Kevin was unable to lie down on the gurney. My scorched sibling’s get it together willful stare triggered them back into the reality of their ungraspable job. Their reflexive gags verified the horror. A siren cry chaperoned by circling red lights soon pierced the picture windows. There were voices around me, but I could only concentrate on lips moving-words echoing into cavernous clamors. Mom called 911 about a boy burned and gave the address. A putrid smell penetrated the air and made me recoil as an unseen ghost girl. Pieces of his flesh began to flake off and swirl down the drain. Our neighbor assisted him to her bathroom, put him into the tub and splashed cool water on him. Coffee cups crashed to the floor as they jolted to swift-footed action. My brother’s plastic hazel-brown eyeglass frames had melted onto his face. Their minds couldn’t-couldn’t comprehend, or believe what they saw.
For a split second, my mom and the neighbor’s mother froze in horror. Kevin knocked on the neighbor’s screen door and, before entering, boyishly announced his injury without inflection. As my sibling’s charred body slowly rose from the ground, I ran inside the house before he could get there and stood behind Mom unsure of what would happen next.
Had it not been my brother, I would have bolted away. Spotting the emergency from a kitchen window, our sixteen-year-old next-door neighbor bolted across his yard and rolled Kevin to the ground, then walked back to his house, never looking back. Kevin’s mind didn’t register that his life was slipping away. When I saw my brother, his head, body and hands were on fire and I noticed something sliding off his body. The rescued pup raced across the backyard doing zany circles till somebody nabbed him by the collar. Both boys ran to safety, but realizing the other boy’s dog was tethered inside to keep from him running off in the night, my brother went back into the inferno. The woods behind our neighbor’s house turned bestial blue, orange and black. I imagine my brother heard a dull pop, like the sound of a gas grill firing when first turned on. A few sparks flared up but whimpered away lickety-split so he added more fuel. Finally the other boy picked up the lawn mower’s gallon gas can-a backup to ignite the fire if the Boy Scout way fizzled-and poured a small amount of fuel onto the wood. Together they gathered kindling from the moist ground and tried to light it. All that remained for the boys to do was build a campfire. Still I waited as they unpacked their knapsacks filled with marshmallows, hot dogs, candy bars and the grape Kool-Aid they drank from canteens as they unfolded their sleeping bags and fluffed their pillows. It was boys’ night, an adventure my brother and his friend had lobbied for all summer. But for his first overnight campout, I was shut out. The almost three year age gap between us was ignored as he invited me to all his school parties, I made my first communion ahead of time with him and one of his class photos included me. Make a ‘V’ with the strings, cross one over the other and pull. He was my playmate and mentor who gave me the confidence to ride my bicycle over bone-shaking gravel and taught me to tie my sneakers so I wouldn’t fail kindergarten. My brother Kevin and I, nearly identical small-boned redheads, were glued together. Perched on the hillside overlooking the campsite where my nine-year-old brother and his friend were setting up for their first sleep out on our neighbor’s property, I watched pegs driven into the ground to support a backyard lean-to and waited for a beckoning hand gesture to join the two Boy Scouts. You can purchase Issue 2 on the shop page. UK’s Dodo Ink will feature her work in an upcoming anthology.
Conza’s writing has appeared in Longreads, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI and elsewhere.
#Paws for trello offline full
We are excited to present in full our featured story from Issue 2: Aftermath, by Yvonne Conza.
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