Slow Burn

The day my brother nearly burns down the house, I am sitting on the living room floor.

Correction: It’s not a house but an apartment, my father’s first since the divorce.

I am playing with Lincoln Logs on the burnt-orange shag carpet, building and rebuilding a perfect house with a green roof.

Correction: I’m not playing; I’m killing time until we’re returned to our real home with our real toys and our real parent.

My father is taking a nap in the apartment’s only bedroom.

Correction: It’s not a nap but his usual stupor, a label for which we won’t have for years.

I see the fire out of the corner of my eye.

Correction: What I see first is the shadow puppet of a fire performing on the kitchen wall; mesmerized, I watch for the better part of a minute before investigating its cause.

When I crane my neck around the corner, I see my two-year-old brother waving a brown paper bag that he has dipped in the lit burner of the gas stove. Pretty, he exclaims. Pretty! Pretty!

Correction: He can’t pronounce pretty. He says pity.

I knock the burning bag from my brother’s hand and scream for our father, who bolts from the bedroom and douses the flames.

Correction: Our father doesn’t respond until I shake him awake; he extinguishes the fire with a pot of cold, two-day-old coffee. My brother’s exclamations soften to a whisper: Pity. Pity. Pity.

No correction necessary.

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books). Her work has appeared in The Best of Brevity, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Rattle, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona. www.erin-murphy.com