Fragments of My Father Saved from the Fire

A short story

Today’s story was beta read by Papi Pavarotti and Trevor Cohen. Thank you both.

I mentioned here the occasion that birthed this story, a trip to the art museum where, while perusing sculpture, the title came to me. Only, for the first 24 hours, that title was Fragments of a Story Saved from the Fire. The details of the story having nothing to do with what I saw that day, but it gave me a title and everything grew from there.

At a little over 3800 words, this is the longest of my stories written since my return.

I’ve called these stories horror-adjacent, which is silly. Horror is many things and embraces any number of uncomfortable emotions.

Fragments of My Father Saved from the Fire

My father died at the proverbial stake, consumed by a non-proverbial fire. His home became his pyre. The ruined foundation resembled a grave marker, but in a cemetery, the grass would be trimmed. Flowers would be placed. Nothing awaited me but the solace of memories, and I stood at the end of the stoop, at the threshold of a door that no longer existed, and waited for something more.

Into that emptiness, I spoke his last known words, most certainly written for me:

My son, you are a composite of those who came before…

The shrill blast of the truck’s horn shook me. My truck. My father’s truck. Parked on the street, it had escaped the flames, becoming part of my inheritance. I glanced back to see my mother’s averted face, her eyes focused on the worn seats, unable to look upon the place we once called home and unwilling to look for peace in memories of my father. She wouldn’t have come if she’d known where I was going.

A minute, nothing more, I’d said. I never pass this way.

There’s no reason why you would.

She laid into the horn again. I didn’t move. Birds burst from tall patches of grass and filled the sky by the dozen. Dark in their groupings, they resembled demons fingerpainting with smoke the sigils of death. Mother’s voice cried out my name, attaching it to their sorcery. They trailed away, and I alone remained with my mother’s pleas.

She stopped when the neighbor’s screen door opened. Mrs. Winterbourne stepped out into that silence and beckoned for us to join her, a shawl of purple lace following every movement, flowing like a psychedelic after-image, her plump, perfect body illusory in its burst of color and grace.

“Y’all come see me a spell,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “I have something for you.”

Mother shrunk out of sight.

Mutely, I waved, transmuted to that teen-aged self that had come of age enjoying the widow Winterbourne as she enjoyed her garden. Half-naked, Mother had said, and I, prone to a most literal exegesis, had spent hours watching and casting mental chicken bones, foretelling which half Mrs. Winterbourne might remove. In the end, she never presented those mysterious places to the light, but I had become a man in the waiting. I felt that manhood waiting for her now.

She was my mother’s age.

Mother glared at me as if she knew, but she knew nothing but that she would die and this moment was murdering her. “We’re going,” she hissed. “We’re going right now.”

I approached the truck.

I’d been sixteen when I last saw Mrs. Winterbourne, and in the years since, that scrawny, awkward boy had become a man: muscular, rugged, and easy on the eyes, if the word of a woman still meant anything in this man’s world. A grin bent cockeyed across my grief. I couldn’t help it. With a little effort, I could seduce Mrs. Winterbourne. Not that I would. But I could, and that pleased me. It pleased all the parts of me. I had my father’s good looks.

“Right now,” Mother hissed, spitting each word through a snarl that bared what should have been her fangs but were a hedgerow-perfect set of teeth.

“Mother,” I said.

The hiss became a growl.

“Mother,” I said.

She’d left my father and I when I was fourteen, two days before Christmas, and came back for me on New Year’s. This was always the way. Thoughtful, eventually. Afterthoughtful. Mother first. Sammy second. Whenever she complained about my own supposed selfishness, I confessed not to copying her greatest skill but to perfecting it.

“We’re going to say hello,” I said.

“You know what they must think of me?”

“I know what Mrs. Winterbourne will think of you if you don’t get out of that truck.”

