Foundations by Dylan Pierce

                          Pat Pilon CC


Foundations

   Ian was fixated on the deterioration of Eve Johnson’s old house. He passed by it on his way home from Carver High every day, the five-lobed leaves of English ivy expanding like a drop of ink in water, covering more of the chipped, burnt sienna brick with each passing day. 
   At first, he’d breeze by, swinging around the curve where Elm met Third, the once thriving corner lot now an overgrown mess of brambles, bindweed, and crabgrass, but now he often lingered, staring long enough to mentally catalog the new damage: the peeling paint on the cellar door, the crooked smile of the bowing brick on the left side of the house. 
   When Eve was alive, there had been carefully cultivated flower beds on the lawn, a transformative effect to rounding that corner; the grey, neglected shingles and dying, unkempt grass of the previous block faded away, replaced by vibrant brick and hues that blended like oil paintings. There had been red and pink geraniums interspersed with hydrangeas and Russian sage, tall sunflowers standing guard at the perimeter, sunny yellow sentinels shading patches of lawn where, after a long rain, birds would root through the soil for fat worms and iridescent-shelled beetles. 
   Eve, in her eighties but still hardy and willful, would wave to Ian as he walked by, taking a break from tending to her plants, wide-brimmed straw hat tied beneath her chin with a comically oversized white ribbon, trowel in her gloved hand. Sometimes, noticing the hesitance in his shifting feet as he gazed down Third, his eyes flicking back to Eve with a trembling smile, knowing he should head home but wanting to prolong this moment, this instance of indecision that stalled the inevitable, she would let him help.    
   Eve always read his body language for what it was. She tuned into the silences and read their fortunes like cards splayed out into a message that would have been cryptic gibberish to anyone else. Still, she never pressed him for the source of his nerve-bitten lips. Her smile as she showed him the proper spacing for tulip bulbs, making equidistant depressions in the soil with her small shovel, seemed to say you don’t have to tell me—we can quietly know it together.
   When Eve died, it was one of those cruel domino-esque effects of mundane circumstance that often vexed Ian if he thought about it for too long. The chain of events that led to a person’s demise could be so insipid and unpredictable, and this reality, the pointlessness of it all, boiled in the back of Ian’s brain like an unwatched pot spitting angry flecks of white foam. It didn’t matter what you did. It didn’t matter how carefully you curated your space, the immaculate efforts of Eve threading together color-coordinated patches of land. None of this mattered because, one day, you were filling up a vase at the kitchen sink, meticulously arranging a bundle of flowers snipped with the precise edge of your gardening shears, and you didn’t realize you’d dribbled a stream of water onto the speckled tile beneath your feet. It didn’t matter because you slipped on your traction-less canvas shoes, hitting your head on the laminate island at just the right angle to trigger an aneurysm that killed you before you even had the chance to be frightened. 
   Thank God for small mercies.      
   This is what people in the neighborhood said about the swiftness of her death. Through this experience, Ian learned that people valued blissful ignorance above all else, especially when it came to death. It was a strange shared comfort he couldn’t participate in. To him, not being afforded awareness at that crucial moment sounded like punishment. To exert control over your own life for decades, to spend so much time whittling the ungainly stump of it into a smoothly sanded object that hugged the curve of your hand, only to have the end of it be so senseless and sudden? What was the worth in that?
   It was this frustration that made him rush past the now dilapidated house. It had been more than a year, and while, as he understood it, the property was now under the ownership of a distant relative of Eve’s, it was some nebulous person no one in Clinton had ever seen. No one had really taken care of the house since Eve’s passing. 
And so it sat, unoccupied and degrading, one unchecked arm of ivy at a time. When word got out that it was truly empty, the break-ins started: teenagers looking for a secluded place to have sex or drink undisturbed, the more savvy ones trying the credit card trick on the back door lock, others just breaking windows with bricks, reaching an arm in to lift a latch. 
