Things We Set on Fire

by Deborah Reed

All those letters he’d mailed over the years to his daughters, letters like the one returned in his hand, letters he was sure they never saw, and he wrote them anyway with the belief that one day Kate would change her mind, would sit the girls down and slide the stack across a table and explain how she’d held them back and how that had been a mistake. She would tell their daughters how Neal had sent news to them every month along with a hefty amount of child support ever since they were babies, and she would encourage them to sit together in a quiet kitchen and read each letter carefully. Their hearts would reshape with every word, all the worried little threads that had formed there over the years dissolving with each peak of insight until they came to rest in the long valley of understanding that life was not perfect, and not everything had been as they’d believed. Their father had loved them after all, his staying away dictated by this selfsame love. And now Kate was dead. A new kind of lonesome tore through him. Unlike the days where he felt he could not rise from his bed if another human being did not lay hands on him, if a voice did not whisper one small word into his ear, even to ask for a fork, a book off a shelf, unlike that, this new, godforsaken battering of hurt called for motion. Through the house and out the back door he went to stand before a golden-purple sunset, the outline of a mule deer against the sandstone peaks before it disappeared into the cottonwoo...