She is driving a stretch of road named only by a number, the faded grey asphalt nearly buried on both sides by pin oaks and scrub pines. They are the trees of her childhood, the trees that enclose her parents’ crumbling dogtrot on three sides, marking the perimeter of the property. Less than an hour ago, she left her parents on that property, in that house in No Place Special, Louisiana, to go back to the bright, polished city where she lives in a brand new condo, where the trees don’t have names, are simply aesthetically pleasing with pruned branches and leaves that never release thick yellow pollen onto the trim rows of mid-sized sedans that wait out front for their owners.

            Her parents are older than she ever imagined they would get. Her mother has given up coloring her hair and now sports a short, silver hairstyle that makes her still brown eyebrows look alien above her deep-set hazel eyes. Her father still drinks a single highball with dinner, but now it is mostly club soda. “The Scotch gives him awful indigestion,” her mother confessed at the dinner table, certain from the clinking of ice at their old-fashioned wet bar a room away that her father was too far to hear. “He just can’t stomach it like he used to.” 

            Their ageing irritates her. Not because they’ve entered their fifties, but because they aren’t doing anything about it. Her boss is fifty-five, one year older than her mother, but she keeps her hair tinted strawberry blond, its golden highlights framing her surgically taut cheekbones and making them pop with the help of rose-colored blush. Her boss’s husband brought bottles of wine for everyone in the office at Christmas, a Spanish Riesling with a name she can’t pronounce. It tasted bright and floral, like the sweet nectar of the honeysuckle she remembers sucking from silk-soft blossoms in her front yard as a child. Her boss and her boss’s husband have become more real to her now than those honeysuckle, that dogtrot, or even her parents as she enters the second quarter of her life, and as dusk stretches the shadows of trees long across the road before her. This thought makes her both sad and anxious to get back to streetlamps and buildings and what she has come to think of as her real life.

            A half hour earlier, when she stopped for gas at the single service station in No Place Special, she remembered smoking cigarettes out front as a teenager. She remembered the way she stood as she did it: hip cocked, Virginia Slim clenched between her thumb and pointer finger, the way she’d seen people in movies smoke marijuana, the nonchalant exhale that she hoped looked as bored as an eye roll. She’d worn five-inch platform heels and dreamed of moving to New York and becoming a model while her girlfriends dreamed of marrying No Place Special’s star quarterback and having twin boys named Brock and Tanner.     

            She now believes that both dreams were equally ridiculous. Her life isn’t as glamorous as she’d planned on it being. A Charlie Parker CD plays in her car, the saxophone blares, slow and mournful then as bright and chirping as a mockingbird in the still of dawn, and she doesn’t really get it, but believes that she will. Her Pottery-Barn perfect condo is decorated shades of autumnwood and taupe with a playful splash of turquoise or seafoam in each room, and she loves it. Except sometimes, right when she comes in from work, it looks as officious as a hotel suite, and she panics for just a second, asks herself, “Did I come in the right one?” These times, she resists the urge to go outside and check the number above the door, assures herself that this is her home.

            On the CD player, Bird’s solo reaches its crescendo. The wild blare is shrill and high and deeply personal; she reaches to turn the volume down.

            As she pumped gas, two boys in a blue pickup with huge, mud-covered wheels stopped beside her. The driver’s side window slid down and a boy with a blond buzz cut wearing a white undershirt leaned out.

            “Ma’am,” he’d said. She’d glanced in his direction without turning her head. “We just wanted to tell you how pretty you are,” he’d said, smiling wide enough to flash a perfect row of broad white teeth. The boy beside him smiled too, his eyes obscured by a New Orleans Saints cap. They were young, barely out of high school, and the kind of heartbreaking country-boy handsome that fades as quickly as spring to summer when they take jobs in the oil field or at the timber company and life becomes too physical for such simple beauty.    

            Her first reaction was city girl fear. She couldn’t remember the last time a stranger spoke to her, much less offered a compliment. Vague thoughts of stolen cars,  missing credit cards, rapes played across some fight or flight part of her consciousness; she looked down to her hand, gripping the gas nozzle so tightly veins popped. She heard the boy say, “We just wanted to let you know, ma’am,” before the roar of the straight-piped truck carried them both away.