   Earlier that day, after a miserable PE class of flag football, Ian had heard Jason Hardin talking about it in the locker room. Jason and his triangle-shaped cohort, Marcus, had made it clear that Ian’s face would be permanently disfigured if his hands came anywhere near certain parts of their bodies, and since Ian was too afraid of a misconstrued accident, he’d avoided any participation all period. This had led to many rebukes from Mr. Condin, who glared at Ian as he stood inert on the field, shouting with that strangled German Shepherd bark of his, “learn to tell your head from your ass, Harker,” whatever the hell that meant.
“Dude, you gotta take Jenny. She’ll be freaked out by how dark and fucking haunted it looks. Put an arm around her,” Jason had looped his arm around the back of Marcus’s neck, causing Ian to wonder, not for the first time, how anyone could zero in on his own suspected queerness when every part of the locker room rituals of male camaraderie were so dependent on superfluous touch, “get close and tell her not to be scared, and you’re fucking in. Worked on Ashley Randall in like five minutes.”
   “Ashley’s a slut, Jase. She would’ve dropped her panties for anybody,” Mike had shouted around a row of lockers, throwing his sweat-logged PE shorts at Jason’s head.
   “They’re all fucking sluts, Mike. You just have to know what to say.”
Ian had left as fast as possible, head throbbing as he weaved between bodies in the hallway, trying to forget that his home wasn’t a viable escape from the prison of school.

                                                                                                                                ***

   “You’re late. Where have you been?” Ian’s sister Christine asked, prying her lips from her boyfriend’s mouth long enough to scowl at Ian. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, her legs entwined around Patrick’s waist, his tanned, rectangular bulk an odious reminder that the meatheads in Ian’s class would only grow up to be larger and louder than they already were.
   When Ian was fifteen, his parents had decided to go to Europe together. They unceremoniously announced this over dinner, casually letting him know he’d have to find a family to stay with for the week because they couldn’t leave him alone in the house. He’d ended up staying with Eve, a tranquil week of blankets, mugs of tea, warm Shepherd’s pie, and sitcom reruns broadcast on the wavy rays of her old tube TV. 
   Now, eighteen and freedom finally close enough for him to feel its heated glow in the palm of his hand, like the velvety, sun-warmed petals he used to stroke in Eve’s yard, he’d assumed they would trust him to be unsupervised.
   No such luck.
   They’d asked Christine, now in her third year of college, if she would come home for spring break to watch Ian as though he were a five year old who still didn’t understand that the stove would burn his pudgy little hands. 
   “Why do you care?” Ian muttered, plucking an orange from the fruit bowl and rolling it between his palms.
   “Because I’m here to watch you, idiot.”
   “Mom and Dad don’t care. They care about themselves and this stupid house.” Ian’s eyes mapped the curve of Patrick’s bicep, that small straight line connecting the bump of muscle to the crook of his elbow, his veiny forearm giving way to surprisingly delicate hands, long, tapered fingers cinched around his sister’s hip.
   Ian’s parents had never cared that much about him or his sister Christine, but it wasn’t the outward, brazen kind of neglect that is easily spotted. It was the thick dust that gathers on places too high for eyes to find, the kind of unsightly grime you see once a year when, standing on a ladder and frowning at the gray wispy piles, you clean the tops of bookshelves and fan blades, grumbling under your breath about how this could happen, how the sooty little clouds could form, silently and steadily, without you ever bothering to notice.
  Mostly, Ian suspected, it wasn’t personal. His parents were two people who simply never should have had children. They were too wrapped up in one another, their love all spent too quickly, a fortune amassed and liquidated overnight. Ian and Christine were thorny obstacles that had been placed in their paths, wedges driven between his parents, preventing their existence from being as selfish as they would have liked.
   “Well, I care. Tell me if you’re going anywhere this week, okay? I don’t mind, just tell me.” 
   Ian clenched a fist around the orange, squeezing the bumpy rind and clamping his lips against a grimace. Christine had been like this since she’d arrived: cold and cruel when they were alone (“I’m just here because I want the house to myself. Don’t get in my fucking way, and I won’t get in yours.”) but performatively concerned when Patrick was around, fulfilling the role of the protective sibling with remarkably good acting that Ian took to be further evidence of her sociopathy. 
