Our Fire Falls

By Abby Vogeley

Writing 212: The Art of the Essay

 

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I was not accustomed to summer thunderstorms. The simmering of heat upon damp concrete, the humble awakening of the sun as it slid patiently through the curtains of cloud. This was the unfamiliar. My Californian Decembers rattled with frozen thunder, but the summer I visited Jack, the Delaware thunder was different. The cold familiarity of winter rage was absent under the cotton blankets of summer air—hot, muddled breaths were drawn from heat-cracked lips underneath its weight. The world was coated in the aftertaste of the storm, and its warm tongue of humidity reminded us of its rich presence. The sun bowed to the mystery of the after-storm haze, and I felt that this foreign dimension was rather skewed, adjacent, perhaps parallel to my own experience.

But Jack knew this world. “This way!” he called, stick legs teetering down the barren road. He graced the oily slickness of the pavement with the confident stride of a middle-school genius, the neon divider fluorescent in the afternoon glow, trailing a path to the unknown. His yellow rain jacket rode upon his shoulders, comfortable—my new magenta windbreaker scratched.

And Jack said we would be okay. “It’s just a little bit of rain. Look at that cloud—the storm’s over, see?”I did not know summer rain clouds. I did not know these East Coast wonders. I did not know this street. But Jack knew. Jack always knew, in fact—Asian country capitals, foreign food brands, classifications of rocks, scientific names of dinosaur species, algebra. And so I believed him—not because he had any genuine credibility, having been a Delaware resident for less than a year, but because my other references for guidance were no better—myself, my twin, and the buzzing of full air.

The powerline wire lay in our path on the barren road, dismembered from its usual stretched stature, where it preferred to be strung high above the concrete, an onlooker. It was used to its position in space, a brisk line parallel and out of reach to the echoes of screeching cars, of galloping deer, of scurrying squirrels, of cackling children. My twin brother remembers it lying on its side, discarded, about a block away from a pet cemetery—I don’t.

But the wire was no longer a wire. Dismembered from its taut order, it hissed, a black tremble of a buzz from its parted lips. It sputtered, but there was no liquid. It shimmered, but there was no movement. Only the overpowering tickling of electricity reminded us of its energy, its presence muttering the damp air, beckoning open ears to listen. The electrical snake gleamed with a knowing eye, its naked belly of wire exposed to a full breath of life. It whispered of its power, whispered of its knowledge. The wire was no longer a wire. It was an apple gifted by a snake—I wanted to know what it knew. And to me, it was simply that—an answer to curiosity. I had always been an admirer of light, and the wire sparked curiosity with its living, breathing pulse.

I did not remember it then, but the sputter of the wire returns me to a spark of another kind. I was, in fact, raised surrounded by this light—but I do not remember that. Rather, I remember my return to the fireflies, my sparks of light, as a preschooler, my chubby fingers grasping into the sky, attempting to capture their lazy bodies. And sometimes I did, nestling them between my hands, peering into the pocket of dull luminesce I had created. As an infant, my parents had sat my twin, Will, and me outside in the summer, and I do not recall the stars, but once I could capture the light of the fireflies within my own hands, I begin to remember their equal glow. It is my grandmother’s Pennsylvanian hill, and it rolled, expansive and wide to our half-sized feet and fumbling breaths. The air was dark, and yet I could still see. The porch light was on—it was always on. The fireflies crawled, but I did not see their life—I saw their light. My light. They were fragments of the sun, and when I placed them in a jar, they buzzed, pulsing with a glow I could not produce within my own stomach. I wanted to keep the jar of light, and so I poked holes in the top. I gave them breath.

And yet, at the end of each night, my mother would usher us out of the screen door, a hand lightly on our shoulders, and gently tell us to let the fireflies go. I would unwind the rubber band, peel off the punctured paper top, and watch my fire fall. Some would strike out, their bulbs pulsing away until they mimicked the stars above our heads. Others would not understand their sudden freedom, and I would shake the mason jar, tilting it back and forth until they could understand—they were free.

I didn’t understand why I had to let them go. I had given them air. I had given them a home. And so I asked my mother. “It’s because they need to be in their home. They need to have their food with their families in their hills and their grass.” But I wanted their light.

One night I did not let my fireflies go. I smuggled them into my grandmother’s guest room—the walls decorated with dancing bears, laughing, twirling, smiling. I slid the jar underneath the lace bed skirt, and I watched, the bumbling lights blinking at me—winking to the tempo of a private concerto.

