“Everything’s half off,” an old woman growls from the porch.
Krystal offers a quick smile that turns to a grimace as she turns back to her son. The woman gives her the creeps–an unfiltered cigarette dangling from colorless lips, her face a spider web of wrinkles, and a filthy house dress clinging to her sagging, puffy frame.
“Hey,” the little boy says, tugging on Krystal’s shirt, “that’s Speedy!”
“Mmhmm,” she mumbles, inspecting a dented tea kettle that probably qualifies as an antique. It looks just like one she used to own.
Her son picks up the ragged stuffed animal–a cheetah with springy legs and a long tail–and sniffs at it experimentally.
Just before he can put the dingy thing in his mouth, Krystal snatches it out of his hands. “Nathan Alexander, that’s dirty!” Years before, when he’d been teething, he’d had a habit of chewing on the tail of a similar stuffed cheetah toy–a gift from her mother that had been with him his first night in the bassinet beside her bed. She’d sneak it away every few nights after he was asleep to wash it, but during the day, it never left his side. Oh, how he’d cried when Speedy was lost.
Glancing again at the stuffed toy, her eyes go wide. The barely-visible red thread where she’d mended a torn seam; the discolored and matted tip of the tail he used to chew on; and, she sees with a gasp, the faded tag with “Nate A” written in washed-out red marker.
“It’s Speedy, Mom!”
“Yes,” she stammers. Suddenly, the plush thing feels cold and damp and distasteful. Nate reaches for it, but she instinctively holds it out of his reach. Speedy had been incinerated, along with nearly everything else they owned, in the house fire two years ago. She’s certain of that.
Along with Nate’s baby photos. And her own.
Along with Daryl.
She bites back a sob that claws at her throat. It’s been so long since she’s wept over her husband’s death. And now? Here? At this ratty little “Fire Sale!” she can’t even recall deciding to stop at?
Nate still grasps for the stuffed animal, but she shakes her head and tosses it toward the back of the pile of plush toys on the plastic folding table. The lump in her throat lessens as soon as it arcs away from her.
“We’re going, sweetie.” She takes Nate’s hand even as he moves to try to grab the cheetah.
“No, Mom, wait!”
But she pulls him along, gently but firmly, as she glances around at the rest of the bric-a-brac displayed on tables and on the patchy, yellow lawn. Some are singed and soot-covered, others are untouched by smoke or flame, but show the kind of wear and tear you’d expect of a junk sale.
And, with growing unease–no, it’s fear I’m feeling, she thinks with odd clarity–she recognizes more and more of the items that used to populate the small two-bedroom ranch in West Plains: an ottoman with a torn corner where their rat terrier, Ralphy, had chewed on it; a display of National Geographic magazines spread on a low coffee table Nate had once bumped his head on while taking his first tentative steps on his own; the small bed in the shape of a red race car–the “big boy bed” he’d graduated to once he outgrew his crib; a huge pile of toys that he’d loved to arrange neatly next to that bed, many of which she recalls him discovering under the tree one of the four Christmases they’d celebrated in that house.
“Nothing strikes your fancy?” the old woman asks with a dry cough. “One man’s junk, they say…” and she flicks her rheumy eyes to look past Krystal, just as Nate gives her arm another tug.
“Mommy! Let me pet the doggy, please? He looks like–”
She hears the familiar sharp yip, and a cold shiver wracks her spine. The acrid, chemical-laced smell of burning linoleum fills her nose, and another scent too–sweet, meaty. Her breath catches and, for a moment, she is rooted to the ground. Everything hushes and darkens and she vaguely recognizes that she might faint.
Everything rushes back in one jarring and painful wave: Daryl yelling for her to wake up even as the wail of the smoke alarm yanks her out of a pleasant dream; smoke wisping along the ceiling, colorless in the waning moonlight; the dog’s frantic yaps and Daryl bellowing Nate’s name; the chaotic flight down the hall to their son’s room even as the smoke she’s inhaling doubles her over with great whooping coughs; Daryl emerging from the room with Nate and shoving the boy into her arms and screaming for her to go out the back, through the kitchen, and that he would grab the dog and be right behind her. And the thunderous crash and whoosh of heat and flame that made her turn to see the gaping hole revealing the fully-engulfed attic, and a pile of glowing timber where her husband had been a moment before.
She hitches in a breath, awash with the sickening certainty of what is behind her.
“Hey babe.”
A man’s voice, soft and kind, from over her left shoulder. She turns and freezes and screams and collapses to the ground.
Nate recoils slightly from the blackened, skeletal husk of a rat terrier that is somehow wagging its shriveled stub of a tail, then he looks up. “Daddy?”
The tall man–naked, skin blistered and charred, face like a melted candle–smiles down at him. His lips crack and ooze. “Hey buddy.” He bends painfully and rummages through Krystal’s purse as she screams again, incoherent. He removes a five-dollar bill and shambles over to the old woman on the porch. “For me, the dog, and the cheetah,” he says, and she snatches the bill from his blackened hand.
He turns back around and holds that same ravaged hand out and–oh God no please Nate don’t–Nate takes it.
The canine abomination scurries between their legs.
Nate turns to his Mom and extends his own hand. Please. No!
And she takes it.