A Story About a Fire

by Salena Casha

We try the app on a Sunday because it’s the scariest of days preceding the most sleepless of nights, heralded by the few and slipshod hours before I have to park myself behind the screen of a computer. The screen is haunted by an emerald field or a bouquet of healed coral set somewhere none of us can afford to fly to and subsequently ruin (or maybe, maybe, what I see on the screen isn’t even real, but I can’t contend with that on a Monday). Either way, in my waking from something no one would call sleep, the multi-colored riot of digitized earth will remind me how I don’t have the generational wealth or the luck to be in that place of make believe right now because I am instead waiting out a flash flood warning as I sit through a slide deck about compliance. It’s always compliance or project timelines these days, akin to counting sheep, ready to bore someone to sleep or death—whichever comes first—but instead, the anticipation of these meetings has me peeling off my nails at three in the morning as I go over my own minor part. This is all to say that the reason my husband suggests we try this app just after dusk is because he knows Sundays are indeed my scariest of days, the most sleepless of nights, the few and slipshod hours before I have to park myself behind the screen of a computer.
          The room is gentle-dark, made complete by my sleep mask. My husband asks me if I’m ready, and I nod, and he tells me he picked one about a campfire. The voice is sonorous and deep, an actor I know but can’t place.
          The story he tells is about many someones, likely children, building a fire in a backyard. I listen as they gather kindling, the type that the narrator snaps once, twice, three times, to show its dryness. I listen to the slow shuck of flint, tried once, twice, three times, until a flame is caught. I listen to slow lick of flames once, twice, and three times the size of the children who have made the fire and the story suddenly comes to an end and then starts again, the voice slowed down to half time and I can feel the panic rising because I smell burning rubber and overheated metal like a laptop on the fritz and I don’t claw my mask off but instead rise from the bed blind and stumble to my desk. My hands tap across the rectangle; the screen is closed and I keep it that way and when he comes out to find me and asks me what happened in a voice thick with sleep, I whisper,
          Can’t you smell the smoke?
          He waits a beat before nodding and saying, yes, but it’s gone now and he doesn’t promise that it won’t come back again.

Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 150 publications in the last decade. Her most recent work can be found with HAD, Club Plum, and Ghost Parachute. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com.