They did not blink in the morning.

And just as the evenings with the fireflies, it is my brother I find at my side in my memories, body buzzing with a kindred curiosity. The day of the summer thunderstorm, the day of the wire, Will picked up a leaf. It glowed in the speckled light, its edges curled from its harsh, sudden departure from its branch. I’m sure the wind ripped it from its fully stretched arm, stripping the wooden hand of a finger. It was a leaf released by chance, destined for rebirth.

My brother twirled the leaf between forefinger and thumb, its light body and dark veins pinwheeling.

“Hey,” he looked at Jack, eyes widened. “We could make a fire.”

“I mean—it’s like paper, it’d work.”

My brother’s chapped lips turned upward, eyes glowing. Jack snatched the leaf out of reach, turning it as Will had. He nodded, approval dripping down his pointed chin.

“Yeah, this could definitely work.”

“How big you think?”

“Fire?—really small, like maybe a little flame.”

I must have taken a step forward. My feet shifted in the oversized rain boots.

“And we won’t get hurt?” I asked.

“We’re fine,” Jack said. He lifted his foot out of a puddle. “It’s rubber—see?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, it’s fine. Don’t you wanna see?”

“I don’t know.” I took in a breath, only to find the distinct smell of gravel burning, the chemical-tinted air sharp as I inhaled. My nose wrinkled.

“Stop worrying, okay? We’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I stared at the fallen wire, heat rising from the asphalt near its tongue. “And we won’t get hurt?”

“We got rubber in our shoes. Stop worrying.”

“You already said that.”

“Said what to—”

“Said to stop worrying, I’m not. I just wanted to make—”

“Stop.” Will stepped inward, angled towards Jack. “We’ll be fine—you don’t even have to touch it if you don’t want to. We’ll do it.”

But I did want to touch it. And it might have been my brother who nodded, it might have been Jack. It might have been me. But we agreed. Hesitation for me clung to the buzzing particles in the air, but it was smothered in curiosity, unidentifiable under its piercing stench. I did not want to be excluded from experience, the possibility to feel something. We wanted to use the electrical buzz we felt, its pulse lightly tickling, muttering upon pounding eardrums. And I could not distinguish the pungent fumes of fear from the fragrance of wonderment—I was not afraid of fire. I was not afraid of what I didn’t know.

I do not remember whether the leaf felt the kiss of a spark. I do not remember who was shocked, if it was Jack, if it was my twin, or if it was me—Will says it was all three of us. He says Jack found a branch, and it became his fire poker, an extension of his arm. What I recall is energy—there was a pulse that drew us away from the wire. A sudden, unfamiliar alertness, of electricity, of subconscious protection. I do not remember the shock, but the buzzing air, maintaining the overpowering rhythm of a march—pulsing, shaking, overwhelming. Stay away. The leaf and branch were discarded onto the spotted road, perhaps singed, perhaps blackened. But we, the explorers, stumbled back towards Jack’s home, giggling. We laughed entering his new house, wet shoes slapping the wooden floor, coats catapulting onto couch ends, chair legs scraping against kitchen tiles. The world became familiar, and the storytelling of our adventure to our families began, heaping plates steaming under wide-cracked grins.

I had never seen my father cry.

“You did what?” my father roared, his eyes thundering with rain.

“You don’t understand, do you?” my mother said. Her eyes, interlocked with mine, were shaking. Her hands clawed the edges of the kitchen table, and I could see her quivering fingertips. My mother’s rage was that of the summer thunderstorms, roars ballooned with heat and drenched in something I couldn’t identify. I was unfamiliar with her thunderclouds of fire, confused by the lack of their typical icy fury.

The bite of humid, stifling rage filled my mouth, and I cried ocean water tears—salty, warm, burning. My voice shrieked, grappling for stability in a combat I could not understand, an anger at their anger.

“Nothing happened! We’re okay.”

“Nothing! You could have—” my mother stopped, unlatching her hands from the table. She shrunk.

Will dropped his fork, rattling. “Could have what? Gotten hurt? We just wanted to—”

“Died.” My father said. Silence. “Could have died.”

Their raging cries were coated in a slick substance that slipped through my fingers—it was unknown to me why this flavor of anger felt different. My body was numb in the heat. I whimpered.

“But we didn’t die. How were we supposed to know?”

