You're On Fire Pt 8

Firemen do everything as loudly as possible, and with booming voices they wrestle beds, dressers, and tables in out of the rain, howling with cusses when they catch their fingers in doorways. You try to help by grabbing at corners and lifting with all your might until your father tells you to get out of the fucking way. With your mother attacking the kitchen and your brother being a fecundating anus (your favorite thing to call him because he doesn’t know what it means), you retreat out to Engine Two parked in front of the house, the one they call The Cunt because it breaks down so much. You climb up behind the wheel and don’t touch anything; piled up in a milk crate on the floor are the waterlogged and broken Rookie Books that the new hires have been trying memorize. They’re the same ones your father studied on when he was a newbie, and that you read too when nobody was looking, though when you started saying words like flashover and oxidation, and you knew what they meant and you were only four, your father accused your mother of teaching you behind his back just to mess with him; so they took you to the doctor who told them to stop being ridiculous. By the time Dan Bell graduated from probationary rookie to full-fledged member of the Rain City Fire Department in 1974, you could repeat flawlessly the definitions of thermal radiation and Joule readings and a hundred more besides, though you rarely did so. As your uncles told you, it’s a great party trick kid, but otherwise keep your fucking mouth shut.