Pouting, she opened the door. Dainty white shoes touched the ground. She looked at me from under lashes, hesitant and hoping for reprieve. I started across the yard. She followed. Mother was a slender socialite with little use for social niceties. She wore her little white dress high and tight, and in the right company, it never mattered what she said, not until the next morning, and by then she was ready to move on. Fuck the world, she’d always said, and the world obliged.

From the road, the house resembled many in town, a blend of Cape Cod and Craftsman with dormers peering fore and aft above tapered columns. Lawn occupied little of the yard, but Mrs. Winterbourne kept the various islands and pebble paths well maintained, and if the herb garden grew a bit wild and eccentric, it was secluded in the back. Few saw. None complained. As we drew near the porch, I heard music drifting through the screen door and the sound of footsteps as Mrs. Winterbourne prepared. Behind me, mother grunted and clutched my shirt to keep her balance. The grunt became a whine, the mewling of a shamed dog, but not for anything she had done. No, Mother’s shame was having been my father’s wife. After the fire, after the news, people assumed we’d known. We had to know. How could we not?

The bastard was a witch.

“What can we possibly say?” Mother said. “She’ll think we have answers. We don’t have answers. I don’t even understand the question.”

We didn’t need answers. We’d come to visit, to revel in old times and share our mutual confusion and amazement over relics found among the ashes. Our heads would shake at the scandals linked to my father by gossip and innuendo, like unsolved cases of animal sacrifice in the woods. No one had ever heard of these cases before, but we knew about them now. We’d share our grief and wonder, and we’d leave. Let the world observe our ignorance and wash us clean.

I held Mother’s hand, and we climbed the stairs. I knocked, Mrs. Winterbourne beckoned us inside, and Mother crossed the threshold. An involuntary gasp escaped her lips. I wondered how many had seen inside the house with its crystals and candles and whether they’d understood, before the fire, before the news. Mother tried to take a step back. I pushed her forward and closed the door behind us.

Mrs. Winterbourne’s house was everything the news had painted my father’s to be. Bundles of dried herbs hung above every window and door. Bone and feather crossed each other above the fireplace, held together by a dash of purple ribbon, seemingly as harmless as my grandmother’s potpourri.

Mrs. Winterbourne placed a silver tea set on a doily’d table, her smile wide and easy. “Make yourself at home. I honestly swear; it’s been a month of Sundays.”

Mother muttered, “Longer.”

She meant not long enough, and Mrs. Winterbourne certainly heard it that way.

“If I’d my druthers,” said Mrs. Winterbourne, “this moment would’ve come long ago, but come it has. Come it has.”

A raven hopped in from the kitchen and flew to its perch by the window. It roosted there, watching, appearing to think, seeming to judge. I thought of things to say, but said none of them. Mrs. Winterbourne poured the tea, not proper sweet tea but the English kind, with twigs swirling like detritus from a storm. It seemed fitting, considering our surroundings, and we each took the proffered cups.

“Samuel,” she said, “I want to tell you about your father.”

I took a sip of tea, a reflexive desire for normality, and stared blankly into the truth.

“Does this mean you’re a witch?” The word tasted funny on my tongue. Not the word. Not as a word. What tasted funny wasn’t the role but Mrs. Winterbourne in it. She was the mother-next-door, the one who shaped my taste in women. One taste threatened to sour another.

I had a girl waiting for me at home, and to see Mrs. Winterbourne was to see Emma’s future. If Winterbourne was a witch, it’d ruin me. The big brunette could no longer be my type, and what else was there? The slender socialite? Heaven and hell forbid.

“She’s not a witch,” Mother said.

I knew she wanted to add there’s no such thing, but there were such things. We knew that now. I waited for Mrs. Winterbourne to pounce, to pronounce the word Wiccan and denounce our denials and become judge and jury in her reverse witch trial. Instead, she ignored my mother, and in addressing me, ignored me as well, pushing forward on the path planned. I knew then she didn’t speak out of any love for Mother or me. She’d summoned us out of loyalty to my father.

“I loved him very much,” she said.