And for once, Jack was silent. For once, he did not know the answer. My twin, too, did not understand this danger.
And I, I no longer knew this world. The familiarity of the light and the wonderment of electricity and luminance and curiosity from the rolling hills in my grandmother’s backyard was not enough. The fireflies had died years before, and it was not my life, but it was my fire—extinguishing, sputtering, gone. The mysteries of electrical wires, the dangers in summer thunderstorms, the fragility of the pulse in a firefly—I learned their consequences, their truths, doused in humid guilt.

I don’t clearly remember the return to the fallen powerline—but my father does. I’ve been told we retraced our path on sunken soles with fathers in hand. They paced in front, muttering, their rage the distant rumble of thunderclouds. The time between the storm and the new dusk had lengthened— my wonder, too, must have begun to pass. The sun peering through the leaves sharpened into daggers of light and the clouds floating across the sky darkened into ominous beings. We arrived to the fallen powerline and heard its pulse, smelled its burned breath, saw its slithering body. My father did not speak for the rest of the night.

My family is not normally at a loss of words. Daily events swamp conversations— but they are tales of the current, the relevant, the safe—the details are protected in the safety net of the present. However, on occasion, the safety net is discarded—the past is dissected, analyzed when the details of memory grow frayed and torn. I ask my father how a shock with the intensity to denature our neurons and fry our organs could have pulsed through us without harm—he shutters.

“If you touched it on its side, without direct contact to the wire. And if you had rubber soles in your shoes, and the concrete by your feet was dry, I guess,” my father pauses. “You could have been shocked and not died.”

The pulse of electricity feels renewed once the circuit of memory is exposed to fresh air, and I feel the fear, the guilt, the naked awareness of my naivety.

When I call my brother on the phone to ask him his memory of the fallen powerline, I find a startled pause. It is because when Will and I are assigned to share a memorable story, one deserving of a retelling, we both tell the story of the fallen powerline—seven years later, on the same day, at universities 559 miles apart. I call to ask his memory, and an acknowledgement arises of its unspoken, branding impact, distinct enough to retell even after never mentioning it to each other before. Our recollections are littered in details of difference, but a knowledge of significance greater than our childhood minds could comprehend intertwines memories, twin minds curious, grasping for understanding. I ask him why he chose this story to tell his public speaking class, and he says he gained an appreciation for life. I chose it for another reason. After the wire encounter, I still did not know summer thunderstorms. But I did know their aftermath, and perhaps that was enough. I no longer approach live wires. I no longer trap fireflies in jars.

Instead, I watch their bumbling, buzzing bodies in the night sky. I am curious, but never reach out to capture their glow.

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A Word from Abby 

When apprehensive about the facts, I tend to lean into the metaphorical. Typically, I have found comfort in utilizing figurative language to immerse a reader into my writing when the topic is more ambiguous. However, when the facts are few, there is little left to ground my language, leaving readers not pulled into the scene, but rather stranded as distant observers. The known was comfortable, and the hazy moments were shaded in vague language. Through writing this memoir, I was challenged to grapple with the unknown. And in this, I discovered the nuance and depth created when balancing a story with what is known and what is not—in ceasing the chase for a perfect account, I found an experience worth sharing.

The memory of the thunderstorm and its remains has always been prominent in my mind—not for its details, but for the foreign and distinctive emotions it bears. When writing this memoir, my difficulty didn’t necessarily stem from what to write about, but rather how to. I was accustomed to crafting narratives from a known plot and masking unknown details in figurative language. However, through exploring essays in Elisabeth’s class, I found the power in working with what I wasn’t certain of—and through this, the recalled details and emotions were amplified. I found a scene could be crafted to both reflect my tendency towards poetic prose as well as to draw a reader into the moment.

When realizing this retelling was not a perfect account, but a memory fueled through personal significance, I called my brother and father for their recollections. It became evident that the prominent moments were varied in our storytelling, and determining how to incorporate their perspectives while maintaining my own voice was a new task. How does one fluidly tell a single story that is based on multiple recollections? In order to do so, I focused not necessarily on the differences, but on the details that connote individual meaning. For my father, the return back to the fallen powerline; for my brother, the near-death experience and the gratefulness for life; and I, perhaps a loss of innocent curiosity. Through these moments, I felt I could tell my story, while still validate the recollections of my family members. A powerful moment has the ability to bear varied individual significance—and through this, a plethora of equally valid stories may be shared.

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From Professor Elisabeth Whitehead