   He often wished he were an only child. The absence of a partner in this isolation seemed less disappointing than having the possibility dangled in front of you only for it to prove empty. 
   You couldn’t, Ian surmised, miss what you never had. 
   For his part, Patrick didn’t seem to notice this, cheerfully smiling at Ian and calling him “buddy” with the firm shoulder pat of an athlete, that male alliance Ian had never been part of before. Sometimes, he would catch Christine’s mouth twitching when Patrick showed him this kindness, and Ian, consumed with the constant adolescent fear of his thoughts suddenly leaking from his mind and into the air, would eschew these gestures with an abashed shrug, retreating into his room, content to be invisible for this week as it was hardly a change.
   Ian’s efforts to disappear were so ceaseless and automatic that they no longer felt like efforts at all, merely natural bodily functions, as regular and rhythmic as the breath circulating in his lungs.

                                                                                                                                 ***

   Over the next three days, every time Ian came downstairs to loot through the fridge, intent on slinking away unnoticed, Patrick would be there. Ian only ever seemed to venture downstairs at the precise moment his sister was gone, leaving them alone. Ian’s eyes would dart from one corner of the room to another, focusing on cobwebs blowing in the air-conditioned breeze, their stringy threads clinging to door frames, or Patrick’s shadow on the hardwood, elongated into something spindly and strange.
   “Hey buddy, you been upstairs the whole day? Come outside! It’s perfect. Not a day to be cooped inside. I won’t take no for an answer.” He flashed a radiant grin, the wholesomeness of it turning dirty in Ian’s mind. Ian barely had time to open his mouth and stutter out a protest before Patrick’s wide, warm palm landed on his shoulder once again, traveling down his arm until his fingers were wrapped around Ian’s wrist, pulling him toward the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard.  
   Patrick was right; it was a lovely day, whorls of heated wind blowing past Ian’s cheek that reminded him of late June, chasing ice cream trucks and running through the lawn sprinkler’s refreshing spray. Shucking off his shirt, Patrick jumped into the pool, leaving Ian to flinch at the water misting his feet, hugging his middle as though afraid someone would steal his clothes. Patrick settled against one flagstone edge, his wet elbows braced on the slate-grey surface. Ian watched the sun wick away the moisture from his arms, the water shrinking into smaller patches until only dewy droplets remained.
   “Aren’t you getting in?”
   “I’m not wearing trunks,” Ian offered, squinting at a small puddle of water by a metal chair, the sunlight glinting off it, blinding rays that hurt his eyes.
   “It’s your house, and that fence is pretty high. I think you can do whatever you want,” Patrick laughed. The musical ease of it made Ian let go of his stomach, but he still didn’t dare to do anything bolder than perch a foot away from Patrick, sitting on the ledge and dangling his feet into the water.
   A fly touched down on the aquamarine depths, surface tension suspending the insect’s quivering legs before giving way beneath them. Ian watched as the fly was submerged and wondered if it hurt. Did the fly know he was drowning? Was there anything under his shimmering, bulbous eyes that approached awareness?  
   “She’s normally not very nice to you, is she?” 
   Ian turned toward Patrick, and saw something keen and clever in his eyes. It reminded him of Eve. He looked back at the pool, searching for the fly, but couldn’t find it.
   “No one is.” What he wanted to say was “I didn’t know you noticed or even cared,” but it sounded too… something. Too saccharine. Too intimate. Too dangerously close to tipping the balance with someone he knew so little. “Where is she?” 
   “Somewhere.” Patrick shrugged, and Ian followed the motion, watching his shoulders rise and fall, the slow roll of muscle as he leaned backward. “She’s mad at me. She always is.”
   “Why did you come here then?” 
   Another shrug. A coy half smile. Ian dipped his hand in the pool, cupping his palm, fashioning it into a little basin. He splashed the water on the back of his neck.
   “It’s not exactly Florida, but your upper middle class asses have a pool and I’m too broke for a vacation that isn’t free.” 