The cuckoo marked the hour’s passing.

“And he loved you,” she said.

I tried to make a crone of her beauty and failed. Grief and groin fought, grasping for the greater footing in this new world, but I remained beguiled by Mrs. Winterbourne, bewitching as ever.

“He wanted to tell you about us, but it never felt right,” she said.

Well won, old man. Well won. Even in death mastering and wrecking me.

“I learned to stay away when you were visiting. That was your time.”

She learned. She’d stayed away because she learned better than to be around when I came home. I understood that now, remembering the last time I’d seen her. My parents had been fighting again. All Mother had to do was drop me off for the weekend, but she was inside, yelling, threatening to take me home, to never let him see me again. I ran out back, and Mrs. Winterbourne was in her garden. Despite the fence between us, she knew I was there.

That you, Samuel? Come sit with me a spell.

At sixteen, I held no nostalgia for those days at my window, watching, only shame covered in a feigned forgetfulness. No desire drove me to her, only a greater need to get away. It was cold out, one of those early days of Autumn, but she didn’t invite me inside. We sat on the patio as a fire burned.

Never gets any better, does it? she said.

I didn’t answer, and it was good that anger held shut my mouth. I’d have told her to go to hell. She was right, though. They couldn’t be in the same room together. Couldn’t stay apart.

Nine years later, Mother put down her empty tea cup. “How long were you two seeing each other?”

“It was after you left,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “About seventeen months after.”

“You recruited him?” Mother said. “Like a Jehovah’s Witness?”

Mrs. Winterbourne leveled all her attention on me. “Your father made that decision on his own. He saw my peace and wanted it for himself.”

I glanced at Mother, hearing the crude remark I knew she wanted to make: all the neighbors saw your piece. She didn’t say it though. With the burden of a great and painful weight, she didn’t say it, and the silence threatened to give her an aneurysm. I saw it in the twitching of her eye.

“Makes no matter,” Mother said. “You should tell the neighbors, though. Get them off our backs.”

“They’ve spoken to you?” Mrs Winterbourne said.

“No.”

“You’ll speak to them.”

“No.”

“In your years away,” Mrs. Winterbourne said, “perhaps your fire has cooled.”

In awkward silence, Mother stared at her tea.

“Forgive the expression,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Awkward or not, the point had merit. Time away from my father had done Mother good, mended some wounded aspect of her soul, and now I knew how that came to be, beginning with that cold afternoon on Mrs. Winterbourne’s patio.

She’d looked into my twitching eye, and with the whispered tone of a Sunday’s sermon highlight-reel, spoke truths I knew but never wanted to hear.

Your mother can’t be honest with herself, neither about what she wants nor who she is. Do you know what that does to a person?

No.

The light of reason stops guiding your actions, she said and tapped me on the chest. That’s when choice springs from here, from those canyons of your heart you can neither hear nor see. It’s where all the truth resides that your mind can’t handle.

So? I said, that and nothing more. It seemed enough. It seemed like nothing I said could ever be enough.

We’ll make your mother a gift, Mrs. Winterbourne said. But it would be best if she didn’t know it came from me.

I nodded and scooted a little closer to the fire. Mrs. Winterbourne excused herself, and when she returned from the kitchen, she carried a tiny burlap sack with a loose purple ribbon sewn into its neck. She picked a few herbs from the garden, added them to the sack, cinched it tight, and secured it with a bow.

Drop this inside your mother’s purse, she said. It’ll help calm her nerves.

The gift worked. My parents fought over the phone, but after that, whenever Mother drove to the house, she never went inside.

Now, I understood why.

Mrs. Winterbourne encouraged us to finish our tea. In unison, Mother and I raised our cups.

“Your father wanted to help you,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “He was making you a present when he died. I retrieved what I could and rebuilt the rest. It’s ready for you, if you’re interested.”

“Is that what killed him?” I imagined dark sorcery over a burning pentagram.

