At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames Read online

  BIZARRO PULP PRESS

  an imprint of JournalStone Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 by Nicholas Day

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Bizarro Pulp Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  Bizarro Pulp Press, a JournalStone imprint

  www.BizarroPulpPress.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-947654-80-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: December 21, 2018

  Cover Design by Nicholas Day, D.F. Noble

  Ebook Formatting: Lori Michelle

  www.theauthorsalley.com

  PRAISE FOR NICHOLAS DAY AND AT THE END OF THE DAY I BURST INTO FLAMES

  “At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames burrowed into my heart with each page that I read and took shape as a beautiful monster. Nicholas Day paints worlds both wonderful and painful. He shows us another side of death and love where their roles are interchangeable and their story unforgettable. He's one of my favorite wielders of words.”

  Michelle Garza, coauthor of Mayan Blue, Those Who Follow and Kingdom of Teeth

  “Existential poetry in the form of a horror story—I mean, a love story. At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames is like a having a smoke—killing you, intoxicating you, connecting you to just how quickly it all burns away. Beautiful, sad, on fire.”

  Laura Lee Bahr, author of Haunt, Angel Meat, and Long-form Religious Porn

  To all of you who have felt the fire inside yourself

  ***

  My eyes explode.

  I feel inferno in my bones, like my father before me. I’ll be flame soon enough. And I’ll be ash shortly after.

  I have a story to tell before this happens and it is happening soon. Going to be blunt when I want to be. May wander a bit as stories do.

  As life does.

  And death.

  ***

  In the lateness of a white, Midwest winter, I broke the red door’s latch.

  Few students, and even less faculty, were present at the high school, as it was well after regular hours. The two of us, she and I, we were part of the high school’s freshmen thespian department, painting sets in advance of that year’s musical. She was not my girlfriend, only someone I considered a close friend.

  Inspiration, the kind inherent to youth, took hold of me and in turn I took hold of her. Up two flights of stairs, quickly and quietly, unobserved and not missed by anyone else. The door was small, the latch was weak, and once broken I led her out onto the rooftop of the school. The lone street lamp may as well have been some meager candlelight.

  The sky was black. Snow fell like so much static, cold ash from some unseen fire in Heaven. I taught her the Box Step. I did not know it then, but our intimacy would begin and end with that silent waltz.

  Years later, we are separated by decades and decisions, lovers and children. We are separated by life. Our dance is now a memory, fleeting, although the setting remains vivid, as does her smile.

  I can no longer remember her name, but I love her.

  ***

  I think about suicide a lot and I think about love.

  I think about the fact they we're basically sacks of gooey, communicable chemicals hardwired to survive through sloppy DNA exchange. I think to myself.

  It's a system

  And any system can be beat if we just fight against what the system wants. I think about suicide and I think that suicide is winning.

  But then I remember, individually, we are all dying anyway. It's going to happen. We committed suicide the moment we passed through a membrane from another dimension.

  Then, I think.

  The system wants us to die

  Living is the only way to beat the system.

  So, I think about suicide but I don't do it.

  Eventually, I come around to the third option, which is that there is no system. Never was. I'm fighting with myself. And that's the one, that's the really depressing revelation. I am my own enemy.

  I am the system

  I think about love.

  Every time I think yeah . . . okay, I'm going to do it.

  Right?

  It's time to finally kill myself. But I almost immediately remember love. And love is so addicting.

  Love brings me back.

  And I'm not talking about love in some sentimental way. I'm talking about chemical compositions, like if it were possible to put music in a syringe and then stick it in your arm and feel the ebb and flow of notes pulsing through your veins before music takes an aural shit all over your brain.

  I'm talking about love-as-opiate.

  And I'm so weak, so wrecked and dependent, so addicted, that I can't even fucking kill myself. It's depressing. Love is rubbish. If I could just kick the habit, you know? I'd like to have control over my life.

  Of course, I am getting well ahead of myself and this melancholy mindset is due to the fact I am about to die in the same terrible manner as my father, and his father before him, and so on.

  I am a lot like my father.

  Got the fire inside me.

  Time slows to a crawl when Death walks in. We’re friends, Death and I. We’ve met on several occasions but almost always by coincidence, like co-workers who see each other in the parking lot before they go into the big building and do what they do in different rooms, on different floors.

  Death, as it turns out, is a librarian of sorts.

  And he’s come to collect my story.

  I think about love.

  And I don’t want to die.

  ***

  I have a wife and kids. They don’t know the fire is coming and I haven’t told them. Don’t need the ones I love to see me as a ticking clock. No reason to mourn before I’m dead. Can’t imagine anything worse than becoming a ghost before it’s time.

  Been chewing the inside of my cheek a lot more, lately, that’s for sure.

