I
You stand on some paltry attempt at a hill.
The area below is burning with eye-scorching intensity. The barn is barely visible through the sea of smoke and fire eating it away; the windows of the adjacent farmhouse are beginning to blacken. The station wagon in the driveway is buckled, leaning on burst tyres.
You search the merge and divide of smoke and shadow for a masked figure, encased in flames, staggering towards you. Nothing. Just the red and black of purification. Punching through the rooftop; spreading out, sticky-fingered, across the lightening sky. It is coming to morning, but not quite yet, not quite.
Behind you, flashing over the grass and the debris, are the blue-red lights of police cars. You do not take your eyes from the barn. The roof splinters, collapses. They gently lower you into a waiting ambulance. You see nothing.
II
Next: relief. You have survived. Everything from here on out is improvement, no? You move back in with your parents, if they are still around. If needed, you reconcile (easy: the onus is on them; how could they hold a grudge after this?).
You tell your story: to uniformed cops and jacketed detectives who return, again and again, with more follow-up questions. The fine details are lost in the retelling. You stick to the basics, the skeleton of the story. It becomes stale. You traipse through well-worn lines. You stay away from the phone. After all, everyone you want to hear from is dead.
Your parents are the absolute epitome of understanding. They want you to stay home, recuperate, recover. They don’t ask you about it. Maybe for your sake, maybe for theirs. They bring you meals and gently pat your shoulder. They turn journalists from the door, chase away bedroom-peeping photographers. Your father (you never thought him capable of it) berates the gathering crowd, spreading his arms from the front doorway like some mad, sweating prophet. The journalists don’t disappear, merely scatter, seeming to you like black feathers falling from a dying bird.
Everyone is just so good.
III
And then reality sets in. You notice, after nearly a year of festering in a bedroom with blue tack-studded walls (you took down the posters long ago but could never quite peel away that stubborn putty), how the waters of the parental fountainhead are running dry. What’s left leaves a bitter aftertaste.
They drop hints. They are afraid. Afraid that, on one hand, you are paralysed, unable to move forward, while also fearing you are regressing, in your childhood bedroom, surrounded by the trinkets and unfinished collections of your youth. You have to live, not merely exist. What does that entail, then? In short, and in this order: a job, a place of your own, a partner.
IV
“It just feels like, like there’s no life afterwards for me. I look online, people are saying I did it. On the street, people recognise me, they turn with this little flicker of surprise, like they’ve seen a celebrity they thought was dead. I go for job interviews, I get this look of recognition. It means the interview is over. They can’t hire me, it’s too fraught with possibility. They ask perfunctory questions and don’t listen to the answers. Anywhere I go, this spotlight is on me. And there’s no escape from it.”
“That’s terrible. I’m afraid our time is up.”
V
You get a job. Maybe something you always wanted to do (perhaps your experience has given you a fresh perspective on life; don’t worry, it will pass), maybe something menial and soul-destroying. It doesn’t matter. You go in every day, work your hours, keep your head down, leave quickly.
Then, you think: I am changed. And you hate it. You want the past back, you want your old self. You want to leave this body, bearing scars (the back of your left calf burnmarked from fleeing the flame, fleeing a hand bursting through the strawheap), and step into some past iteration of yourself. You used to be fun, had a degree of wit, had a special talent for making people feel relaxed around you. Now you keep them at a distance. Try not to engage much. Speak in monosyllables. Not rude. Never. For better or worse, your upbringing won’t allow it. But distant, always.
They would want to know. They would gain your confidence somehow. Oh, you don’t blame them, how can you? It is, for them, like watching car crashes on TV. They forget, in that moment when sturdy metal crumples, glass splinters, leather twists, the whole structure flips in midair, that there are human beings in there.
VI
You’re living in the city now (what city? doesn’t matter) and those nights are long, especially in the winter. Cold. Dark. You’re in an apartment. It’s sparsely furnished, you don’t foresee living here for long. There are creaks. Footsteps in the hall. Slowing? Stopping?
No. Fumbling for keys. You hear the whisper of pocket-rummages, the clack of metal-on-metal. A door opening, closing. There are moments (when you are startled from near-sleep, that drowsing purgatory, feet in different worlds) when you hear these noises, or the muffled arguing from above, or the crackle of music below, and you hate the people around you. You think, why can’t they just stay silent? And then the irrational thought goes away. You settle back, try to smile wryly at being frightened (it worked as a child, didn’t it? warding off the monsters with mirth) and, after twenty minutes of chasing sleep and catching only air, you realise your shoulders are tensed up, rigid, your skeleton replaced with concrete.
