Cookstove

In a broken cookstove, a fire set with pine needles,set with curiosity and kitchen matches,three dead goldfish, slimed and flappy-flat,tossed by childish hands (that light-skinnedboy and his sister, rememba?) to cook.Dull scales smoked and seared black.Three small fish, swelling until, gut-bursting,they popped, she said. They erupted,and fire burst from the stove’s belly.The children? What did they do? They ran.Brother and sister, they ran, ran, ran.

We were just kids, she said. Didn’t knowno better. We wanted to cook fish.

Abandoned, the flames leapt up and also ran,sweeping from needle to needle to bracken,pine litter, pine bark, from root to trunk. Rising heat,a flash, a flood, a fury of fire over pine sweepsand pine limbs, over the husks of cicadaand globby seeps of pine tar.

Flames, goldfish bright, lashing loblollyand yellow pine, lashing the old blackjacks,reaching skyward. Trees exploding into canopies of fire.That smoke was pitch black, she said. Pitchblack and you could see it burning for miles.(Like the world ending, did she say that too?Like the whole world was gonna end.) And a man sees across the fields all he’s worked forset before destruction, all past and all future set before the flames.Black smoke, black-blooded smoke. Trees catching,going up, torches beside his fields (cotton, cane, melons)and good pastureland. Black fangs of smoke,black-venomed smoke. He coulda lost everything,she said. Coulda had nothing left.

But they came from all over, saw the smokeand came to fight, battling the flameswith shovels, shirts, axes, sopped rugs, buckets,brooms, beating the flame’s terror. They came, she said,

from all over. Black, white, half-white, half-black.O the parity of fire: take one place, take another.Got one way to make men equal, that’s what the flamessaid. They fought and fought those flames. Black,white, half-white, half-black.

And afterwards, he whipped his boy and girl,his errant flesh, whipped them until their faceswere shiny as goldfish, their hands fin-flappingtoward the blows, the belt’s ceaseless rise and fall,its flame and heat against their legs. He whipped them.Coulda lost everything, he said.

Took them days to put the fire out. Despair like ashand cinders, a soot that smeared their faces and smearedtheir hands. Days to beat the flames down.O the parity of fire, the equanimity of soot and soil.You couldn’t tell their greasy, black-sooted skin apart,less it was cut by sweat, seamed by tears, unless an eyelit by an old fuel refused to turn away, then you knew.