Imagine the Fire by Allison Field Bell

We read the devastation in the newspaper: Coffey Park and Paradise. But we don’t have to: it’s outside in the air—the ash, the thick clogged sky. We wonder who will be next and will it be us?

We remember a time before fire season. When the summer was just summer not a gathering of kindling, when the fall was just fall, without the waiting. Now, we look at our forest and imagine it aflame. The line of trees across from our neighborhood. Pine, evergreen. No longer just the origin of that fresh clean country smell, that lush country beauty, but a thing to be burned.

We look at our houses and consider what photograph we would save, what piece of jewelry, and will the cat be found in time, and is it even safe to fall asleep in October, in November?

We set up the alert system on our phones, and even when we aren’t in California, we learn about small brush fires that could or could not be the next tragedy.

Then, one October, we are evacuated. In the middle of the night, our phones go off. Cops drive through neighborhoods, announcing themselves, sirening down our streets: panic, fear. We pack our photographs, our jewelry. We find the cat. We stare at the dark wall of trees beyond our windows, willing them to survive. We load into our cars, and we are caught in a line of traffic.

We imagine the fire coming now: what would we do? Where would we run?

One way out, one way in.

The cat cries in the backseat. We can’t see any stars or discern any smoke. It seems like cloud cover, but we know better. The air is full of that burnt smell. We know that the sun will rise red and full behind a haze of swirling ash. We hope to be in the city by then, far away from trees and the dark unlit corners of country where we have made our homes.

Some of us will eventually move away—too many question marks and too much to lose. We will take control: move to a desert without trees, where soon there won’t be any water at all, but at least there are no fires. Or we will move to the Midwest—so wet and green and safe. But with winters growing harsher, less predictable. Better to freeze than burn, we think.

We think to escape unscathed because we can’t think that we won’t. Can’t believe that all we can to do is watch our world burn, wondering what will be left. A wedding ring, a piece of pottery.

In the line of cars, some of us honk at each other, but it doesn’t sound impatient. It sounds like wailing. Pain made palpable. Like a woman mourning a loss she cannot even begin to imagine.

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ALLISON FIELD BELL — Allison is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her prose appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Epiphany, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Superstition Review, Palette Poetry, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Art by OLADOSU MICHAEL EMERALD — Oladosu (he/him) is an art editor at Surging Tide Magazine, a poet, a writer, a digital/musical/visual artist, a photographer, a footballer, a boxer, and a political scientist. He teaches art at the Arnheim Art Gallery to kids and adults. His work has been published or forthcoming in many magazines and has won numerous awards in writing and art. Art chose him before he existed. He tweets @garricologist and @garrycologist on Instagram.