Megan Jauregui Eccles

What it is to Burn

There’s smoke in the air.

Not the tinny smoke of barbecues or the warm, wood smoke of a fireplace. Not even the salty, beach pit smoke of summer evenings and shared laughter.

Fire season smells different.

A wildfire smells like a warning.

I’m four years old. My baby sister is in a car seat. There are kids all around me. My grandma sits beneath the oak tree in a field I’ve never been to. She’s explaining to us that our parents will be right back, that they’re fighting the fire. I imagine my mom and dad with their fists up on the front line, throwing punches. A red hand fights back. Later, I will learn that they were digging fire breaks. Later, I will learn that the unfamiliar field is the only way out.

When my aunt’s house burns, it burns so hot that the roof pops off and lands in the trees, a hundred feet away. I joke that my cousin shook up a soda and left it underneath. I pick melted coins out of the rubble once it’s cooled. But then my aunt and my cousins move across the country. All the laughter goes stale.

I’m fourteen years old. I’ve just left my first homecoming dance. The man who will someday be my husband is in the same car, my aunt’s big van, filled with sleepy teenagers. I’m not tired. My head is full of excitement, buzzing like bees. I feel wild and impermanent and like anything is possible. When I get home, the air is hazy. My parents whisper in the dark. I sit out in our porch and watch the fire creep closer and closer.

In the morning, the sheriff is at our house, telling us to leave. My mom is anxious, my dad steady. Finally, he tells my mom to pack. I grab my American Girl doll, the novel I am writing, my dog. We get into my parent’s new car. We take a road that seems to go nowhere, dusty, and unpaved. There’s a line of cars. Uncles, aunts, cousins. All of us leaving like ants in a line. Once we hit a real road, my dad hops in a truck and goes back home to fight the fire. I know now he will clear brush and dig trenches and put out the fires he sees.

We go to the coast to my maternal grandmother’s house. I sleep on the floor in the laundry room to stay close to my dog. I chat with my friends in AIM. The pool fills with ash.

The news comes in two waves. First, that the fire chief loved that he could see all of San Diego County from my parent’s house. Firefighters sleep on our porch and clear the brush to protect our home. They’re able to keep our home safe and countless other homes with a bird’s eye view.

Second.

There’s a girl who lives right behind the fire station. I’ve seen her at school, she’s on drum line. I watched her a few nights before at the homecoming game. She’s the kind of effortless, high school cool that seems infinite. She and her sister try and drive out of the fire. Their house burns. They burn. Her sister sustains severe burns. The girl doesn’t survive.

I’m eighteen. My parents have come for homecoming weekend with my eight-month-old twin sisters in tow. I stayed close to home, living with my maternal grandparents off the coast and commuting to the prestigious university in which I have almost a full scholarship. One of those scholarships is in the name of the girl who died in the fire a few years earlier.  It is the loveliest weekend. It is the last weekend.

It is still dark that next morning when my sisters and mother clamber into the house. The winds turn and there is no time for warning. They are here. My dad is home fighting the fires. He promised to grab my dog if things get bad.

Things get bad.

Two days later, we get the call.

“It was a rough night.”

Those words live in my mind, an echo of the after and the before. A rending of my life. The stories unfold in bits and pieces. My dad joins us at my maternal grandmother’s once the danger has passed. There is nothing left, save for his mother’s house. Everything else is lost. The house, my dog, the last bit of hope in my father’s eyes. He tells us how he could feel the roof sponge beneath his feet. How the firefighters sat at the bottom of the road, watching. How he pleaded, and they said it wasn’t worth the risk. How he took the risk and lost everything anyway. My dog was so scared, she ran into the house. We find her bones in the pantry, the same place she used to wait out thunderstorms.

School is cancelled for the week. My classmates joke about how awesome fire week was, how much fun they had. I don’t say anything. When asked, I repeat like a litany that no one died. That we are okay.

I am not okay.

There’s a folder in my desk drawer with all our important papers. There’s a shelf in my office with books I can’t stomach losing. Signed first editions, that book of Keats poetry with my husband’s grandfather’s name scratched into the corner, a special edition of Anne of Green Gables that my grandmother brought me from Avonlea. I know where our wedding album is and we keep hard-drives together, with everything double backed on the cloud. When the next big fire comes, I know exactly what to do.

There’s an app for everything. There’s an app for fires. The notifications have a special sound and I track their movement. I know which way the wind is blowing. I know the percentage of containment. I have calculated how much time we need to pack the car and how long it will take us to get to a safe place. I wonder, often, if any of those safe places are in California.

I pass out popsicles. The kids eat them beneath the eucalyptus trees, laughing and playing. The wind shifts away from us. The fire is 60% contained with no more forward movement.  I can still see the smoke in the distance, hear the hum of planes.

I breathe in deep. The air is clearer now.

“I got you a flower,” my three-year-old says.

I tuck it behind my ear and smile at him. He’s off again, not a worry in the world. My ten-year-old looks at the smoke and looks at me.

“We’re okay,” I tell him.

And it’s a truth and a lie. I count the seconds, count the days. One more fire season gone. I pray my children never know what it is to burn.

We are not phoenixes, rising from the ashes. We are seeds. What is destroyed comes back to the soil. There are seeds that only grow with the intensity of the heat. Some trees with deep roots come back up. We grow and we grow, different, but back again. Altered, but alive. Quick to burn and slow to rise, we manage to survive.

Megan Jauregui Eccles writes dark, speculative fiction for young adults and is represented by Lauren Galit of LKG Agency  Her writing has appeared in Kelp Journal, Coachella Review, Ladies of the Fright, The Lineup, Wild Greens, and Dwarf+Giant. She teaches creative writing at John Paul the Great Catholic University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside—Palm Desert.