   Ian thought of the time his sister, upon finding that Ian had been in her room, his curiosity getting the better of him at age twelve, had set fire to his sketchbook in retaliation. 
   A smugness warmed him, driving up the corners of his lips. 
   “Do you think she’ll be back soon?”
  “Doubt it. She’s probably getting drunk with a girl whose name ends in ‘ie’. My money’s on her passing out on a couch somewhere and coming back tomorrow.”
   Good, Ian thought, stripping down to his boxers and slipping into the water’s cool embrace.

                                                                                                                                 ***

   There were three dead rabbits by the lattice around the front porch of Eve’s house, their corpses arranged as though they’d snuggled close for warmth and comfort as they died together. The sight made Ian’s chest tight, but it also made him want to take his sketchbook from his bag and document every fiber of the rabbits’ pelts, the way their eyes were as wide and innocent in death as they were in life. 
   Next door, a middle-aged man was watering his lawn, the ridged green hose winding around his bare ankles, dirty flip flops on his feet.
   Ian called to him, and the man lazily lifted his eyes.
  “Do you know what happened?” Ian gestured to the rabbits, and the man peered in their direction before heaving a sigh, turning his attention back to the immaculate springy green beneath his feet.
   “It’s the holly.” Ian looked where the man was pointing and saw a clump of shrubs with waxen, dark green leaves, Christmas-red berries sprouting from between them like shiny hard candies. Eve hadn’t planted those, but everything of Eve’s had long since died. “Whoever owns it isn’t paying anyone to watch the property so you complain to the city, but they don’t do a damn thing. All they can do is try to get in touch with the owner and fine them for not taking care of it. Blah blah blah. No one wants to do anything, and I’m two seconds from coming over there and spraying the whole lawn myself. What happens when someone’s dog eats those berries and dies?”
   What did it look like when the poison hit? Did the rabbits foam at the mouth, seizures wracking their tiny bodies until they went rigid?
   “I don’t think holly is poisonous to dogs.” Ian didn’t know why he said it. He wasn’t even sure it was true. Had he heard it somewhere or did he just feel the need to defend this house, the only remaining vestige of Eve’s life, decaying though it was? The man’s disdainful frown made Ian regret speaking up, but surely someone had to. Ian was tired of the discourse around the house, the way it only revolved around what people perceived to be a blemish on their perfect street, an aberration among the manicured lawns and large decks painstakingly stained and treated to repel the unforgiving hands of weather. The neighbors argued back and forth, litigating the life of this house, never decision makers, always professional debaters. Bureaucracy and line items. Stale mates of regulation. He was sickened that someone in Eve’s life, someone she had trusted to care for this wondrous thing, had so casually dismissed the responsibility and let the wood rot, roots seeping into the drainage and trapping the moisture that now made the brick distend and bulge.
   Ian stood up and sprinted away, squeezing his eyes shut as he ran, images of dead rabbits blinking like photo negatives across his eyelids.

                                                                                                                                 ***

   When Ian came home, Patrick was at the kitchen counter juicing oranges into a tall glass. He tried to run past, but Patrick called his name and Ian skidded to a stop, his face flushed, his breath ragged from the run.
   “You okay?” Patrick asked with a tilt of his head, the sincerity in his eyes making Ian want to cry. When was the last time someone had looked at him like that? Had it ever happened? Juice was running down one of Patrick’s hands, trickling down his wrist, bits of pulp gathered between his long fingers. He must have squeezed one by hand before he found the juicer. Ian wanted to lick his fingers clean, taste the sweetness of the juice on the salt of his skin. “Hey… sit down.”
   Patrick’s concern expanded into something graver, little lines forming between his brow. Ian didn’t realize he was crying until Patrick guided him to a stool at the island, handing him a tissue and resting a hand on his back.
   “What happened?”
   Where to begin? The texture of Ian’s thoughts wasn’t a legible thing. It couldn’t be translated into easy explanations that Patrick would understand. It was an ache that had metastasized into bigger aches, a great calamitous mass that had been growing over time, punctuating every step he took until the heaviness of moving forward was nearly too much to bear. 
