Waterlogged Recollections

The night my father took five gallons of gasoline

And a Zippo lighter to my childhood home

In a manic and methamphetamine-induced frenzy

I was at a lock-in playing hide-and-seek

in the empty high school classrooms

Hiding in the gym lockers

My ringtone resonated through the steel

like microphone feedback

When the call came through

I thought it was a joke,

I begged the person on the phone

To do anything they could to save our animals

Break the door down

Shatter the windows

Climb through the basement storm shelter

When I relayed the call to my mother,

I heard a laugh on the other end of the line

I did not know then what that laugh meant

Whether she too thought it was a joke

Or if she knew already that it was arson

It took exactly nine minutes to drive the fifteen-mile

Stretch between the school and our farm

The lake road swarmed with buzzing

Paramedics, firetrucks, police officers

From all tri-state counties

Barricading the farm in a semi-circle

Suffocating every roadway to the house

Leaving me no option but to run barefoot

Through gravel, shattered beer bottles, and thorns

When I finally saw our home---

Coughing out flames from the flank

Sick with pneumonia

From all the mold growing in the floorboards

Three floods swallowing her whole

1965, 1973, 2008

The freshly painted siding and pine scented stairs

From the last reconstruction

Only three years prior

My mother's silhouette illuminated

Against the backdrop of our burning home

Holding three dogs in a horse lead-rope by their collars---

From a distance, she looked like

Persephone and Cerberus

Escaping Hell---

The fire a byproduct of a messy divorce

Sixteen years as a Stockholm-afflicted Persephone

Finally emerging from a hellish marriage

With soot-covered clothing

And a jewelry box hoisted on her shoulder

Ripped down from the wall of the burning house

Pieces of drywall falling off the nails with each step she took,

She turned briefly

To look back upon the house,

Like Lot's wife upon Sodom---

When we finally locked eyes,

I had never seen someone so content

In the face of destruction

So utterly calm and collected

As if floodwater and fire promised a fresh start

She did not cry once

Not even

When the firefighters told us it could be a gas leak

Or that once the roof caught fire, there was no saving it

Old flood houses burn fast

Not even

When they found our missing farm dog on fire

Huddled in the rubble of the porch

When his lungs finally gave out months later

After thousands of dollars in vet bills

Not even

When I found the missing metal gas can

That was never recovered from the garage

In the back of my father's pickup

Not even

When she kissed me on the forehead

Smelling of smoke and sweat and sorrow

And told me to leave that night of the fire---

I can still remember the words she said

As she handed me her life savings in that jewelry box:

Let that fucker burn---

nothing in this world matters

more than my children---

not even that old house

Haunted and too waterlogged to burn