Fire Exit

by Morgan Talty

Because what’s more sacred than laughter at the dinner table?

I do not know what I believe in when it comes to the afterlife, or the before life, but I’ve had this strange vision—when I was drunk, sadly—of the both of them passing by each other, one on the way in, one on the way out, their bodiless heads turned, bodiless eyes locked, knowing. A hello and a goodbye.

And every time there was a noise—the slam of a door, the squeak of a shoe on the floor, a cough, the sound of that sliding glass window behind which was a man and then a young woman and then both—my body was sensitive to it, and that sensitivity frightened me in a hard-to-describe way, like I’d known somehow I was going to be frightened by it even though it had yet to happen, and so that knowing what was to come only increased the fright or the fear. The only comparison I can really make is to playing hide-and-seek. It was like that—I knew somebody was hiding, and I knew to expect they’d pop out from somewhere, and so that knowing made it worse when they did, when the future came.

Is there a word that means something is both true and false? I’ve looked, and I’ve yet to find one. I can come up with statements that are the example. “I am your father” is one that comes to mind.

screamed so loud and hard I knew a part of the world was about to die.

We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them—the ones that make us—how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?