   “It doesn’t matter,” Ian whispered, taking a tissue and wiping away his tears. 
   Patrick sighed, a deep, helpless kind of sound, one that Ian hoped wasn’t exasperation. When Patrick reached for the tea kettle, Ian amended his position, choosing to believe it had been a noise of frustration at not being able to help him. Ian often frustrated people in this way. People gave up quickly. 
   “Are you making me tea? How grandmotherly of you.” Ian imbued it with playful snark, but secretly it made his pulse quicken, this small display of care. It reminded him of Eve, the two of them curled up on her sofa, their palms wrapped around steaming mugs of tea. He’d been so nervous to ask for shelter that week his parents left, but she’d offered it so freely, letting her space be his sanctuary, then and always. He never even had to explain; she’d see him on her doorstep, all shaky limbs and skittish eyes, and usher him into her home without so much as a raised eyebrow. As the kettle whistled, Ian wondered if he was drawing parallels out of nothing, connecting inane dots the way delusional religious fanatics see signs in clouds and burnt toast. 
   “Hey, grandmothers like it for a reason. It’s soothing. Proven fact.” Patrick turned around, fingers curled around the brassy kettle handle, and smiled. He poured the boiling water over the mesh basket nestled inside the pot, and Ian walked over to the counter, leaning in close to watch the gunpowder pellets unfurl in the water, expanding into long, veined leaves. 
   “Proven by who?”
   “Grandmothers, of course. You gonna argue with wise old ladies?”
   Ian bit his bottom lip and watched the steam rising from the basket. Patrick leaned in closer until they were standing like that, heads bent together, inhaling the steam, letting it bathe their faces like sauna mist. Ian hoped Patrick would never put the lid on the pot. He hoped they’d stand there forever, inhaling the same steam in silence, Patrick’s shoulder pressed against his, his cheek so near that Ian could see every sprout of stubble if he slyly moved his eyes to the right, keeping his head very still. Patrick’s eyes flicked up to meet Ian’s gaze, his lips parting slightly.
   Maybe not so sly after all.
   Ian wanted to look down, to walk away, anything to break this painfully acute awareness, but there was an addictive strife in refusing to look away, letting the moment expand into eternity, seeing too much or too little. There were social conventions about these things. You weren’t supposed to look this long. To refuse to stop was to admit something. He knew this, and he was desperate to stop before he went past the threshold. But instead, he froze like prey in the snow, like those rabbits must have if they ever saw a fox out of the corner of their huge, dark eyes, calculating their best chance of escape.    
  “Do you want something?” Patrick asked, the words a low hum that stirred the hair on the back of Ian’s neck. 
  “No,” he said weakly, still looking, looking, looking. 
   “Are you sure about that?” Patrick said it softly, a kind nudge from the grey into the black, an acceptance on Ian’s behalf, a thing that is said without being said.
   “No.” Ian shook his head minutely, his eyes finally descending enough to trace the curve of Patrick’s lip, fruit riper than the orange Patrick’s hand had squeezed dry.
   “Do you want me to decide for you?” Patrick’s smile returned, but it was barely detectable on his lips. It had migrated to his eyes, and there it stayed, crinkling the corners and lighting the irises, little tongues of flame licking across the brown, brightening it from shade to shade. He lifted his arm, and Ian expected another firm shoulder pat, a gesture of reassurance without heat, without intent. Instead,    Patrick’s hand rested on the side of Ian’s neck, his thumb stroking up and down his cheek until finally brushing the edge of his mouth, sliding across his bottom lip and back again. Ian closed his eyes, and when he felt Patrick’s lips on his own, he was grateful not to see. Feeling and seeing at the same time was too much. It could tear you in two if you weren’t careful. And who would put you back together again?
   Patrick’s mouth trailed down his neck, and when he murmured against the skin, Ian didn’t stop to think. He let the words fall into his skin and he obeyed them, leading Patrick up the stairs and into his room, letting Patrick push him onto a bed no one else had ever been in. 
   When they were both naked, Ian felt the urge to hide, but from what, he wasn’t sure. What was left to hide anyway? He’d said everything with that moment downstairs, standing in the steam and refusing to turn away. It was too late.