“He smoked in bed. I’d warned him more times than I can count, but it didn’t do any good.”

I would have preferred sorcery.

“You weren’t with him?” Mother said.

“We were dating, not living together.”

“I’m interested,” I said.

Mother looked at me.

“It’s from Dad,” I said.

Mrs. Winterbourne stood, but I held out my hand to stop her.

“Why weren’t you living together?” I said. “Why didn’t you marry?”

Mrs. Winterbourne flashed sadness in the shape of a smile and gathered our empty cups. “Come with me. You’ll understand.”

The room felt suddenly crowded. The raven tilted its head with a personality I thought I recognized, and for a moment I thought it was my father, but it wasn’t my father.

Mrs. Winterbourne led us into the kitchen.

When I was twenty-three I’d noticed something odd about my father’s home. Beneath the obvious strangeness of Mrs. Winterbourne’s house, I saw it here, too. No, that’s not fair. It’s not true. Emma noticed it first, and I noticed it after she’d pointed it out.

I’d never brought many girls home, but I’d thought Emma was the one, the girl to keep until her looks gave out. I’d still thought so until just that moment, until I learned my father had fucked Mrs. Winterbourne, which was too much like him fucking my girl, and that wasn’t something I knew how to handle.

Mr. Fisher, Emma had said, you have the most extraordinary kitchen.

Call me Ishy, Father said.

Ishy. Emma grinned bigger than I’d ever seen, the first instance of Father provoking my jealousy, something I should have taken as an omen.

Emma pointed to the copper-finished, Bertazzoni proofing oven, and Father explained the delicate needs of yeast. She gushed over the high-end dehydrator, and he lectured on extractions and preservation. I’d never given any thought to the changes in my father’s kitchen. Lonely men liked lonely things. Emma saw something miraculous and wild.

I’m glad to see you take an interest, Father said. Sammy’s always been a little lost in the kitchen.

Most men are, she said.

Once upon a time. These days, it’s a pretense.

He’d said it in good humor, but the dig angered me. Real men didn’t care about kitchens and neither would he, if he’d been able to keep my mother, but now I understood the source of his interest. He’d copied every aspect from Mrs. Winterbourne’s kitchen, lacking only the overtly pagan aesthetic. Maybe he imitated that, too, on days I didn’t visit.

“The wrongs of one life inhibit the next,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Mother rolled her eyes.

“Your father couldn’t begin a new marriage until he’d settled the sins of the old,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Mother’s eyes stopped rolling.

“And then came the cancer,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

We ceased to breathe, and I remembered how thin he’d been the last time we were together. He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. Mostly, I bitched about wanting to go out, but he was tired. I told him he was too young to be this old.

Tell me about Emma, he’d said.

I stared out the back window as if something wonderful might spring up from the grass and deliver me.

We’ve got a few years left in us.

Sammy.

No more lectures, I said.

She deserves better.

She’s free to do as she pleases. So am I.

He sat in the gloom, away from the light that streamed through the windows, and faced a dark television. I saw nothing more to his life than that, a dog lingering for crumbs when life’s meal was gone.

Life’s short, he said. Fill it with something good.

Good’s all there is.

Pleasure and good aren’t the same thing.

At least, that’s what I think he meant to say. His voice trailed off. I might have asked then if there was something wrong, but the boredom had grown thick and oppressive. The whole world beckoned, and he’d trapped me in that stuffy house, a prisoner to his early old age. I told him I had to go and didn’t wait for an answer.

I could have done so much more.

Mrs. Winterbourn set a bowl on the kitchen island. “That’s when he began work on this.”

I recognized it from the paper, or one very much like it. The news had made a fuss about a ceremonial dagger and melted glass fused with a tiny bird carcass, but none of it would have meant much if they hadn’t found what they called an incantation bowl, the words of its spell carved along the interior, spiraling from rim to well.

“I see the recognition in your eyes,” she said. “You know the bowl. You’ve read the transcript of its spell.”

