THE SUN.
It soaks into my arms and legs and face, filling my cells like warm water balloons. Its heat radiates from the tar paper shingles and soaks into my back, saturating me from every direction. I am lying in the crook of the roof, next to the chimney, hiding. No one knows I can climb the oak outside my bedroom window and jump here from its branches. Most seven-year-olds couldn’t, but I’m different. I’ve been practicing a long time.
I have my toys with me. Two plastic men. One is a good guy, a hero. I can tell by his big jaw and flat haircut. The other is a monster. I don’t know what kind of monster but he is ugly and his skin is blue, so he is bad and I make him fight the hero. They stand on my chest, poised to attack.
“I will kill you!” the monster says in a shrill snarl.
“Not if I kill you first!” the hero says in the closest I can get to a baritone.
Far out in the yard, near the woods, I hear my father shouting something over and over. It’s probably my name. It has the blunt cadence of my name, but it’s distant and inconsequential. The violence in his voice is softened by the warm air. I can almost imagine he’s looking for me because he wants to give me a present.
I mash the figures together into a frenzy of battle. Plastic fists clatter against plastic jaws.
? ? ?
I stretch the balloon’s ring and slip it over the faucet. I turn on the water and watch the balloon swell.
“Who you gonna hit with these?”
I look up at my father. His huge, meaty face. His hands thick and callused from decades of brutal labor.
“Paul,” I say.
He pulls one of the finished balloons out of the bag on the counter and squeezes it. “It’s warm.”
I nod.
“You trying to give him a nice bath? Use cold water.”
“Why?”
“Getting hit isn’t supposed to feel good. It’s supposed to make him scream.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how games work. Winning is supposed to feel good and losing is supposed to hurt. What’s the point of being a winner if losers get to feel good too?”
He hands me a fresh balloon. “Use cold water.” He opens the freezer and sets a tray of ice cubes by the sink. “And a few of these.”
? ? ?
I stare at the beige carpet, looking for patterns in the stains as the youth pastor harangues us with harsh truths.
“Don’t let the long hair fool you, he’s not some peace-and-love hippie. Luke chapter twelve: ‘Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.’ He didn’t come to make friends. He’s got fire in his eyes and a sword in his mouth and he came to cut the world in half.”
Stacks of chairs with purple cushions. Folding tables. Pale fluorescent lights. Monday through Saturday, the hotel rents out this shabby conference room for political rallies, corporate training sessions, and the occasional flea market or gun show. On Sundays it belongs to a few dozen families who set up guitars and mics and hang a vinyl banner that reads HOLY FIRE FELLOWSHIP.
“He came to divide!” the pastor shouts into his mic, pacing back and forth in front of thirty squirming teens. “Brother from brother. Wheat from chaff. Saved from damned. He’s here to draw a line. Which side will you be on when the Last Sunset comes?”
I force myself to look up from the floor and face his fevered gaze.
“Maybe you think you’ve got plenty of time to decide. Maybe you like living in this cesspool so much you want to hit snooze and tell God to come back later. Maybe you think if you do enough good works, if you feed enough refugees and build enough schools and recycle enough pop cans, you can make God change his mind.” He shakes his head, and his voice drops to a low simmer. “God doesn’t change his mind. You can’t put out his fire. It’s coming to burn away this twisted world, and I don’t know about you, but I’m praying for it to hurry up. I’m soaking my house in gasoline.”
? ? ?
The skeletons of Helena, Montana, loom over me, charred rafters stabbing at the sky like the ribs of ancient animals. Bits of charcoal fall onto my upturned face and I wipe at them, drawing smudges that revert my faintly pink skin to gray. I see clean white siding superimposed over the houses’ black frames. Neat vegetable gardens under jungles of ivy. Children riding bikes through the glass-strewn streets. Voices in the silence.
“R,” Julie says. She is walking alongside me, watching me with deepening concern. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I say to the street ahead, my face slack, eyes far away.
She reaches for my hand. I let her take it and I let her squeeze it, but I don’t squeeze back.
“Here,” Abram says, stopping in front of what might have once been a two-story Craftsman house. It’s now just four black walls slumped against a collapsed roof, windows smoked over, sickly brown vines creeping through every crack. “This is it.”