Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng

she had spent most of her childhood in libraries, taking refuge among the shelves as a new girl bouncing from school to school, absorbing books as if they were air—and, in fact, she told him shyly, she wanted to be a poet.

It was as if she had glanced at a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces and saw the whole picture without even consulting the box.

To have such a deep taproot in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn’t imagine it.

house, Lexie asking to spend time with her—she felt like Cinderella looking up to see the prince’s outstretched hand.

it would be years—well past her retirement—before the nickname and story, passed down from class to class, faded away.

Mia looked down at Izzy, this wayward, wild, fiery girl suddenly gone timid and dampened and desperate.

It was disorienting, like seeing a door that had always been open suddenly shut.

Izzy’s words—You’re a reporter—had touched her mother’s pride like a finger pressed into an old bruise.

As a journalist, she was no stranger to being hung up on, but this time irritated her more than most.

To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.

It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.

thought, like refusing to hand over maintenance records at the sale of a secondhand car.

All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated.

Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.

Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.

let her fantasy go, like a balloon soaring into the sky until it burst.

things had been good or bad, right or wrong, useful or wasteful. There had been nothing in between. Here, she found, everything had nuance; everything had an unrevealed side or unexplored depths.

I would never have let myself get into that situation, she told herself. I would have made better choices along the way.

Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.

But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things.

everyone followed the rules and everything had to be beautiful and perfect on the outside, no matter what mess lay within. She could not pretend that nothing had happened. Mia had opened a door in her that could not be shut again.

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over.

A thin wail rose from her throat, sharp as the blade of a knife.

Where do we follow the rules, and where do we justify breaking them?