\ burn

Whenever she cradles her eyes, we fold into ourselves, became the children from our past; not the memories of cross-country car rides, not the stories of summer camps by the lake, not the dreams of hiding from monsters in the den, but the adolescents simply waiting for the time to pass. I know who I am during these times, know why the future seems so unattainable when I am 12 years old. When we need to come into the house, vault its unfriendly steps, weather its barnwood creaks and moans, we whisper so as not to wake her, though in our adult state it is easier to do the job we are here to do, we cannot bring ourselves to ignore this gift.

She was awake much more often in the beginning, but in the past two days, she has slept increasingly longer hours into the morning, reaching midday, and napping as soon as the apex of the sun starts throwing our shadows back to the east, where we are from, some part of the south where the claustrophobia of the foliage now has us in wide-eyed astonishment, the openness of the prairie.

Today, her breathing is so shallow that the tips of her fingers are blue, the muscles that hold her jaw tight have given to gravity.

The house, full of dangers, lies threatened itself, in the path of a fire 50 years wide, and during the day we put up a barrier with rakes and shovels, and an old tractor with a scoop attached to its front end. We are alone in our defense, we refused to leave, as much as we were sentenced to it. We are tied to her and she is tied to this land.

It's so flat out here, she thinks, and I try to remember that you can still get lost within this candid wilderness, that it only seems barren of secrets because we stand on top of the earth, cannot see the craters and ravines. Cannot help but be fooled by the illusion of these grasses and tumbleweeds. You can drop into this ground and never be seen or heard from again, and burn just as easily among these flatlands as in the Smoky Mountains. Even easier. Two men died in '95 not so far from here, at the Point Fire, just on the other side of the border. They found them still in the cab of their brush truck, burned up in grass no higher than your waist, with a final vista of 200 miles in all directions, atop a flat, sleeping hill.