  Cigarette is lit and I puff away. Smoke too much. Always have. Should’ve quit years ago, kick the habit.

  Kick the habit

  Worthless phrase, really. So easy to say yet so hard to actually do. It isn’t like saying, “Kick the dog.” You can readily do that . . . given you have a dog and at least one foot.

  A habit like smoking may as well be a possession. Got to get a priest if you want a proper exorcism. Want to know how I feel about priests? See if you recognize this quote:

  “Fuck the police.”

  That I temper the anxiety caused by my imminent immolation by lighting up cigarettes is a black humor that isn’t entirely lost on me. Fight fire with fire, as my great-great-grandmother had been fond of saying. Lately, though, the smoking has gotten out of hand. Understandably so, given the circumstance.

  My wife and I, we’re rarely intimate anymore. Emily, God rest her soul. I mean, God rest her soul for putting up with my lacking libido. I don’t want to make it look like she’s dead. Of course the sex would be bad. And gross. What would the kids think of me if that were the case? I can see Robby’s thi
rd-grade teacher inquiring about life at our house.

  “And how are your parents, Robby?”

  To which my brown-eyed, stout son would reply, “Mom is dead but Dad doesn’t mind because now they have alone time whenever he wants and Mom never complains.”

  My son talks like that, you know? Real fast, in exploding sentences. The boy has absolutely no time for a comma in his speech. He will make a great public speaker. I could have been one of those.

  ***

  I came to my hometown of Wood River to reminisce. I actually live in Edwardsville, about an hour’s drive southeast. Edwardsville is a lovely town, a college town, actually. The community has a really nice public high school, too, one of the highest rated in Illinois.

  But Wood River, that’s where my roots are, you know?

  Now, maybe, I ought to take a second to set the scene—if you don’t mind—to paint a picture in your head, a portrait of the town where I was born and raised and within whose borders I will most certainly die.

  First, imagine a metal erector set built by giants. It buzzes with florescent light, belches enough smoke to dwarf the clouds in the sky, and pisses fire so bright that nighttime becomes nothing more than a perpetual evening. Add to that the smell of sulfur. Now, surround this vision with little suburbs full of modest homes, mostly vinyl siding, but pockets of brick in the older neighborhoods. You see green trees, wide yards, lots of trucks and big garages. During the summer, you hear the almost choral hum of a thousand air conditioners working in unison. In the winter, well, I don’t really know how it sounds. I stay inside.

  It gets too damn cold.

  The city is kind of like me in that we both started out as one thing and, over time, we both became something else. You see, Wood River, the part that I grew up in, used to be called Benbow City. At the time, it was hardly more than a green spot on the state border, nothing much more than a humid floodplain along the Mississippi River. Like me, the fire was hidden inside, waiting to be let free.

  Then, Standard Oil showed up and that all started to change.

  The Wood River Refinery was built in 1907 and, shortly after, a fellow named A.E. Benbow founded his city pretty much right across the street. It wasn’t nothing much more than a place to get drunk, gamble, and fuck, but man alive was that town making some money. Once upon a time, Benbow was, per capita, the richest city in the whole United States.

  Some people called it the wettest town in all of Illinois, one saloon for every thirteen residents. Of course, you can’t be making claims like that and not see a significant increase in the population. A stable job, good pay, plenty of places to get a drink and a chance to get laid… Benbow was a blue collar’s wet dream.

  A Wet American Dream.

  But, my daddy used to say that if something sounds too good to be true, then it is just that.

  By 1917, the party was over in Benbow. In January of that year, the courts found a lady guilty for making prostitutes out of little girls. Couple of months later, the law rounded up a whole bunch of folks for running what they referred to as vice resorts. Then, a couple of days after that, a real popular place called the Red Onion got shut down.

  The fun police really cleaned up the joint. By the end of that year, Mayor Benbow gave up. Wood River annexed the place and, like me, Benbow wasn’t known by its old name. It was Wood River from there on out. I’d wager to say that more people remember my real name than even know Benbow existed.

  Folks around here got a short-term memory when it comes to history. Matter of fact, I find that it’s the strangers that seem to know most about the city.

  I guess, when you’re born in a place, well, you just get to living in it and not thinking about how it all began. Hell, if you weren’t standing there and watching it happen, chances are you don’t even know about my daddy. Maybe you don’t know about the floods either. That was all over the television when it happened. And if you don’t know about that stuff, well, then you sure as hell don’t know about the fire that swept through downtown in 1912. Shoot, you can’t even find old newspaper clippings about that fire. The only reason I know about it is because my great-great-grandma used to go on and on.

  “Hell of a fire,” she’d say. “Just me and the bucket brigade running around like a bunch of screaming meemies. Terrible thing. Lost my papa to that one.”