            Here alone with Charlie Parker and late afternoon giving itself over to twilight, she knows that those boys hadn’t meant any harm. They were good boys, the kind of boys she’d flirted with on the lawn of First Baptist at Vacation Bible School picnics as they ate homemade ham and cheese sandwiches prepared by Christian women. The boys she’d fantasized about French kissing behind the gym after Valentine’s dances before she’d discovered Virginia Slims and understood that her hometown was no place special.  

            She smiles at the thought of those two boys. Five years ago, she would have thought them racist redneck misogynists, but something about where she is now, between her hometown and the interstate, makes her happy that those boys, like the boys from her adolescence whose last names she’s forgotten and whose mothers she avoids in the aisles of No Place Special’s Brookshire Brothers’ Grocery on her infrequent visits home, still exist in their growling pickups, cruising the backroads with a six pack of something domestic, unafraid to offer a stranger an opinion.

            The road rises before her and she crests the closest thing Louisiana has to a hill; in the wisp of valley below, she can see what looks to be grey-blue fog hovering above scraggly half-grown saplings and mangy patches of dandelions. She tries to recall if she’s ever seen fog in Louisiana before and comes up at a loss. She is bewildered as she descends the hill and watches the ghost clouds swirl across the road before her.

            Then the smell hits; the smell she can only identify as fire. Heavy, and scorched, and dangerously good. She remembers this as the smell of bonfires, trash fires, brush fires, and tire fires that filled her youth with the consistency of yesterday. She remembers how the smell clung to her hair and would waft out, filling her bedroom as she brushed one hundred strokes before bed at night.

            The road rises again, and she can see the points of orange flames bursting from the tree line ahead of her. She wonders if she should call someone, if this is a genuine forest fire like Smokey the Bear used to warn them about in elementary school. She thinks this might finally be her time to prevent it and is a little disappointed when she comes to a break in the trees to find the jagged, tilled furrows that indicate a controlled burn.

            But her disappointment is replaced by wonder when she takes in the field before her, its crab grass and weeds and waist-high saplings ablaze in the dusk. The flames are ordered, making near-perfect lines between rows of newly-turned, red-brown soil. The fingers of the flames consume the foliage, still clinging to green even as their bases are blistered black. It fills her with a safe terror she hasn’t felt since childhood, when she’d lain in bed certain that there was not a monster in the closet but still scaring herself with the image of long, yellowed clawed fingers. She shivers as the CD screeches a note that fits the dance of the flames perfectly and thinks, There’s beauty in this.

            Above the orange-red burn, black tendrils spiral up and outward, a smoke signal to the universe, and as she drives on, she sees the man controlling the burn. He is little compared to the fire he’s started, dressed in a straw cowboy hat and a pair of Carhart overalls, the kind her grandfather wore when he changed the oil in his Ford. He leans against his plow and watches, one hand over his brow to shield his eyes like a military salute. The ditch he’s dug to keep the fire from breaking free keeps him safe, but the flames turn both him and his plow the angry, brilliant color of live oaks ready to shed their leaves.

            In her mind, above Bird Parker, another song plays for a second.

  His faithful foll’wer I would be,

  For by His hand He leadeth me.

           They are words she knows as instinctually as she knows her middle name. The benediction from Sunday mornings, the way she knew church was almost over, that she was about to be released from the wooden benches and the red-faced preacher out into a bright Sunday afternoon full of nothing in particular. It always sounded awful on the tuneless church piano in the warbling falsettos of their ten-person choir, but when she was little, it was beautiful. It meant she was almost free. 

She leaves the man and his fire in the rearview, yet the car holds that blackened, smolderingly alive smell, and for a while, she believes in God with the easy acceptance of childhood until the fast food chains and halogen lights point her toward the interstate. Then she forgets and only thinks of home.

	About the Author: Emily Alford is a Louisiana native and a recent graduate of the McNeese State University MFA program. This is her second story to appear on Fiction Weekly; you can read the first, "Liquidation," by following this link: Liquidation

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