story clapboard house on bit of land in Indiana.  Our house had a modest backyard that was backed by scrubby woods leading to a creek about a hundred yards off.  The closest town was just a couple miles away, and our neighbors were friendly enough.  There was a school about halfway between our house and the center of town.  Momma and Papa bought the house after they were married.  It was close to Papa’s family.

The time that Grammie came to live with us is like a time marker in my mind.  A marker between when I had my own small bedroom and the privacy that went along with it, and when I was forced into close proximity to my brother.  It marks the time between when my brother and I merely avoided one another and when we began to actually conflict with one another.  My brother, Philip, and I could have come from different families we were so different.  Phil had dark hair and a stocky build.  He was a loud child.  I was fair haired and mild mannered.  Not quite a ninny, but probably close.  I like to consider myself a late bloomer and an intellectual.  As you can probably guess, Phil and I did not get along much.  It continually amazed me how my parents never realized that their two sons did not want to spend time together.  We were constantly being told to keep one another company on the walk to school, to play together in the yard, to share clothes and toys.

I had a lisp as a child.  The doctor said it would go away with time and told my mother to try to get me to stop sucking my thumb.  The thumb-sucking was affecting my ability to speak clearly.  It is because of my lisp that my teddy bear was called Thed.  I couldn’t pronounce Ted.  Philip teased me endlessly about my lisp.  I hit him in the eye once after a particularly tearful bit of teasing.  I had been holding a matchbox car at the time and it cut him at the brow and sent blood dripping down his face.  It looked pretty gruesome.  Momma wasn’t happy with me and although I tried to explain through my tears that it was Phil’s fault, that he had called me dumbo and mimicked my speech, she sent me to our room with a painful spank on the rear.  Afterwards, Phil had a small white scar cutting across his eyebrow where hair wouldn’t grow.  He stopped teasing me about my lisp after I hit him.  I used to think I scared him, but I know now that Momma spanked him too after she cleaned up his eye and gave him a lecture about teasing his baby brother.  My lisp did eventually go away.

It was a particularly hot and arid summer.  We hadn’t gotten rain for weeks.  I had found a matchbook in Phil’s things, jumbled up on our bedroom floor with his discarded pants and some grubby candies.  Phil was constantly picking on me, calling me names and when Momma wasn’t looking, pinching the soft flesh on the underside of my upper arm.  We had just fought.  Momma was visiting the neighbors and Phil took advantage by pushing me around.  He followed me wherever I went, giving me a shove occasionally and making me stumble.  When I would turn to swing a fist at him, he would duck and laugh at me.  After over an hour of this, Phil got bored and went off with one final thwack on my head.  I retreated to our room, where I found the matches in his things.

I took the matches outside to find some twigs.  Hiding from Phil, who was somewhere in the house, I crouched in the corner between the cellar door and outer wall of the house.  There, I gathered together my supplies.

I had seen somewhere in a story book a fire with a ring of stones around it, and set out to recreate it.  The story had been about cowboys in the West, herding cattle and telling tall tales around a fire each night.  I made a circle with my carefully selected rocks.  In the middle I put some dried grass I pulled from the yard and a few twigs.  I opened the matchbook to reveal three matches.  I pulled one out.  I had never lit a match before.  I saw my father do it plenty of times to light the fireplace, or a rare cigar.  Scrunching my brow to remember how Papa did it, I touched the match head to the cardboard of the book.  Nothing happened.  I rubbed it around a bit.  Still, no fire.  By now my match was bent a bit and the white head was worn down.  I pulled another match from the book and holding the two together, starting roughly tapping them on the matchbook.  Suddenly, a flame burst up on the match heads with a hiss.  I was so startled I dropped the matchbook and matches.  They luckily landed right in my circle of rocks.  I watched as the grass and twigs caught fire.  I had done it!  But the small twigs were burning up fast.  I had to find more twigs.  I dashed off towards the woods behind our house where the undergrowth would surely yield some good fuel for my campfire.  My eyes scanned the ground for sticks.  After I gathered an armful, I turned back to the house my heart beating fast in the hope that my fire had not gone out in the precious minutes I had spent away.

It had not.

The fire, goaded on by the gentle summer breeze, had escaped my carefully built circle of stones and spread onto the clumps of dried weeds growing against the house’s concrete foundation.  Great orange fingers of it licked up the side of the house, charring the whitewashed wood, growing upwards.  I stopped dead in my tracks and stared, mesmerized, by the sight of that hot fire.  I was surprised how little time it took to get as big as it was.  Part of me glowed with pride.  I had made that fire, that powerful and awesome sight.  The other part of me was deaf with the pounding of my heart and scared. 

I watched as the fire quickly grew upwards and blackened the entire side of our house.  I couldn’t move.  I'm not sure how long I stood there.  The smoke was thick and black and billowing.  A great crash sounded as a window exploded and the frame crumpled inwards. As if snapped from a reverie, I jumped nearly out of my skin as another deafening bang echoed through the air as the wall gave way and the weight of itself took it down.  For the first time I noticed the hot, dry air pushing against my cheeks, the awful smell of burning wood and smoke.  I turned and ran into the woods, away from our house and the burning.  I found a place between the roots of a large oak tree where I threw myself down and hugged my knees.  I could still feel the sharp sting of the smoke in my nostrils and smell the burning grass and wood.  It reminded me of roasting marshmallows in the fireplace during winter.

They said afterwards that my grandmother didn’t feel anything.  She had been in bed, sleeping when the fire consumed our house.  She probably didn’t wake up and just died from suffocation from all the smoke.  Phil was found in the cellar, where he liked to go to find baby mice.  The cellar was windowless and accessible only from the outer door, where the fire started and where the first wall had fallen.  Phil had been trapped.

My parents sold the land and we moved to another house in another rural Indiana town.  Momma said she couldn't stay in our old house.  They say death changes people, but I felt the same.  Better, even, without my underarms bruised from sharp pinches and my dignity crushed with cruel words.  But Momma shrunk visibly since that day.  She cried a lot.  My father seemed older and the deep lines in his brow made me wonder if someone has to die for people to age.  I myself didn’t seem to be older than my seven years.

I left home when I was old enough to work and earn money to take care of myself.  I remember the day I packed up and left my parents' house.  My belongings fit into a canvas duffel bag I could easily sling over my shoulder and carry into my future.  I kissed Momma on the cheek and shook Papa’s hand. Papa looked at me with his solemn gaze.  Behind his eyes I saw the same question that had been there since that summer Grammie came to live with us, unasked and unanswered. I turned away form him and closed the front door behind me.  As I took the steps down the porch two at a time I finally felt like I'd grown up.

 

 

back to Contest #2