Fireplace

A. Muia

The fire burned out half the block, and they had to close The Signal. Not knowing what to do, the men wandered about the town. Some passed through the park, drinking wine from paper bags, shamefaced before the eyes of children. Others hung around the main street until window shoppers came and forced them to the other side. One man went along the tracks, almost to the next town, but turned back. They were uncomfortable under the open sky, and every one of them wished he’d worn a hat. They were used to the narrow walls of The Signal; it was more a corridor than a room. The low ceiling almost touched the heads of the tallest men. And they missed the signal itself, hung in the window, flashing from green to yellow to red.
          He was the man who had gone down the tracks and turned around. Now he thought he would go to the wreckage, just to see the extent of it. He should have gone as soon as he heard. Old Dillard the barman nearly dead, lying in a hospital bed with his lungs full of smoke. How does one free the lungs from smoke, he wondered. Besides the regular tobacco kind.
          He stood across the street and felt afraid to look. Red paint peeled away from the cheap tin bargeboard; ragged burn-holes lay burst open like a cancer he had once seen on the neck of a man. Window openings stoppered with cardboard, and glass on the ground. Gutters hanging. The signal busted out. The door tilted off the frame. The police or someone had put a rope across. He went around to the alley.
          The lights were out. The back door still had its screen, and there wasn’t any rope across. He cracked the screen open and tried the door handle and it gave. He stepped into the back hall where the toilets were. Those doors were gone. The old horsehair couch was pushed against the wall, and he squeezed around it. The whole place smelled of burned wood and scorched hair. He kept his hand on the wall, and the paper was damp and slick, oozing some kind of paste. He felt his way along.
          Harmon and Dye and Mills were there. Mills sat on the only stool, and lifted a hand to him. He didn’t know what happened to the other seats. The room was only half-burned. Just blackened on the one side. Harmon and Dye were standing at the bar. They held beer cans that could not have come from the refrigerator, which lay in the corner on its back with the door open.
          No one said anything. Harmon offered him a sip, and he took it. He leaned on the bar. The ceiling littered ash. It was coming down like a fine snow from the plaster rococo ceiling and settling on the men. A cord hung down with no bulb attached and this bothered him more than anything else, the cord just hanging there. He looked away. Harmon took a can from his coat pocket and punctured the top with a church key and gave it to him. There were circles on the bar, clean of soot, where the ashtrays had been. Once he had enjoyed pictures of women on the walls. Now the smoke had made black daguerreotypes of them. Ladies stared from the tin frames like postmortems. The only thing in the room that looked like itself was the fireplace.

A. Muia is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for her novel A Desert Between Two Seas (University of Georgia Press). Her stories and articles have appeared in Chicago Review, Grist, Image Journal, the Orison Anthology, Water~Stone Review, West Branch, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, and other journals. Her novel was also a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award and a 2026 Top Pick for the Southwest Books of the Year. She is a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator, leading writing circles with youth in juvenile detention through the nonprofit Underground Writing. Find out more at http://www.amuia.net.

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