  It seems like, especially in a little old town like this, the stories coming out of old folk’s mouths is as close to a history book as a place is apt to get. Sometimes, I look over the obituaries just to lament all the stories I ain’t never gonna hear, because if you never heard some these old fart’s stories, then those stories were going to the grave, like every obit is a little piece of history getting buried up at Woodlawn Cemetery.

  And that’s that, I guess. I grew up there. I went to Wood River High, married the homecoming queen, had a future.

  Now I smoke, my homecoming queen is getting older, and my future? Well, I have a semi-lucrative job drawing raunchy cartoons for top-of-the-line porno magazines. You’d know the cartoons if you saw them: Jokes about old men’s balls and lady’s sagging breasts; Santa getting it on with Mrs. Claus with mood lighting provided by Rudolph; Cute, furry animals using foul language.

  And I meant what I said about semi-lucrative. The money is surprisingly good. I have an art studio in the basement of our house, so I get to work at home. Send out this comic to that magazine and this comic out to that magazine.

  I’m terribly popular at porn conventions. Young kids, mostly boys, seem to really get a kick out of my work. “Funny shit,” they’ll say.

  “Thanks,” I’ll say. And I’ll usually wave my hand in appreciation. I make sure I never shake hands with anyone. It is a porn convention, after all.

  But I am getting ahead of myself.

  The first thing I ought to tell you about is how my daddy burst into flames when I was six years old.

  ***

  Dad caught the fire just before my seventh birthday.

  The doctors called it nothing. They didn’t have a name for what happened, except accident, which, goddamn, I guess so. But my momma had a name for it and she called it spontaneous combustion.

  Mom said the fire was an Act of God, and if you know anything about God then you know damn well that God doesn’t go making accidents on people, so those doctors were just plain wrong, or maybe not right with the Lord. Maybe, she reckoned, all that control they thought they had over life and death made them a little punch drunk, a little jealous, like if they kept doctoring long enough and came up with enough names for medicines and maladies that maybe, just maybe, well, maybe they could beat God.

  Then be God.

  But before I even get into Daddy and all that, I think maybe you ought to know that my daddy’s daddy burned up the very same way.

  Just poof and flame then gone.

  Now I didn’t see grandpa light up—just my daddy—but my daddy and mom saw gramps go. Daddy hated talking about it, but he would, occasionally, and usually when he was plenty liquored up. Mom, though, she would talk about it every Sunday, sometimes taking her time with the story and other times telling it in a rush of a couple sentences.

  The ending was always the same.

  Mom would look up to the sky, in sun or snow or rain or whatever God was throwing down.

  “He was like a firecracker,” she’d whisper. “Just like a firecracker.”

  She must have liked the word, the way the consonants clicked and clacked in the back of her mouth, because it eventually became her pet name for me.

  Firecracker.

  Damn if that name didn’t stick with anyone in an earshot. And earshot is a pretty easy thing to be in a little town like Wood River. By the time Daddy died, well, I ceased being whoever I was and, instead, I became Firecracker.

  ***

  Downtown Wood River is a sad affair. Empty storefront windows are the ghosts of past prosperity. Even worse is when those windows are broken or boarded over, as if faded glories were too e
xhausting to take care of.

  I finish my cigarette and head down the road to The Night Cap, a tavern that used to be little more than a dive bar but ended up being bought out by some entrepreneurial spirit who changed it into . . . a dive bar with a patio.

  My allergies act up, and when I go to rub my nose I notice the way my hand smells like stale nicotine. I shove my hand in my pocket, punishing it for my own bad habit, forcing it to play endlessly with change. Should’ve quit years ago.

  Not that it will matter in a couple of hours.

  I walk through Night Cap’s front door. It smells like forty years of spilled drinks, with just a hint of disinfectant and diluted bleach. Thankfully, a single window and dim lighting help mask the rest.

  Night Cap has a respectable menu for a greasy spoon. The Italian stuff is pretty tasty, but I’m too wound up for a plate of solid food. What I want is a cheap, cold beer.

  I coast past the pool tables and the pock-marked dart board and make my way to the back of the place. A lack of clientele surprises me. I remind myself that it is Tuesday afternoon.

  People have things to do besides drink a dozen or so beers while they await the inevitable.

  All the tables in the back of Night Cap are the same. Round tables, wood laminate tops, each surrounded by four chairs. Ketchup, salt, pepper, and sugar sit in their centers. I glance over each table, as though it is some kind of hard decision as to where I’ll put my ass. Even worse, I already know which seat I’ll take. But I still act out the decision-making process. It is a habit. I do this every time I come here.

  Finally, I very casually make my way to the table where I proposed to Emily.

  ***

  “You know what? You can tell the level of a person’s anxiety by the length of their fingernails.” And I held up my hand to show her.

  The first time I’d ever worked up the courage to speak to Emily.