Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

She saw the impact. But Noah must have seen the object coming. From the next room, where he had been playing Monopoly by himself, he said:

“Skyler, look.”

“What.”

“Skyler, look.”

He was five years old and Skyler Wakefield had been his babysitter since she’d started college, a year ago now. In a few weeks, classes again. She was ready to declare her major. She was going to be a fiction writer, like her father. This is what she had been thinking in the moments before it happened. Like my father . Then she looked. The house, set on one of the city’s hills, had views of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands on the far side of the bay. What Skyler saw through the window confused her: A plane. But not a plane. It was too bright. Like something cosmic come at high speed through the atmosphere, a star falling in broad daylight, but now decelerating strangely, like a machine, as if to land in the water of the bay. Then not landing. Slowing and lifting — all of this happening very quickly — as it approached the bridge, seeming to shrug its wings like some impossible dragon, though there were no wings, and yet something, metal or fire or a bolt of electromagnetism, was severing the suspension cables; and as each red cable lashed whiplike into the air, the roadway fell by stages to the pure morning blue of the water.

More than a crash. Not an accident. Get away from the window. Knowing what was coming now. Skyler put her back to the wall — shut her eyes, hard — and tried to shout to Noah. But her voice was gone from the terror of knowing. Even with eyes closed, she could see the flash of light.

If he’s looking, he’ll be blind .

A moment later, a shock of wind hit the house and the sound of every window breaking, of flying glass, of glass shards being rifled into walls and furniture, chiming against objects held together by metallic bonds, was like the music of the world please no glass plane dream help now Mom Dad Dorian …

When Skyler woke up, smoke was flooding the room. The door — the one leading to the hallway and the adjoining room where Noah was — she could not see. She tried to feel her way to it, but objects blocked her way, and she crawled in circles. She stopped. She pressed her cheek to the floor, trying to hear, afraid that the membranes in her ears must be slashed, because the only sound now was a pure and constant tone, like the hum of a tuning fork. She reached in her pocket for the phone vibrating against her thigh. On the glowing screen, she saw the numbers and the name. Noah’s mother. She pushed ACCEPTand held the device to her ear, and was able to hear the voice, just barely:

“Skyler.”

“I’m here,” she said.

Of course, the mother wanted to know if Noah was there. “Are you still with him?” “I’m with him and he’s all right,” Skyler said, not knowing if this was true. The mother gave her very clear directions. Take Noah out of the house and go three blocks south and one block west to a school with a fallout shelter. Being told what to do made Skyler angry. Take him out. Take him out how. Then the voice was lost. The call had dropped. The network collapsing under the weight of attempted connections.

In the hallway, there was less smoke. Here, she could breathe, though breathing only thickened a sooty residue in the flue of her throat. She made it to the room he was in. The window hung in the dark like a painting of orange fog. She did not want to go in. If she went in, she might not come out. She took off her shirt, pulled it inside out, and wrapped it around her mouth and nose. She found him under the window. After saying his name close to his face and not hearing a response, Skyler took him by the wrists and pulled him toward the door. He was not heavy: because he was small. He looked younger than five years old; it made him crazy how people were always low when guessing his age. I should be running, she thought, then remembered a way outdoors through a south-facing room at the end of the hall. She would take him, but first she would find the door and open it.

She felt the door, the knob. Decided there was no fire on the other side. Turned the knob and pushed. To the left, steps up to the street; to the right, a dark cloud lit from below and within. She got Noah onto her back. His arms dangled over her shoulders, and his lips, when his head moved, seemed to be kissing her neck. Skyler took him straight up to the street, worried if she put him down she wouldn’t pick him up again. There was no one else nearby. One person, a block away, running south. At the crest of a street, beyond the enclave of opulent homes, Skyler looked down to the burning neighborhoods along the bay. What she saw down there recalled a medieval painting of hell she had studied in Art History. Innumerable scenes of crazy torture, some brightly lit by fire, others in shadow, all of them under a sky impastoed with sun and ash. The street leading down was so sharply pitched that steps had been built into the sidewalk on one side. People were climbing towards her, climbing the steps on their hands and knees. Skyler felt a surge inside. Up here, the metal posts of street signs might be twisted into the shape of palsied limbs and the trees along the streets defoliated, but the buildings were still standing; and so was she, and she had the boy. She shrugged the boy higher onto her back. Three blocks south and one block west. Not far. She told herself that the worst was over and she had lived through it and she could keep living if she did everything correctly. The boy weighed nothing now. With every step: easier to carry. Skyler imagined she was carrying her brother, who would turn three in a few weeks. She felt like she was carrying Dorian.

After a couple more blocks, she saw the school on the far side of a public park she’d visited before with Noah. From a half block away, she could make out the sign with the symbol of three inverted triangles nailed above an entrance to the building; but not until she got to the doors could Skyler read the message, handwritten in magic marker on a sheet of looseleaf paper and fixed to the inside of a window. The shelter was filled to capacity. Steadying him, she tried the door handle, though she knew it wouldn’t move. The strength went out of her. Going down to one knee, she laid Noah on the concrete, supporting his head as she had her brother’s when he was an infant.

“Locked,” a voice said.

She looked up.

“I tried every door.”

The man was standing right over them. A kind of rain had begun to fall, black and oily. The man held the boy under the arms, and Skyler took his feet and they moved him under a portico out of the rain.

“Your phone,” the man said. “Is it working?”

“No.”

“Honey,” the man said. “About your boy.”

“He’s not mine.”

“Whoever’s he is. You’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

She didn’t answer.

“Honey.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said.

“Look at him.”

She looked at him. He was a boy, a few years older than her brother, though not much heavier. She wasn’t sure what else the man wanted her to see.

Skyler had been sixteen when her parents had Dorian. Her mother on the cusp of forty. Skyler knew they weren’t planning more family. It had been six years since the last child (her other brother); and a whole decade separated her from Clifford. The truth was, every single one of them had been an accident. Her father had told her, one time, that accidents could change your life for the best. Which is exactly how Skyler felt about Dorian. Back when she was sixteen, when it seemed she would soon lose her family forever, slip out of their reach and beyond their power as through a hole in the fabric of space — there he was: covered in blood and fluid and trying to express something with his tiny lungs while her mother came out of the violent trance of childbirth and her father smoothed her mother’s hair and Skyler guided the curved tangs of the scissors to the umbilical cord and cut the mooring.