Catching Fire
He was born into a world of fire. In the delivery room the nurses had to put up rubber shields and wear heat retardant suits. They treated him for burns and crossed themselves amid the stench of singed hair.
Years later, he never knew when the fires would begin. There was the time he dropped a bowl on his mother’s foot, and the whole kitchen erupted, the dagger edge of each flame pointing towards him, dancing as his mother seethed. Afterwards, all sign of the fire disappeared and she would rush him up to the bath saying sorry, sorry, sorry until he was submerged into the ice cold water.
As a teenager he learnt how to dodge the flames, goading her with insults until her eyes glowed red, wanting to see how far she would go. She had stopped apologizing by then. He would cook dinner while she recovered, and as they ate she would tell him to be grateful.
“How do you expect to survive in the world if you can’t endure a little heat?”
To which he would nod, accepting, waiting.
After leaving school he learned how to fight fire. He joined the emergency response unit and went around the city saving lives, for the first time feeling invincible amid the flames.
Often he was reminded of his mother, and wondered how long it would be before he was called out to the place where he grew up. Where his mother still lived, surrounded by an inferno he could no longer withstand.
Now he has a son of his own, and a wife waiting at home. Each morning he promises to stop. That he just needs a few more weeks and he will rid the world of its fire, but each time another call comes in, another voice on the other end choked by soot and flames.
He comes home still radiating heat. At night, he lowers his son into the bath and does not look in the mirror. Does not want to see the glow of orange in his own eyes.
The bath reminds him of the way his mother’s hands would sing and boil when they touched the water. The way she had sung for her life, a few hours before. How he had told his men to stand down. Saying that the noise was just the old house burning, and something collapsing within.
My Brother Hated
Rock-n-roll. He hated the way it accepted death as a part of life. Was more of a blues fan, I suppose. Quiet, same as Dad. He hated how people said sorry after Dad died, like it was a mistake. He hated when I joked about joining Dad in heaven. Going out to the bend in the road where Dad’s truck was still laying in the verge, shotgun cartridge the only evidence of trauma. My brother hated it when the police ruled it a suicide. He withdrew even further than before, saying how life shouldn’t be taken for granted. He hated when I tried to get him out of the house. When I introduced him to my friends, dragged him along to the festival and told him to loosen up.
My brother hated drugs until I got bored of watching him sit by himself and slipped a tab into his drink. An hour later he hated that he wanted more. That I wouldn’t give it to him. He hated talking to strangers until he went off alone, asking for pills, asking if anyone knew what was on the other side of death and getting blank faces in return. He hated getting lost, but had no chance of finding his way back. Lights on sound on acid, taking him further away from the camp with promises of solace and peace. He hated the river, but that is where they found him. Floating, caught in the stream.
My brother would have hated the attention. The way the music stopped and everyone turned to watch. How the festival was shut down, and the police took too long to arrive. He would have hated that I did nothing. That I did not ring Mum because what was I supposed to say? He would have hated how I took the others to the cave, clearing the floor and taking out a speaker. He would have hated the music we played, the way we took pill after pill, trying to forget.
My brother hated many things, but would have loved what came next. When the police arrived and we refused to leave, jumping and screaming and fighting for the right to keep on living.
Vincere
After Dad left, me and Sam would play games of not-quite-Chess on top of the disused construction site in town. Sam said he’d learnt the game from one of the older kids at college, who in turn had learnt it from some math genius that lived on the other side of the world.
We called the game Vincere because we had read it underneath the only picture of Dad we’d managed to find, forgotten at the back of the cupboard when Mom had her Big Clear-Out. In it he was standing with a group of young men in black gowns and strange, square hats. Google told us that the word meant conquer, to overcome. It was only later that we understood what was really going on. That Dad had graduated top of his class and now Sam was well on his way to doing the same.
The construction site had been abandoned long before we moved into town. A block of flats only half built. Sitting on top of one of the roofs you could see through their would-be windows and down into a series of kitchens and living rooms that would never get used. Before Vincere we used to make up stories for the people who would have moved in. Posh families coming in from out of state with strange accents and too-crisp shirts. Kids who would have been below us in the college pecking order, our imagined escape from bullies.
Vincere involved 64 pieces and the goal of world domination. We would dust off the board he had made especially out of Dad’s old plinth and play two games at once, attacking from all four sides. Him white, making the first two moves, me black, watching his face in concentration, trying and failing to come up with some kind of strategy. The board was positioned in line with the points of a compass, so that whoever won could stand up and claim their prize: the land stretching out in the direction of their winning pieces. In our minds we became instant kings, staring off into the distance at all of the townspeople who were now under our rule.
Sam always fought for the South. Whenever he won, which was almost every time we played, he would stand on the edge of the roof looking out at the horizon. Often he would get so close I had to pull him back. ‘Dad is down there somewhere’, he said once. Apparently he’d asked around at Dad’s old golf house and come back with an address. Soon he was going to run away. Find the address and see for himself whether Mom’s stories were true.
A week before his birthday he met me at the site all smiles and shifting feet. He handed me a piece of paper and said it was his ticket out. A coat of arms and a letter that started ‘Congratulations Mr Harding…’. Dad’s surname that Sam had taken as his own. The name we’d been forbidden from uttering at home in the years since he left. ‘They want me.’ Sam kept saying, chasing me up the ladder and laying out the pieces for a new game. ‘They’re gonna teach me Fourier Transforms and Differential Calculus. I’m gonna be famous. ‘
We didn’t finish the game that evening. He was too itchy to get home and pack. University wouldn’t start for another month but he wanted to go find Dad first. I imagined him turning up at the gates of Dad’s new home, being welcomed in by a woman who was not Mom and impressing them all with his letter. They would sit around a table the size of our whole living room and talk about things I couldn’t understand. There would be new siblings. Step-brothers and step-sisters his own age who he would teach Vincere and who would prove to be a much better match for him than me.
It was halfway through maths when Mrs Betty called me into her office. Mom was there in tears and two men in strange uniforms wanted to shake my hand. They told me my brother’s train had come off the tracks somewhere a few counties down. Sam had made it to two miles outside the town whose name he had written down; Dad’s address and whatever new life he would have created for himself.
Rory Perkins is a British writer focussing on shorter works. He has been published in Vast Literary Press, SoFloPoJo, Passengers Journal, and Artam's The Face Project (forthcoming). He can be found at @rperkinswriter on X.