Ashes to Ashes
By Christine Powers
Listen to a reading of Ashes to Ashes by Christine:
Guilt tackles me the day after our house burns down.
This is not a written confession, don’t worry.
When my father comes into the room to tell me, in a voice sharp and harsh with fear, that there’s smoke coming from the bar down the block, I don’t think much of it.
There are only three buildings on our block, and they all share a wall with their neighbor.
Even with that knowledge, I never consider the possibility that the fire department will not be able to contain the blaze.
This is what I take with me into the February night: my cellphone, my wallet, my snow boots, one hat, one bra, one pair of underwear, and my winter coat.
I never re-enter my home.
Three separate insurance investigators pick their way through the collapsed, abandoned remains of my family’s home and our quilt shop, the Chinese restaurant next door, and the Vault—the bar I had been working at for six months, trying to save up enough to escape the orbit of our tiny South Dakotan town—and all three put the same thing on their forms.
An accident. An electrical fire. No human casualties. Millions in damages.
Now my father, having practiced insurance law for nearly forty years, went out of his way to make sure our home was well-protected, so when the insurance check hits, we know we have nothing to worry about. We can replace everything. There’s no reason to be sad.
My family doesn’t grieve, in general. Within a day or two the jokes start. The shell of the house becomes “The Hole”, a black pit from which there is no return, and we take turns asking “where’s the TV?” or “where’s my toothbrush?” in order to laugh at the response and numb our pain. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for, the answer is the same:
“It’s in The Hole.”
I keep coming back to what I took with me. My cellphone. My wallet. The clothes on my back.
The rest of it I abandoned. I didn’t even think about it. My brother Tom was out of the house that night. He didn’t get back until it was halfway over. I knew he wasn’t there. I knew he had things he’d want to save. I didn’t even think about it.
The first guitar he ever made cracked apart in his hands when he dug it out of the ruins of the house.
Every quilt my mother stitched together with love and care, thousands of hours of labor turned to ashes in her hands.
My father’s entire collection of musical albums, carefully curated over a lifetime of listening and re-listening—out of print albums, first pressings, foreign exclusives—cracked and shattered by heat and falling beams.
A decade of my sketchbooks and journals warped and bloated with water and soot, left to rot under the wreckage of my home and eventually scraped away by a bulldozer, carted off to the landfill and leaving an empty lot in the middle of downtown.
The guilt comes in waves. There was so much we could have saved. It took hours for the fire to reach our home, hours for the smoke to fill our rooms, and during all that time, right up until I saw the first flame catch on the first bolt of fabric, glowing white hot behind the glass of our family’s store, I assumed that I’d be sleeping in my bed that night, with the quilt my mother made for me to celebrate my college graduation and my childhood teddy bear tucked in my arms.
There’d been so much time.
Albums of childhood photos, the record of me and my siblings growing up, the home videos of our first steps, our first birthdays, our first Christmases; Tom’s tools, Jesse’s windchimes, Sam’s books; my computer with all of my digital art, my flash drive with the first novel I ever wrote, the baby blanket my grandma made for me.
There’d been no time at all.
Later I learn that the only reason we were warned was because the owner of the bar remembered we lived above our store. There is a world where my family dies in our sleep, suffocated by carbon monoxide, buried together in a tomb filled with the trappings of our lives, and two of my brothers survive by sheer virtue of not being there.
There is a world where we are abandoned.
I try not to think about that.
It takes me five minutes to abandon my home. It takes a year to abandon everything else.
Our home burns down in February of 2020, and I feel another pang of guilt when my parents remark how easy it will be for me to leave now. This is not new information. They know I’ve been saving up, that I need to try to get to Broadway, if only so I won’t regret never trying, and the biggest obstacle is and always has been money.
Now, unburdened by the detritus of a life, with a check reimbursing me for a year’s worth of wages, I finally have enough to reach terminal velocity and leave this crummy little town behind.
Except for the fact that a month after the fire, three days before my flight takes off, the world goes into lockdown. I can’t leave even if I want to. So for the next eleven months I, like the bones of my home, rot in the stagnant mire of our town, choking under the oppression of my family’s expectations.
It is an unkind thought to have about the town. It is an unkind thought to have about my family. But somehow, with so much of our lives destroyed, there is a desperation to have what remains stay exactly as it once was.
In my family’s eyes, I am perpetually fifteen, angry at the world, but never allowed to turn that anger outward, and so all of its destruction rampages and rails inward at the one person who will never tell anyone of my cruelty. They expect malice in my words, even when I take great pains to rid all emotion from my voice. They expect me to be an unchanging teenager but demand that I grow up. They tell me they love me but my mother continually mourns the daughter she thought she was going to have.
I come close to ending it, in those eleven months, even if I never admit it to myself, not because I want to stop living but because a life in a trap is no life at all. It comes to a head one night after an argument with my mother and she says she wants me out.
So I gnaw off my own foot and limp, bleeding and weak, to Minneapolis, with what I can cram into my ancient electric blue Jeep.
This is what I take with me into the January morning: my cellphone, my wallet, my snow boots, one hat, one bra, one pair of underwear, and my winter coat. None of the replacements feel like mine yet, but I bring them too. A laptop. My clothes. Blank journals. A guitar.
I don’t even think about everything I leave behind.
Christine Powers turned her love of playing pretend into a BA in Theater. She lives in Minneapolis where she spends her time playing Dungeons and Dragons, convincing the husky not to eat plastic, and working in local government.
Great writing this, an unexpected journey to a leaving.