Burn

by Peter Heller

Everyone had to know in their bones that every life hung by a thread. That the world did. But if we couldn’t pretend to count on a morning of sailing, or fishing, or a visit with someone we loved the next day, we’d go nuts, right? Right. So pretend away.

emptiness was a place he was learning to appreciate if not love, as she had learned to love the in-betweens. He had to acknowledge something. Bow to it, if slightly.

time worked best when there was a movement toward or away. Toward desire, away from death. Away from the Big Bang, toward an infinite expansion that might or might not be God. Toward quitting time, beer-thirty, a quinceañera, a vacation, a wedding, a funeral. Toward the sense of a poem, or love, or away from the chaos of a dream. But now they did not know, truly, what they were headed into or out of. Or what flashed on the horizon.

The quaintness of the town had somehow survived its immolation.

For a time without measure he let his attention move into the deepening stars and he imagined himself soaring there, not this time as some pelagic osprey but as a great beast that beat the dark slowly and with great power, and glided past the furnaces of stars on long extended wings.

In this silent world only the hiss of incineration and the whisper of his primaries kept company with his traveling mind. And it did travel: far ahead into interstitial gloom where there were no screams and no choppers, and no blue Foresters driving away up a hill. No collapsed dogs. No apoplectic politicians, no states, no borders, no countries.

Hannah, was never polite. She could be ebullient, sometimes indulgent, but never simply polite.

for the rest of his life, he suspected that he did not know how to properly read the emotional landscape of those around him, and that what seemed solid and eternal probably wasn’t, and that love could run very, very deep and also end.

Born squalling, die retching, and in between tossed every which way like a chunk of broken Styrofoam. Wind and tide.

She had crumbled in his arms, what it felt like. Like he was trying to hold her together, the whimpers less about grief or terror now and more about limbs, heart, lungs, struggling to stay intact.