Preview: “Fire Escape”

Here’s an excerpt from an essay, “Fire Escape.” This story will be available for my readers on Patreon. Become a subscriber to access the full version of this story, as well as my library of short stories, essays, craft notes, and e-books.

There is a device in your home to warn you about smoke and fire. It’s intended to protect you, but most of the time, it’s a nuisance. It interrupts your sleep or bothers your dog or is a disruption at parties when something burns too hot on the stove. You might mutter, This damn thing as you remind yourself, again, to replace its batteries. 

That alarm exists in your home because of a fire that started in my family. 

But before that fire, the one that destroyed a branch of our family tree, there were others. I don’t know why fire followed my family in this way. An architect I spoke with, who took me to lunch a few times because he wanted me to write his book for him, noted house fires were more common until federal regulations forced building materials to change. I can’t remember if I told him the stories about my aunt. 

My grandmother had four daughters. The older two were blonde, the younger two were brunette. My mother was the youngest. My oldest aunt became a teacher. My second aunt became a nurse. I never met my third aunt, Cathy, the aunt with whom I share a name, but I know her stories. 

There’s the story about how Cathy tried to become a nun. She wasn’t very good at it. She walked on stilts her first day at the convent to entertain the day school students. She snuck away to the wall that marked the convent’s property line, which abutted the golf course where my grandparents and great-grandparents worked, where my mother was raised in a similar way as I was raised at the kung fu school. Cathy met a family friend by the wall to smoke cigarettes and hear updates from the family when she was supposed to be taking a vow of silence. 

When Cathy wanted to quit becoming a nun, she tried to force herself to stay by shaving her head, thinking she’d be motivated by hiding her baldness under her habit. It didn’t work. When my grandmother picked her up to come home, she brought my aunt a wig. There was a ledge by the window in my grandmother’s living room, where she had pictures of her daughters and their families. Cathy was the only daughter to have a portrait by herself, and my grandmother pointed to the picture to tell me, “She’s wearing a wig there.” I wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t told me. 

These were the stories I liked the most. I liked the idea of someone rebellious in my traditional family, although my father said Cathy followed the rules. They debated, one night, whether it was wrong to drive through a red light if there were no other cars and there wasn’t a cop to stop them. My dad didn’t think it was a big deal. My aunt told him, God is always watching. 

I try to animate the person I’ve only seen in a few pictures in my grandmother’s living room: the family photo with my five cousins and uncle, the portrait on the ledge. I flip through an album on a brass stand of Cathy’s wedding day, my mother the youngest bridesmaid I had ever seen, not much older than me.  

Who was that woman, who smoked cigarettes and walked on stilts? This question follows me throughout my life. If I understood her, this aunt with whom I share a name, maybe I could understand part of myself. 

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