The cicadas chorused as Laney pushed off on her bike, past the neighborhood pavement onto the old fire road. Glass vials rattled in her backpack while she kept wheels balanced in thick sand, following the empty trek from Miller’s pond. It was too hot to fish, so it had been just her and the mosquitoes. And about ten trillion microbes, give or take.

Laney collected samples every morning between 8:00 and 9:00, filling old medicine bottles with droppers of stagnant pond water. She noted the time on her watch and wrote 8:12 under May 9, 1972. Her dull pencil pushed deeply into the spiral pad, pages warped with the sweat of her hands. She could fill in the rest later, after the burning.

   When she got to the fire tower, leaning her bike against a pine tree, it was 8:33. Laney could smell cigarette smoke from the base of the ladder, and giggling dripped from above. The metal rungs burned her palms as she climbed sixty feet into Georgia sun. Sukey and Mike entwined on the covered lookout platform, four gangly legs resembling one long tube-sock. 

         “Have they started?” Laney pushed her hands through hair wisps stuck to her cheeks, tucking them into the back of her shirt. Her fingers smelled of rust.

         Mike pointed west into a clearing of pines. “Not yet, they just finished the fire breaks.”

         “They obviously don’t know what they’re doing. The foreman’s been yelling all morning.” Sukey offered Laney a cigarette from a tin kept on the platform.

         “My dad?”

         Mike passed the binoculars and pointed again. “Over there.”

         A familiar silhouette leaned on a shovel at the far end of the line of mounded dirt. The man stared off into the trees, his hat pulled down low over his face, next to the other work-release inmates. He didn’t look around, which was just as well – Laney wouldn’t meet his eyes if he did. She sketched him in the margins of her notebook, flames licking the insides of his pockets and the soles of his shoes.

It was 8:49 before he moved again, when two men came back with flame throwers and nodded. A thin plume of smoke rose from a half-mile away, drifting into cloudless sky. 

         Sukey took the binoculars. “I still can’t believe they are actually setting fire to the forest.” 

         Laney started a new page, sketching out the area the Park Service had surrounded. “New research says it’s supposed to help the trees and stop unwanted fires. Make flowers grow.” She drew the rising smoke and circled 9:02.

         Sukey looked at the end of her cigarette. “Fire flowers.”

         Mike laughed. “Honestly, I think it’s because no one’s found that vet’s marijuana patch yet. The sheriff is crazy pissed he can’t catch him.”

Sukey smiled up at Mike and picked at a loose thread on his shirt. Laney turned the wheel backwards on the binoculars until the edges of her father’s clothes blurred and grew into the trees. Letting go of the strap, she let the lenses rest on her skin, the weight pushing into her chest.

All three leaned on the hot metal railing. Mike and Sukey pressed their elbows and knees against each other, a line of sweat forming where they touched. Laney wrote in her notebook with her father in her line of sight, just off the edge of the paper. Wind blew the smoke away from them, toward the lake.

         The men on the ground suddenly agitated like swarming ants, following Joe’s barked orders about moving into spiky palmettos to cut off the flames. Laney’s dad pulled his shirt over his mouth, and she lost sight of him in the trees. The plume of smoke spread into a growing line, with another, darker one rising farther behind. Birds took to the skies, flying in startled bursts.

         “You recording this, Laney?”

         Sukey looked over her shoulder. “Two pages behind the pond microbes and her summer application to Duke.”

         “I’m getting in.” She traced over her drawings and words until they were dark, the lead turning into reflective patches. The space around her father’s drawn head shone.

         “Of course you are.” Sukey borrowed the pencil and drew a smiley face in the corner.

She took back the pencil, erasing the doodle. “I just have to finish my research paper.” 

Sukey drew it back again. “Will you miss us?”

“You know I will. It’s just…” She gestured towards the smoky woods.

Mike stepped in. “We know. Polarity and repulsion, you told us. Two things cancel each other out.”

“Fire in the past. Fire in the present.” Laney ran her tongue across her teeth. “The taste of ash is the same.”

         The smoke streamed now, eating through trees in a hungry wave. The edges of flame appeared as an underglow blooming through gray. They could hear yelling, but couldn’t see anyone. A radio called for backup. Laney wrote approx. 30% containment and circled 9:35. 

         The binoculars showed thick haze, and chunks of dark ash floated past the platform like flower petals. Laney reached out her notebook to catch one. On paper, it could be the shadow of a snowflake.

         Mike poured a canteen of water over bandanas to cover their mouths as they sweated into the wood beneath them. No one mentioned climbing down. Mike and Sukey held hands, waiting for the wind to shift away the heavy smell of pine.    

         Finally, the breeze moved westward and they could see again. Laney wiped soot from her watch. 10:55.  

         Trees and underbrush burned, patchy flames and smoke appeared clearly in the targeted acreage.  Firefighters wore full gear, turning over dirt with shovels, spraying fire retardant in hot spots. The inmates struggled back out, having shouldered the worst. They gagged, or stripped down on the backs of trucks, sucking at oxygen. Laney’s dad braced his hands on his knees, retching. He was covered in gray, just like he had been ten years before.

Before boarding the white Clinch County Correctional bus, he raised his head towards the fire tower, hand shielding against the sun. Soot caked in new lines around his eyes and accordion pleats along his neck. At 11:23, Laney dipped her pencil in ash left along the railing and drew petals around Sukey’s smiley face, coloring the center into a smudged circle. The bus bounced down the road, mixing dust with smoke. 

         Mike pulled Laney into a hug. “I can’t believe that didn’t go wrong.”

         Sukey frowned. “The poor animals, their homes are gone.” She hugged Laney too.  

         “Thanks for being here with me.” Their teeth shone absurdly white.

         They climbed down into denser smoke, and rode their bikes back along the sandy lane, now shrouded in hazy gray. At the pavement, they parted with half waves. Laney continued to the end of the street, past neighborhood houses and to the edge of town. She stopped in front of remnants of another fire, boards on the shattered windows. 

         Pulling aside a loose corner, she stepped inside to near darkness. The soot here was mainly pushed into corners, and settled. She passed where she would sit at the bar as a child, drinking sodas her mom served her. Laney moved beyond fragments of broken furniture where she danced to jukebox tunes. Circled the carcass of a coin operated horse once tied with pink ribbons. She took another sample, filling a spare glass bottle with old ash.

The glass gently clinked together as she rode home through back streets, each specimen touching the other. She propped her bike on the bumper of her grandmother’s car and stepped into a long shower, blowing black from her nose before it swirled down the drain. Water molecules and soap stripping her of the day’s new stains. Polarity and repulsion.

She counted that morning’s microbes under her scope, recording her findings in evenly aligned rows. Gazed at clean fingernails and around her room at neat stacks of atlases and science journals. At her contained samples lined along the edge of her desk, the soot-filled glass set apart. 

Ash tumbled along the curved container as she moved the sample to the crinkled pages of her notebook. She placed it on top of Sukey’s smile-turned-flower, situated in the center of doodled petals like a dawning bloom.

In the margins, she circled 4:37 and strung words one next to the other along the frayed edge, each letter penciled in perfect, blocked from.

New observation. I am a fire flower in burned earth, ready for the sun.

+++

Librarian, mother, and minor trickster, Janna Miller has published works in places like SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, and X-Ray Lit. Her story collection, All Lovers Burn at the End of the World is forthcoming from SLJ Editions in 2024. Generally, if the toaster blows up, it is not her fault.