You keep the TV on. Languish beneath the aquarium-blue light. You’ve developed this quasi-insomnia at the perfect time in human history. There is an endless supply of things to watch. Funny things, romantic things, pointless things. You try to force yourself through scary things, seeing it as some kind of exposure therapy. You start off OK, the pathetic fake-out jumpscares even making you laugh (a little). The dark figure moving around in the background? Half-glimpsed in shadow, backlit by the moon streaming through a window? That’s― that’s fine.
It’s the eternity of mundanity that gets you. Short and unimportant camera shots that linger, that strike scalpel-sharp and deep: the tyres of the station wagon crunching gravel, the endless cornfields, the couple holding hands as they mount the porch steps to the farmhouse.
You hear lines you’re sure you’ve heard before. See things you’ve definitely seen, even if only in a nightmare. Soon, you’re gripping the armrest white-knuckled, afraid to reach for the remote on the coffee table lest a gloved hand shoot up from the floor and grip your wrist.
VII
Against your therapist’s advice, you drink. After all, you’re in the city. There’s nothing else to do. During the daytime, you’re fine (that’s the pills); at night, the world becomes smudged. That jumper, thrown over the back of the chair? That water bottle lying on the floor? That axe in the corner? That figure behind the door?
You try clubs first (a naïve attempt to reclaim your lost youth?). Too lonely; you drown in music, in a conveyor belt of faces that flit by too quickly to see.
You sit in bars. Once, you would have tried to look like you were waiting for someone. Go through the motions: mess with your phone, pretend to text, occasionally sigh and look impatiently towards the door. Not anymore. You order a drink, take a seat, sit as long as you can. The place closes. Chairs are upended on tables while the staff sweep the floor. You lift your feet and let them drag out the day-old spilt peanuts and broken glass.
There are men, picked up between (and as easily as) cigarettes. You never go back to theirs. They’re more than happy to go back to yours. You sit up with them, finish that bottle of wine chilling in the fridge.
You never do anything with these men. They sleep on the couch. Once or twice, you awaken to find them sneaking into your bedroom. One good thing that came from all this: you have no problem making them leave.
VIII
You find a new job or you rise up the ranks of the one you have. You can afford a better therapist now, afford more pills, but the time isn’t there. How are you expected to wake up, get to work, stay late, have dinner, engage in one of the hobbies you’ve picked up to occupy your mind, and squeeze hour-long chats into this? You leave it. You tell yourself: I’ll go back, I just need time.
You are older. You’ve toyed with a few ideas (a book? once, someone wanted movie rights; you doubt they’re still interested), but they don’t seem right. You can see yourself on the glossy front page of some supermarket checkout rag. Too soon, that kind of thing. Expert opinions from people who graduated from stalking front doors and climbing a storey of latticework. Needless to say, you don’t do it. Maybe prostituting the story would be good for you? Cathartic? Maybe not. We’ll never know.
IX
It has begun, the forgetting. Not everything (bits you can’t forget: the original scour of metal scraping over wood, the watermelon squish, frantic breathing, the needle-on-vinyl-crackle of flame, fingers in leather gloves curling with a creak around your throat), but some things.
Scream-twisted mouths become indistinguishable from each other. The lips are all glossy and unchapped; the teeth are devoid of imperfections, rows of tiny, gleaming, white-marble headstones. A mole disappears, a laugh is lost, freckles smooth into skin.
X
So, here we are. At the end, finally. You’re alive somewhere. Not in the city (not that city, anyway). Do you move to the countryside? Perhaps. You say you’ll try it for a while. Peace. Solitude. The silence might be too much, or just the thing you need.
You’re married. A guy or girl who is kind, doesn’t flinch at the burn mark (or, at least, only shudders inwardly). Maybe they love you. Maybe not. You’re both at that age, after all, two drowning people using the other to stay afloat. Do you love them? Are they merely there? A pair of shoes that are ugly, not fit for your purposes, but reliable, comfortable?
Are you in love?
Who knows. I certainly don’t. Only you can tell us, but you remain silent. Sitting in a chair on a warm Sunday afternoon. The clock marks each second with a bomb burst. A shadow (the lamp? the vase?) lengthens over the floor, and you resist the urge to turn around.
You sit there and think about a car full of young people driving out to the country, a station wagon rattling, laughter filling the air, the tyres crunching gravel, a radio playing loud, a warm fist holding your hand.
John Higgins is an Irish writer. His work has been featured in Always Crashing, Misery Tourism, and more. He has been shortlisted for the Mairtin Crawford Short Story Award and the Scribble Short Fiction Prize.