I had. The entire town had.

With a glass stirring rod, Mrs. Winterbourne scraped the twigs from my cup into the bowl.

“As part of your father’s gift, you’ll need to recite it now.” From a cabinet, she pulled a glass orb with the remains of a cardinal trapped inside, as if resting.

“Dear God,” Mother muttered.

“I didn’t kill the bird.” Mrs. Winterbourne placed the orb inside the bowl, a perfect fit. “Do you remember the words of the spell?”

I shook my head, every movement a lie.

From the refrigerator, Mrs. Winterbourne removed an amber glass bottle and poured a black-red liquid that covered the orb and pooled along the rim.

“Dragon’s blood,” she said. “Tree resin mixed with alcohol. When the alcohol dries, it leaves a hard, red finish, sealing together the orb and bowl. You have until then to speak your father’s spell.”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“I believe you do.”

Mother grabbed my arm. “I don’t trust her. Not a word of it. Not about your father. Not about him having cancer. Not about that bird.”

“I didn’t kill the bird,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “Neither did Ishy when he made his. We wait. It’s part of the ritual. We wait until we find one felled naturally.”

“We know what you really do,” Mother said. “Everybody knows.”

“Everybody? You mean those people who judge you by what they’ve read? Are they the everybody who knows?”

Mother didn’t answer.

“It’s the way of the world to blame the powerless. If a child goes missing or a critter dies, blame those who can’t defend themselves. Anything done that needs hiding, blame it on the elderly; blame it on the woman; blame it on the witch. That’s a memory born into every girl’s blood.”

Mother’s voice softened. “I still don’t trust you.”

“Those old ways keep a man from facing the culprit at home.” Mrs. Winterbourne looked at me. “You’re a master of those old ways, aren’t you, Samuel? A vein of cruelty runs through your ore, but it can be made gold. You’ll have to choose, but make it quick. Alcohol don’t take long to dry.”

She hadn’t explained my father’s gift, but from the words of the spell, I understood well enough. Everyone should have but hadn’t. That was clear from the rage. The town had welcomed his message about family as if it were the end of everything good and godly.

My son, you are a composite of those who came before, a present that retains the past, a vessel that holds the blood once spilled, now emptied for blood’s trespass.

#

The journey back felt strange, and once, I lost my way. Mother complained and didn’t stop complaining until I parked outside her house, and then she didn’t speak and didn’t move. She breathed and shuddered with the effort of breathing.

“We shouldn’t have gone back,” she said when I refused to fill the silence. “I don’t belong there.”

“I know.”

She managed a smile and patted my leg. “You gonna be okay?”

I shrugged, which was the most honest answer I could manage, and she climbed out of the truck and shut her front door, and I was alone. Only, I didn’t feel alone. I felt like I’d been gone, not for a few hours but gone far away for very long.

My apartment had a keypad. I knocked. Emma let me in.

I confessed to a forgotten code, but in truth the whole system caught me by surprise, as if my own home were something distant and crudely remembered, like fragments from a dream. The more I fought to center myself, the more I felt like a wrong that couldn’t be made right.

I told Emma she deserved something more and left, taking little with me. None of it belonged to me. I belonged to none of it. Except the truck. I took the truck, and the road passed beneath me without purpose or direction. My phone rang. The screen read Emma. I didn’t answer.

Mrs. Winterbourne’s house stood silhouetted against the awakening day. A murmuration of starlings rose into the dawn, painting sigils of life, and I wept. When the sky again hung empty and blue, I dried my eyes and left the truck, and Mrs. Winterbourne opened her door like she’d been waiting all this time, my angel at the threshold.

“You’re home now,” she said and held me and cried.

Some part of me thought this strange, too, but such a thought was built on lies. For weeks, I’d sat with the spell, those words, and their meaning. Given my proclivity for a literal exegesis, I knew. I had to have known. How could I not?

— Thaddeus Thomas