The Prologue~ How She Told It

The house was gone. It had been for a long time. Not one board, one nail, had been salvaged for its rebuild. Fire does that. Takes a house to nothing. Not even an echo. 

I wasn’t sure what I had hoped to capture by being there on the empty street. What ghosts would climb out of the house that had been built over the ashes and dance around my feet. The shuttered home offered no marks of my childhood. No recollections of the boy who was stolen from it. 

But I conjured the night as she told it. The oil painting that needed to be finished. The warm light of the porch-turned-art-studio glowing in the dreary autumn night. The patter of rain on the windows as the tired mother in a speckled smock wiped the strain from her brow. The thump she ignored that would live louder in her nightmares. The brushstroke she concentrated on to find the right hue for the shadow. The shadow that swept off the page and crept into the room of her three-year-old son. The sirens that followed. The husband, who returned to see his house burn to the ground. Who restrained his wife from running into the flames in utter despair. 

That’s how she told it. And that’s how I would remember it.

But I knew it had rained that night not because she told me, but because I remembered the umbrella. And I remembered the way the rain drummed the nylon above my head so loud I thought I would drown. The man’s feet as they splashed through the puddles on the sidewalk. His voice deep in my ear and in my mind. It’s okay. Shhh. It’s okay. Everything will be fine now.

The rain never stopped the fire. The fire that ripped through my bedroom. My home. And charred my family’s life forever, leaving me with only the baby bracelet that never spoke the story. The one I hid in silence on a black cord around my neck as we traveled together through the fires of hell.