The Fireman

by Joe Hill

Isaiah Thomas rose up on his toes, fell backward, and let go of the basketball, hit a shot from nearly half court. They didn’t know it then, but by the end of the following week, the basketball season would be over. Come summer, most of the Celtics would be dead, by incineration or suicide.

Chilling!

We’ve got such a short time to treat each other right. We’re going to make it special.

His daughter got it and burned to death and he jumped off the Piscataqua Bridge.” “I didn’t know.” “You were working. You were at the hospital. You never came home. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was going to tell you in a text message.” He was quiet. His head was down and his eyes were in shadow. “I sort of admire him. For understanding he had seen all the best his life was going to offer him and recognizing there was no point in hanging around for the last shitty little bit. Johnny Deepenau was a Budweiser-drinking, football-watching, Donald Trump–voting, stone-cold bozo who never read anything deeper than Penthouse magazine, but he understood that much.

short T-shirt that rode up to show crossed belts of the ’scale above her hips. It gave her the look of a goth gunslinger.

She had learned from Jakob to think of people who spoke of blessings and faith as simple and a little infirm. People who thought things happened for a reason were to be pitied. Such folk had given up their curiosity about the universe for a comforting children’s story. Harper could understand the impulse. She was a fan of children’s stories herself. But it was one thing to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon reading Mary Poppins and quite another to think she might actually turn up at your house to apply for the babysitting job.

“That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that.”

“First time I ever joint the Chorus,” Don Lewiston said, “I forgot the face of my father,

The merry chatter died as Father Storey stepped to the podium. He moved his spectacles up his nose and peered owlishly at his own songbook, then announced: “If you’ll open to page 332, we begin tonight with a plain but honorable hymn, beloved by the Pilgrims in the early days of America.” This was met by a smattering of laughs, although Harper didn’t understand why until Nelson opened the songbook to the right place. It was a camp songbook, for little boys and girls, not a true hymnal, and the song on page 332 turned out to be “Holly Holy” by Neil Diamond. Harper approved. If anyone could save her soul, it was probably him.

In the last three weeks, Ben had developed a habit of hovering. When Harper walked toward a door, it seemed like he was always there to hold it open for her. If she was limping, he slipped up against her, unasked, to put an arm around her waist and serve as her crutch. His fat, warm hands reminded her of yeasty, uncooked dough. He was harmless and he was trying to be useful and she wanted to be grateful, but instead she often found herself wearied by the sight of him. “You okay, Harper?” Ben narrowed his eyes at her. “You look flushed. Drink something.” “I’m fine. I already had some water and you wouldn’t believe how much I’m peeing these days.” “I said drink.” He pushed a paper cup of cranberry juice at her. “Dr. Ben’s orders.” She took the cup and drank, mostly to shut him up.

The first few days, the worst thing he seen Harold do was take a dump and use the pages from one of the camp library books for toilet paper.” Renée winced. “It turned out to be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Our only copy. If I had known what he was going to do with it, I would’ve given him a copy of Atlas Shrugged.”

LOL! Sick Ayn Rand buuuuurn!

We are taught to think of personality as a singular, private possession. All the ideas and beliefs and attitudes that make you you—we are raised to believe them a set of files stored in the lockbox of the brain. Most people have no idea how much of themselves they store off-site. 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.”

We were never properly grateful for making it through the last century, as far as I’m concerned. Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we’ll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible. You’re afraid it’s the End Times because we’re surrounded by death and ruin. Nurse Willowes, don’t you know? Death and ruin is man’s preferred ecosystem. Did you ever read about the bacterium that thrives in volcanoes, right on the edge of boiling rock? That’s us. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”

make

The hens are clucking. Harper thought it would be a toss-up, which term for women she hated more: bitch or hen. A hen was something you kept in a cage, and her sole worth was in her eggs. A bitch, at least, had teeth.

They had forgotten who they were. They had forgotten their own names, the voices of their mothers, the faces of their fathers.

I tried to lift the beam, but I couldn’t.

He’s trapped under it, as badly as he was ever trapped under the beam.”

We’ll figure it out later. There’ll be another night for this.” But there never was.

beam

But it turned out life was more like the kind of song the Stones wrote: you didn’t get any satisfaction, you took one hit to the body after another, if you were a woman you were a bitch who belonged under someone’s thumb, and if you wanted mother’s little helper from your dear doctor you better have the silver, take it or leave it, and don’t come crying for sympathy, that was just for the devil.

The Spring Training boy was back: the Red Sox were having an exhibition game against the Shakespeare All-Stars. Romeo was up to bat. He struck out, broke his bat over his knee, swallowed poison, and died on home plate. Juliet ran over from the on-deck circle, wept for a few moments, then stabbed herself through the heart with the shaft of his Louisville Slugger. The pitcher, Tom Gordon, waited with his hand on his hip while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dragged the bodies off the field.

Nozz-A-La

Nick. He grinned and signed back to her: “Look at all the lights! It’s like where Santa lives! It’s like we walked all the way to Christmasland!”