Ian looked down, and Patrick’s eyes, the fire he’d seen in them, looked different with Ian’s cock in his mouth. There was an almost malevolent tilt to them, and Ian’s thoughts flitted briefly to his sister’s cruelty, to the smeared words of Jason Hardin, to the way eyes light up not only from joy but from the success of spite, a wicked pleasure in the feats of pain. But as he kept watching, he saw that the spark in Patrick was neither of these things. It was something else. Something like hunger. Uncomplicated, but incomprehensible too.
   When it was over, they lay on the bed with the lazy haze of summer, languid limbs and slurred syllables, sated and unable to think about anything except the precise moment they were in, the past and future waved away like the cigarette smoke they’d both blown toward the open window (“You have to have one. It’s tradition,” Patrick had giggled, covering Ian’s face with wet kisses.) Ian had to remind himself again that it was really April, the inexplicable heat wave and temporary suspension of school tricking him into believing the seasons had changed.
   It was because of this dreamy, untroubled state that neither of them heard the front door or noticed her footsteps as she climbed to the second floor. It wasn’t until they heard Christine’s inhuman shriek that they even remembered her existence, that this was all ephemeral and she had been due to return at some point, bursting their contentment and bringing back the tension that always characterized that house.
   Ian couldn’t decipher the shrill words coming out of her mouth. He had practice in evasion, especially this kind, a brand specifically tailored to him, invention borne out of necessity. It wasn’t until he was out of the house and in the street, dressed and running with nowhere to go, that he began to feel bad about leaving Patrick behind. Could they have left together? Maybe Patrick would have taken them both in his car and driven away until Clinton was a mere speck in the ugly, receding distance. It was a nice thought, but the risk of unintended outcomes, consequences that couldn’t be undone, was too great.
   When Ian got to the corner of Elm and Third, he stopped. He stood in front of Eve Johnson’s house and caught his breath, his hands running up and down the sides of his shorts, a torrent of fury rising until he felt he could see a faint red glow outlining his form, a fuzzy field of anger he’d been storing alongside everything else he couldn’t let out. 
   He thought of Eve’s face in the sunlight, the way she would hum to herself as she tended the flowerbeds, never happier than when her hands were buried in the earth. He saw a broken window and thought of every idiot who’d ruined the sanctity of this place, turning it into something tarnished and unseemly. Ian thought of all the bickering neighbors who barely noticed Eve’s passing, only a moment of cursory, obligatory mourning before they descended their talons onto the business of eradicating this house—at first excited for the chance to acquire it, then despairing at the notion that she’d left it to someone else, as though they were entitled to ownership, and finally, letting the house fall into disrepair, urging its collapse along one neglectful turn at a time, one purposeful punch of glass here, a broken lock there. He looked at the shambles of Eve’s former life and wanted to do something. 
   No one had done anything. They’d only brought destruction and greed and selfishness and apathy. 
   Ian walked around to the side of the house and over to the back door. He turned the knob, expecting resistance but feeling it swivel under his hand, the swollen wood sticking in the frame for a second before harshly giving in, his body lurching forward. As he walked inside, he took in the cracks in the paint, the dust so thick it made him cough, the once lemony yellow of the kitchen a polluted brown, streaked water stains running down the walls.
   Keeping on through the doorway and into the dining room, he spotted the thick maroon curtains, moth eaten but still hanging onto the runners. He tried to pull the rope and move them along the track, but it refused to budge. Ian sat on top of the dining table and thrust his hands in his pockets. 
   It was then that he noticed he had the cigarettes. He didn’t remember taking them, but there they were, a lighter rattling around in the half-empty pack. He took the lighter out, flicking it on and off, passing his fingers through the small flame, a bright white and yellow oval peak at the top, a translucent blue blaze burning at the bottom.
   Ian hopped off the table and stood in front of the curtains for a long time, pinching the dense fabric between his thumb and forefinger, turning it this way and that.
   He wanted to do something.
   No one was doing anything.
   Least of all him.
