The Light Pirate

by Lily Brooks-Dalton

She’d always been a satellite, orbiting out beyond the gravitational pull of family and community and togetherness.

“It’s better this way,” Phyllis said. She wanted to explain that it was the ideas woven into the siding and the shingles and the door frames that needed to go, that sometimes humans need to see change, to literalize it, in order to know that it’s arrived, but she couldn’t manage to put the words together.

Watching her home of so many years beginning to collapse in on itself, the flames licking around the eaves, the window sashes glowing red hot, the skeleton of it revealed before her, beams and doorways and the staircase at its center, she mourned what had been. They watched in silence until the second floor fell into the first. The roof kissed the foundation, and finally, with a crack like bones breaking and a spray of sparks, all that remained was a pile of flaming rubble. She became aware of Wanda’s hand in hers. “Ready?” Wanda asked. “Ready,” she said.

For the first time in a long time, she cries—big, choking sobs—the whole time worrying about her tears. She needs that moisture for other things, she tells herself, this is a waste, an extravagance, a careless use of precious resources. But even so, she cries, and even so, the price of these tears is tangible, exacting, steep.