Our neighbors have picked up a firework habit. It’s emotional regulation, they say. Never mind the burn bans and drought, the sleeping children and anxious dogs, the calls to the police and the subsequent fines.

Their son aces a spelling test? Roman candles.

Their daughter goes on her first date? Sparklers. 

Their father loses his job? Multi-shot dive bombs.

Their mother burns dinner? Black cats. 

It’s nightly at this point, the shrill whistle followed by the neon blast that rattles our windows and sets car alarms blaring. 

Our friends tell us to move, but our property values have tanked. So we take precautions. We water our lawn despite the water restrictions. Wear earplugs. Give the dog CBD oil. Post a child outside with a hose. The sparks crackle on our property, but we’ve never yet had a flame. We build our own form of emotional regulation. We breathe in and out and remind ourselves that they are just trying to survive in this world, like we all are. 

It’s gotten harder for all of us in recent years. Sickness and drought and shootings and injustice that feels unending. The pandemic aged us in ways we didn’t know we could age, and our tempers are high, and there’s little room for patience now in our world. We all feel we’re owed something. We just don’t know what that is. 

Maybe, like our neighbors suggest, it’s fireworks. In a way, we’re all ready to explode. 

We can’t live like this forever, though, so we call a neighborhood meeting. 

“We understand,” is how we begin. “Who doesn’t love fireworks?” 

“The birds!” calls out a neighbor.

“The grass!” calls another.

We try again. “We understand you love fireworks.” We pull out the language from therapy. “We feel you are creating a toxic neighborhood environment.” 

We all live here, we say. We all deserve to feel safe in our homes. 

Suggestions are offered. Fireworks once a week, once a month, only after a rainstorm, only with prior neighborhood clearance. Just stop altogether, someone says. There are burn bans in place.

In the end we can’t agree on anything, but we leave knowing we got our point across, and we’re banking on their civility.

That night there’s silence. They let us sleep in peace, and our bodies and brains exhale. 

But the next night, the familiar whistle and blast. 

Fine, we say, if this is what they want, then we’ll go to war. They asked for it. We buy our children drum sets. We give our teenagers the green light to host parties. We turn up the bass in our cars and leave the radios on day and night. Our whole street is issued noise complaint after noise complaint. And the fireworks continue. 

And then one day, our phones blare with the alert and the sirens blare down the block and the cries blare from every home. The stories we’ve watched play out across the country time and again—avoidable tragedies, really, if we wanted them to be—come for us. Our town. Our schools. Our children. The victims are our own this time. Our joys and futures and loves and reasons for everything.

It’s then we know our neighbors were right all along. 

That night we all pile outside. We pull wagons filled with explosives and dump them in a pile in the middle of the street. We block the intersections off with parked cars and pass around matches and lighters. There’s no order, no line, we set them off two at a time, three at a time, in any direction at all. They explode above our heads and rain their sparks on our lawns. We shout and roar for more. None of it matters anymore. Our neighborhood looks like a battlefield, the night sky alight with pink and blue and green, and if a spark lands on a lawn and the flames ignite, what then? We will burn it all down. What else matters? Why save the planet if this is what we’re saving it for?

Raze this neighborhood and this town and maybe this whole land to the ground. 

Let it turn into ash and see if anything rises.  

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Courtney Craggett is the author of the story collection Tornado Season (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Image, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Baltimore Review, Washington Square Review, CutBank, and Monkeybicycle, among other journals. Originally from Texas, she now lives in Utah with her daughter, three cats, and dog and teaches creative writing at Weber State University.