Fire and Water

Flash fiction

Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash

The world burns.

Old Mr. Fletcher, his back as crooked as a crowbar, chops away at the woodpile near his house. He cleaves each log straight down the middle with every swing.

My car is packed. Sadie, my German Shepherd, barks at me from the passenger’s seat.

I approach my neighbor, holler at him, ask what the hell he’s doing. The winds have shifted drastically over the past couple of hours straight toward our homes in the hills. We’re doomed.

“Chopping wood, Brent. It’s what I’ve always done this time of year—what I’ll always do.” The fire, the glint that used to live in his eyes, has vanished.

“We’ve got to go, Fletcher,” I scream. “It’s an inferno! Our homes are as good as gone.”

“Yeah, well. . . you better hustle, sonny. I’ll be seeing you.”

I know I won’t convince him, so I say goodbye—run for the safety of my car. I thought the old man would have had better sense than this. What bullshit, packing it in like that.

I fling the door of my hatchback open, start it up, and hit the gas. Sadie’s panting, slobbering everywhere. She knows what we’re up against: she gets it.

A wall of flames, twenty feet tall, at least, is in my rearview mirror. The forest—those beautiful, tall pines—are engulfed.

Mr. Fletcher’s in my rearview, too. He hacks away, back to the fire, facing me. He pauses, stands as tall as he can, and offers me a soldier’s salute.

“Damn it, Fletcher,” I say under my breath. Tears sting my eyes. You tough, stupid bastard.

I race down the mountain, using both lanes, hitting almost eighty miles an hour in the forty-mile-an-hour zone. I’m white-knuckling the steering wheel the entire S-shaped descent. My tires wail like banshees.

“Come on,” I repeat over and over.

Flames lick my periphery a time or two, and smoke fills my lungs. I use my wiper blades to wash away the steady stream of ash and soot. It’s relentless.

I punch through into a clearing—a speck of blue remains in the yellowed sky—and careen over the single-lane bridge.

At long last, I roll into town. It has transformed into a ghost town. I say a silent prayer that it isn’t wiped clean off the map.

I pass Maisy’s Diner, the gas station, and Lou’s general store. You can tell everyone left Miller’s Point in a hurry: front doors are wide open, forgotten luggage rests on porches, and someone even left the nozzle on the ground at gas pump number three.

I pass through the main intersection—fly right through the red light. There are a couple other stragglers strapping belongings to the roof racks on their cars; a family of three slides trunks into the bed of their pickup truck.

I lay on my horn, screaming at them through my ash-streaked windows. My smoldering spirit shines through.

“Get the hell out of here, you assholes!” I yell. Sadie glances up at me and shoots me a look. Hypocrite, she says with her eyes.

I reach the highway. I’ve got a full tank of gas. On paper, it’s three hours until I reach the Atlantic Ocean. But within a few exits, it’s bumper to bumper, so I decide to stick to the back roads.

Just go east.

When I reach the ocean—five hours later— I let Sadie out and stretch my legs. We walk down to the water. She takes a piss on a dead horseshoe crab.

“Really?” I say to her.

Depending on which way the wind blows, I might wait it out here or follow the coastline south.

I climb a few large rocks and sit atop the flattest of them, letting my feet dangle as I inhale salt and seaweed. Sadie wanders the desolate beach for a few minutes and returns when commanded.

I think about Fletcher: the Vietnam veteran, cancer survivor, and his lifelong war with addiction. He was going on seven or eight years sober.

Maybe the guy didn’t feel like fighting any longer. He’d survived battle after battle. Hell, he’d been fighting his ass off since he was eighteen—probably longer, from the stories he used to tell me out on his porch over coffee. His childhood wasn’t a walk in the park by any stretch of the imagination.

Scratching behind Sadie’s ears, I catch a strong waft of smoke. I’m not sure if it’s safer to the south, but I’ll take my chances. I hop off the rocks.

I erect a small cross out of driftwood and make sure the pieces won’t blow over in the wind. Then I jam the cross into the sand.

William James Fletcher, a fine man, I etch in the sand with my index finger. I know it’ll wash away in the high tide.

Won’t we all?

I gaze out at the horizon—the whitecaps. “Come on, Sadie.”

Together, we walk back toward my ash-covered car.

Thank you so much for reading “Fire and Water” today. I appreciate it. If you enjoyed my story, please consider sharing it with a fellow fiction reader. Or let me know what you thought of it! I’d love to hear from you.

My thoughts and prayers go out to my Canadian friends to the north and to those affected by these wildfires.

Take care,

Justin

P.S. — I plan to host Fifties by the Fire this Saturday. Hope to see you there for some fifty-word fun!