Ember by Erika Nichols-Frazer

First, a whisper, chin stubble brushing cheek. You like how it feels to be wanted.

Quickly, the wildfires take the valley, swallowing it whole.

He didn’t tell you at first, but you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to know that he was anything but yours.

A fire from the west meets a fire from the east—explodes. Up and down the coastline, everything burns.

He never says her name. She is only his wife. Nothing else. You don’t know what you are.

It feels as though the drought has lasted your whole lifetime. You can barely remember days when you could run through the sprinkler, squealing, all afternoon until you were cooled off, no matter what day it was.

You meet during your lunch period. You park on an adjacent street, always in a different place. There is thrill in the precision of it.

The shape of a flame eating trees: The Eye of God.

The secret is hot in your belly.

You are evacuated from the only home you’ve ever lived in. You don’t know if you’ll see it again. Your mother gathers the good china and silver, which have been in the family for generations, as she likes to say, and fills a duffle bag with them. She pads it with wadded dinner napkins. She will keep her hands on the duffle bag at all times in the makeshift shelter in your high school gym.

Your mother told you recently, out of the blue, to guard your reputation, that it is the only real currency you have. You didn’t know what to say to this.

You bring only the pearl necklace your grandmother gave you for your Sweet Sixteenth last year—the one she wore at her wedding—the baby blanket you were brought home in, now threadbare and faded from pink to a light gray, and your journal. You never used his name in it. Not once.

He won’t leave his family for you. You know this.

He took his wife and daughter, who is only four years younger than you, to their house in the mountains. He hasn’t texted to make sure you’re alright. You decide that, even if he does, you won’t respond.

Your mouth tastes like ash, your eyes teary from the sting of it.

You’ve never woken up with his face close to your face, feeling his breath on your skin. These are the things you want but will not have.

The worst fire in over a century, the news says. It’s on everywhere. Homes like yours devastated, gone. Your neighbors’, where you went to Christmas and Fourth of July parties. Where living room couches and antique bedframes were there is now nothing.

When he rolls away, he kisses your eyelids, his lips barely brushing them like the wings of a moth.

………………..

Erika Nichols-Frazer has an MFA from the Bennington Seminars. She is the winner of Noir Nation's 2019 Golden Fedora prize. Her stories, essays, and poems can be found in HuffPost, Literary Orphans, OC87 Recovery Diaries, Please Do Not Remove: A Collection Celebrating Vermont Literature and Libraries,and elsewhere.

www.nicholsfrazer.com

Twitter: @enicfraze