Nicholas Day - At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames

“Go left, Daddy!”

“Watch out for the ottoman!”

“Watch out for the chair!”

“Put out your hands! That’s the pie safe you’re touching.”

And once he knew that he was standing in front of the pie safe, well, blind or not, the man knew that house pretty well. He was at the front door lickety-split and then out into the yard. Momma picked herself up and went following. So did I except I didn’t scream like she did.

Daddy kind of stumbled a bit outside and for some reason he started over towards the neighbor lady’s place. The frost melted before him like a crowd separated for a great man, or the way folks in westerns used to back out of the streets when there was going to be a gunfight. He fell right in front of the door to the neighbor lady’s house, and that’s when the fire became too much for his body to hold.

Now, it was real strange, but when Daddy was bouncing around our house he never once lit anything else on fire. Maybe he left a smudge of burnt skin here and there, and of course his hair went up quick and smelled something awful, but nothing caught, nothing went up along with him.

That changed right quick, though, and fire belched out from his fallen body and started eating away at Ms. Mackeninny’s house.

With Ms. Mackeninny inside.

I’ll tell you, I thought Momma was screaming to beat the band, but man oh man did Mackeninny make a racket.

That’s about the time all the neighbors came out to see the fuss, to see the greatest fire they’d ever seen.

Mackeninny stopped screaming long before the fire department showed up.

I watched them hook their great big hose to the hydrant up the street. They came running up the yard and they were ready to blast the house with a horizontal waterfall. When they pulled the valve, that hose farted out a trickle of water about as powerful as my showerhead. Back then it was awful intense, but I have to admit it’s kind of funny to me now.

Daddy used to tell me that, when it came time, I ought not to worry about a fancy funeral or anything like that.

“Don’t put me in no box, either,” he’d say, and then Momma would get so mad.

“You don’t want to be buried next to me?” She’d ask.

“I don’t want to be buried at all,” he’d reply.

“You don’t love me.” She’d say.

“It has nothing to do with loving you,” he’d say. “I want to be cremated is all.”

“Fine, be cremated. But if you go before me then I’m just having your ashes dumped in my grave.” And that’s about the time in the argument where she’d stick out her chin and nod her head as if it were the period at the end of a sentence.

“Ah, goddammit.” And that is what Dad would say when the argument had ended.

Momma stayed true to her word. After the fire, we scooped up whatever we thought might have been Dad and we put it in two different envelopes.

“This’ll be buried with me,” she said and handed me the second envelope, adding, “and you can take this with you.”

So, that’s it, really, about my daddy. He burned up and that’s that. Momma and her envelope are already in the grave. My envelope is locked away in a safety deposit box that’ll be popped open sometime very soon.

But did I see Death when the old man went up in flames?

Surely I did, though not at that exact moment.

Death came to me like he comes to us all, in sleep, when we enter his Library of Lives.

I am tied to a chair and my mother won’t stop putting food into my mouth and she keeps feeding and feeding me and then I realize she is feeding me the remains of my father and, my God, it’s delicious. I eat every bite of him, right down to the bone. Then, my grandmother, my father’s mother, comes into the kitchen but she’s naked and walking around like she used to do when she thought everyone was still asleep. She helps my mother crush up Dad’s bones until they’re nothing but a powder.

They cut up the powdered bone into lines.

“Do you like skiing?” my mother asks. The two of them start snorting the powder and laughing.

My stomach begins churning and growling. Not because I’m sick but because Dad is so angry. I can feel him inside of me, moving in my guts. It’s the pain that makes you double over, as if a cue ball is pushing its way through your intestine and that ball has at least seven feet of tight, coiled rollercoaster left before the ride stops.

I have to get to a bathroom, I think. Dad is so awful when he’s angry but I am still tied to a chair and I can’t get up. The pain is terrible. I start trying to jerk loose but the rope won’t come undone. I start sweating and I am afraid I might shit myself, so I begin to shimmy my pants off. Now, my trousers are at my knees and I am bouncing in my chair, which falls over and that pressure in my gut, that cue ball, it finally reaches my asshole while I am face down on the ground.

I’m pinching so tight that if I did fart it would probably sound like I was whistling a song, and as that thought crosses my mind I laugh and the pressure explodes into something as orgasmic as it is nauseating, but instead of a fart, all I can hear is my father hollering, screaming excrement all over my mother, his mother, and everything else in the kitchen.

I wake up shivering and crying the night before my death, a full-grown man reduced to childhood emotion. Everyone is asleep and it is dark, but I cover my face anyway, thinking that if God is real then I would rather not have him see me like this. I am ashamed, not because of the dream but because I only sat and watched while Dad died in front of me. I was never tied down in real life, though I sat at the table all the same, like a good boy.

Dad was so awful when he was angry, just like God, and if God is real and he sees me covering my face then I have no doubt that God knows why I am crying. And if God knows then Dad knows because He would have told him, because that’s what happens when you die, that’s the consolation for having lived a mortal life. All secrets are set free. I am covering my face because Dad is so angry at me. I am afraid that if I take my hand down and open my eyes that I will see him in the dark.

“Go away,” I sob. “Please, go away.”

Soon, I fall asleep, exhausted, having shed as many tears as one can, and with a throbbing headache, too. Throb, throb, tic, toc. The pounding in my heart is making clockwork in my head and it is awfully painful. My last coherent thought, the one I’ll remember in the morning just before I open my eyes for the first time, is that my headache sounds so much like my father’s booming footsteps. And with that realization comes a deep sleep and another dream.

My father is trapped inside his own graven image. He strips away from the inside out. He is free and violent and hungry. Nothing can stop him, nothing can stop me, and we are both on fire.

I wake up very early on the day I die and decide that if I am to burn, then it won’t be in front of my family. I’ll go away, anywhere, as long as it is far from them. The fire is my burden.

I found a frog smashed into the pavement right before I fell in love for the second time. His blue and purple guts squeezed out like a crunched-up bunch of shoelace. His pink tongue pressed out of green lips and bent over on itself, as if it got tired of hanging out the mouth. Being dead looked exhausting and wet.

Could crushed frogs haunt pavement?

“Hey, frog,” I whispered. “Do you have a soul?”

I waited, though the frog said nothing. The other kids at the bus stop watched me. An older boy, some nameless kid whose voice fluctuated between tenor and bass, he pointed right at me.