The Fireman

by Joe Hill

There’s something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”

She thought hatred might’ve been easier to forgive. If you hated someone, she was at least worthy of your passion.

In ten seconds he had her worrying about him again, when five minutes ago she would’ve been glad not to hear from him for a month. It embarrassed her, that she couldn’t hang on to her rage.

She said, “I love you, Con,” because whatever Jakob believed about those three words, they still mattered to Harper. They were as close to an incantation as any she knew, had power other words lacked.

At the end, I get to be the person I always wanted to be, she thought.

I told you had to be some kind of karmic opposite to the words I love you. He had always found it much easier to say “I told you.”

Nick most of all, with his bottle-glass-green eyes and articulate hands, which drew words on the air like a boy wizard sketching spells.

Have you seen Nick? Did he come in for dinner?” Norma Heald gave her a glazed, dull, unfriendly look. “Haven’t seen him. Why don’t you go outside and yell for him?” “He’s deaf,” Harper said. “Don’t let that stop you,” Norma said.

To live for others was to live fully; to live only for yourself, a cold kind of death. The sugar was sweeter when you gave it to someone else to taste.

it was all a lie, the idea that singing could save you. British children sang to each other during the Blitz and the roof still caved in on them. Her own voice had never mattered. Tom Storey’s faith was a prayer to an empty cupboard.

The oars clanked in their locks. She had a sensation of gliding out, not across the sea, but into the sky, across an impossibly buoyant acre of cloud. The mist parted before them, curling from the bow in luminous feathers.

Harper thought the gentle blessings of children were often as unprovoked, unexpected, and uncalled for as their cruelties.

It wasn’t so much that he hated losing. It was just that he hated losing to her. In their relationship, he was the coordinated one, and Harper was comically, adorably clumsy. He took it personally when she stepped out of character.

“I brought you some wonderful loose teas—” “Tea! You think I want tea?” “Why not? You’re English.” “And so you think I drink tea? What, do you imagine I used to wander around in the London fog in a deerstalker cap, talking to my mates in iambic pentameter? We have Starbucks, woman.”

Aren’t you going to give me a talking-to?” “For being an idiot and blithely walking right into trouble?” “Yes.” “Naw. I can’t think of two qualities I admire more in a person.

“I spend more time thinking about the things I wish we had done than I do thinking about the things we did do. It was like we opened the perfect bottle of wine and each shared a sip . . . and then a clumsy waiter knocked the bottle to the floor before we got to have any more.

Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you—finish you—as much as you create you. When you’re gone, the ones you’ve left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.”

“Things are different now. Law ain’t law anymore. Without someone higher to answer to, the law is just whoever’s holding the nightstick.

“There’s always a little decency in the worst places . . . and always a little secret selfishness in the best.”

“I wish we had time to dig a tunnel,” the Fireman said. “To where?” “It doesn’t matter. You can’t have a decent prison break without a tunnel.

“You know what I miss?” she said. “If you say Facebook, you’ll ruin a perfectly lovely evening.” “I miss Coca-Cola. That would’ve been so good with a Coke. You know, we might’ve fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren’t all bad.”

“I mean what did you want to do that actually might’ve happened.” “I wish I had discovered a new kind of mold I could’ve named after Sarah.” “Wow. You romantic son of a bitch.”

“My parents are sturdy, practical people who own several ratlike dogs.

that has poetry in it, but it doesn’t make a lick of sense.” “That’s what poetic speech is for—for the things that are true but don’t make sense.

“They’re looking for you,” she told him. “I heard it on the radio.” “They better be careful,” he said, without looking back at her. “They might find me.”

“This is pointless!” “Are you alive?” “Yes!” “Then there’s a point,”

She had wanted a few thousand mornings of waking up next to him. They weren’t going to have any of it, but he had wanted her to live—he had loved them and wanted them all to live—and she thought he ought to get something for all his trouble.