   All he did was think. Ian thought so loudly and so incessantly that he wanted to clamp his head between the thick wooden slats of the lattice of Eve’s porch to see if the pressure could silence it all for even just a second, a makeshift guillotine of splintered boards squeezing the space behind his ears, his nose buried in the dirt of the rabbits’ grave, asphyxiating on sodden soil. His parents, Jason Hardin with his square jaw and animalistic sneer, Christine with her hissing disdain every time he dared to be near her… it was all swimming inside him with nowhere to go.  
   They didn’t deserve this house. No one appreciated it the way Ian had. No one appreciated Eve the way Ian had, and now that they were both gone, so was his only refuge from the suffocating stillness of this friendless town.
  It was time to send it all deep into the ground. The earth would take care of it. It was designed to do that. It didn’t abandon its counterparts the way people do. It nurtured and protected. It built entire cities of flora and fauna from one seed. It didn’t punish anomalies. It found a place for them to exist, food to sustain them. The earth thrived on destruction. It took the barren and made it fertile.
   New plants would sprout from the singed soil, an apt tribute to Eve. Maybe it would flourish again someday. Maybe someone would come along to foster new growth until everything was restored.
   Ian flicked the lighter on and held it to the edge of one length of fabric. It didn’t catch fire at first, the curtains no doubt damp from all the trapped moisture, the untreated air in the house, stagnant and muggy. 
   But eventually it did, a small worm of yellow that wriggled into a bold orange.
   Once it started, it was faster than he thought it would be, the flicker of flame crescendoing into a roar, the crackle and scream of it like an endless mouth, open and ravenous. The more it ate, the more it wanted to devour, its ambition growing until the tendrils of fire began to reach toward the ceiling like arms to heaven. Ian bolted from the room, coughing as he left, running across the yard and into the street, the ghost heat of flames on his skin. When he got to the sidewalk, he found he couldn’t leave. Smoke was beginning to billow from the broken windows, and the sight transfixed him.
   A burning building is the most terrific of all monsters. Its colors are vivid as a sunset, and it makes no apology for what it is. It swallows with gusto and gives nothing back. Nothing but leveled earth and ash that crumbles between your fingers. It destroys with unmatched swiftness and dares to look beautiful while doing it. It feeds on its sister elements, absorbing the air and water until it's nearly unstoppable. 
   It seemed fitting, Ian thought as he watched it burn, the neighbors finally spilling out of their houses like nosy vermin, clutching their midsections as they pretended to be horrified, as though this wasn’t exactly the unlucky coincidence they’d been hoping for, all those mornings muttering about property values and neighborhood decline as they snatched their paper from the stoop.
   Ian sat across the street, hugging his knees to his chest as the sirens wailed, the banshee cry growing louder until he saw the lights flashing red down the block, the giant hose unraveling like a mythical snake. It took hours to put it out, and Ian stayed the whole time. He stayed until the firemen packed away the cavernous-mouthed hose and the scorched facade stood, half of the top of the house gone as though it had melted crookedly, plastic left too close to the stove. Everything was blackened, a charcoal char touching every remaining beam, every plank of wood that hadn’t perished. 
   Ian imagined they would bulldoze the wreckage, fulfilling another greedy desire of the people he’d seen on the street tonight. 
   No one had asked him a single question during the whole debacle.
   No one noticed him at all.
   Ian was good at being invisible. He’d had a lifetime of practice.
   When the sky faded into stark black, too dark for him to distinguish the falling ashes from the night, he slowly rose from the sidewalk. He felt something tickle his neck and swatted at it, expecting to find a flattened mosquito against his palm. Instead, he found a black smear. More ashes. 
   Ian turned his face to the sky and opened his mouth, welcoming the ash on his tongue. It felt like a baptism, and isn’t that what fire really is? A wrathful cleansing, a matter you have no say in, even if it began with you?
   Ian turned down Third and began to walk home. He didn’t hurry. He knew no one was waiting.

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Dylan Pierce is a queer Pittsburgh-based writer working in the mental health field during the day while working on their first novel and trying to preserve their local film community in their off hours.