Firebird and The Phoenix

Shortlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, March 2020

Dirty scarlet sky. Burnt copper sun. Greedy orange flames, soaring black plumes–trees snapping, falling. Flung our cat and family photos in the car. Fled.

Next day. Pale ash on the ground like dead snow. Turned rubble over, searching for ourselves in lives already cremated. Firebird, nature’s thief, stole everything.

Parked a beat-up silver caravan where the house burned, the two of us and the scorched cat moved in. Cat hid when I struck matches to light my smokes, bandages around his paws. My wife went to the relief centre, brought back charity clothes. White rage bellowed out of me and I chucked them in the creek. Two months on, my wife’s pork chop arms were sticks and she left carrying an empty suitcase. Tears on my skin.

Neighbours came to my door; smoke stink in their clothes too. Woman with them I know from town, she lost the lot. Stories I recognise spilling in her eyes. Helen, is her name. Neighbours shoved me into the community hall, folks there filling on hot meals and cold beers. Different names but tears the same, folding around each other when they cried. We ate together most nights. Helen played a rosy guitar; voice like water trickling over river stones. She pushed a smile out of me.

Everything is before or after the fires. Time split. People split. Some couldn’t leave; others couldn’t stay. I’ve planted eucalypts back in the same spots, means I’ve survived. But Firebird could swoop again anytime. Life. It’s tissue paper.

I’m necking beer on the deck, new house proud on the old site. Helen is on the front steps strumming, strumming new rhythms she’s finding words for. Phoenix-like we’ve risen from ashes, but ghost flames still holler in my ears and I shake lighting the kindling at night.