The Ocean in the Fire

by Renee N. Meland

  “Why not? I come here all the time.”

  “You know why.”

  “But that was an accident. Why would I have done what she said I did? Especially right in front of people?”

  The clerk sighed. “Because…” she took another breath. “Whatever the hell you people do up there, you make our customers uncomfortable, and we can’t have that. This is a family business.”

  “But I didn’t…”

  “Go.”

  Connor looked around at the other patrons. Surely, one of them, maybe one who had been closer to the door when he had ran into that awful woman, would stand up for him. One of them certainly saw what didn’t happen. He looked at each face, desperately searching for someone to have an ounce of sympathy, someone who would come to his defense.

  They all looked away.

  Every. Single. One.

  As he left the bookstore for the last time, he hoped that the hostility he had just felt was relegated to just the bookstore, and once he was outside, he would figure out how to make everything okay again. It was one thing to be stared at, it was quite another to be accused of a crime. But he held out to the hope that perhaps it could all be fixed, and once it was he could comfortably fade into the background as before.

  After he made his way back to the truck, he sat in the driver’s seat for a while, listening to the vinyl squeak as he settled in. He turned his radio down and watched as the world carried on around him. From his parking spot, he could see down both sides of the street. He had the perfect view of every passerby, and as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t deny that something was wrong, and whatever it was had reached beyond one single business. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, something that could be corrected with a quick explanation.

  Then he remembered the birthday party.

  ***

  When he walked into his house, he stuck his bag of newly purchased items on the kitchen counter. The wire had poked a hole in the bag, and sat menacingly in the air, waiting to scratch the first passerby who was not paying attention to his or her surroundings. “Poe? Are you home?”

  His daughter came running to him from around the corner, shoes clomping loudly on the stairs with each step. “Daddy!” She threw her arms around him. He felt the tug of her little fingers squeeze the fabric of his shirt. The difference between a hug from Poe and a hug from Harper was that Poe didn’t want anything in return. Then there was his son, Gabriel, who preferred a stiff pat on the back above anything else. “Did you have fun in town? What did you do?”

  He patted the top of her head, gently messing up her hair. If it had been Harper instead, she would have thrown a fit. Poe didn’t care, and left her hair in disarray. “Come sit out on the porch with me for a moment.”

  “Sure.” Poe happily followed her dad outside, pigtails bouncing as she walked. He sat down on the top step, and motioned for her to sit down beside him. “What’s going on, Daddy?”

  Even at six, Poe was extremely perceptive. Sometimes Connor had an easier time hiding things from Kate than he did Poe. “When you had your birthday party a couple weeks ago, did you have fun?”

  “Oh yeah. It was great.” Poe smiled, but glanced at the ground as she said it. That was always her tell.

  “Poe?”

  The little girl sighed and bit her lip, as if she was worried that what she was about to say may hurt her father’s feelings. Connor couldn’t imagine Poe ever hurting him, especially not on purpose. Harper was the calculating one. With Poe, he could always be sure he would get the truth, and he hoped that would remain the case as she aged. “I had a great time; really I did. But the kids kept asking me and Harper about our farm, and why we live so far away. We didn’t know what they were talking about. We don’t make any of our stuff to sell like farmers do, and Harper told them so.”

  A lump formed in Connor’s throat. “What did you girls say we did?”

  “Well, Violet Reynolds kept saying we had to make money somehow, and asked what you and Mommy do for a living. I said you were a prepper. Then Annie Masterson asked me what that was. I told her we’re preparing for the end of the world.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Well, first Violet said you don’t make money doing that.”

  Connor put his arm around Poe. “She’s right. We’re very fortunate that your grandmother left us with enough money that we can live off of it and still afford to do what we do.”

  “Oh.” Poe’s eyes averted back toward the ground.

  “What else happened honey?”

  That’s when Connor saw the tears in her eyes. The boards of the porch squeaked as she shifted her weight to lean into him. “Violet kept saying things. Like her daddy told her once that we live all the way up here because you’re a murderer and probably kidnapped us and that we’re a cult. I didn’t know what a cult was.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Well she said that a cult’s a group of people who live together, like a family. So I said yeah, I guess we are. We’re just a family. Then she said cults are bad. We aren’t bad are we? You never killed anyone right? And you’re my real mommy and daddy too?”

  “No, of course I never killed anyone. And yes of course we’re your real parents. We did not kidnap you.” He paused. “And we aren’t a cult either, honey. A cult is something much different than a family. Sometimes people make up things to find explanations for what they don’t understand.” He felt her squeeze his wedding ring and spin it as it sat around his finger. “And sometimes other people will take those made-up things as fact.”

  Poe nodded. When he looked in her eyes, he could see the corner of their compound looking back at him in their reflection, an odd juxtaposition of flowers and tall grass with iron and steel. He could tell that even at such a young age, she was able to understand such a complicated concept as rumor and insecurity. It was almost worrisome how much of an adult was hiding in the tiny girl before him, jeans dirty with mud and a small leaf hanging from one of her pigtails. The pink ribbons in her hair did nothing to mask how deep her thoughts travelled. He was proud she was so much like him, yet he wished she wasn’t.

  She continued. “All the other kids told her to stop it, but then as they left, they kept asking us about the end of the world.” She hesitated. “They looked really scared. I didn’t know what to say, so I told them their moms and dads probably knew.”

  Connor swallowed hard, and the lump in his throat settled down in his insides. He had always meant the end of society as they knew it when he referred to what they were preparing for as the end of the world. It sounded far less dramatic when he said it privately at home than when he pictured his young daughter saying it to her classmates, then those same children telling their parents about it. Oh the stories that they must have come up with in their own, creatively sinister minds. Poe looked at him. “Was that bad, Daddy? I’m sorry…”

  He forced a smile. “No, of course not. You should be proud of who you are. It wasn’t a bad thing to say, not at all.” Or at least it shouldn’t have been. How they lived their lives shouldn’t have mattered to anyone else. They should have been able to live as they saw fit, without so much as a blink from the community around them. Their way of life should have been respected, the same way a religion or someone’s culture was respected, something not to be touched or ridiculed by a supposedly progressive society. They should have been able to continue on without trouble. But all Connor needed to do was look at history to know that the masses never quite behaved like they were supposed to. Usually, the people that called themselves progressive were the first to pass judgement, and were all too eager to light the torches. It just took a little spark, a little static in the dark to set the world on fire.

  And burn it would.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  POE

  The clearest picture Poe Holloway had of her sixth year on earth was one of the sky being blocked by thick metal bleachers. The blue and gray stripes had a dusting of green at the outer edge, where the
grass of the playground peeked through the base of the giant structure. Everything could be categorized as “giant” when she was six years old. At the time, she couldn’t imagine anything larger, thinking that any skyscraper or towers that she had seen in magazines were just tricks of the eye, towering monsters that were only real in someone’s vivid imagination.

  She spent her recesses hiding beneath them, sometimes with a book, probably filled with poetry from another time where life wasn’t so complicated, or in some ways, was more so. But most days, she would just sit there, with her knees held tightly against her chest, trying to concentrate on the soft grass between her toes instead of the hard words in her head.

  It wasn’t always so.

  Her fifth year on earth was much more pleasant, filled with days in the classroom where she safely disappeared into the landscape, and used that time to read the stories that her mother had introduced her to.

  Poe tried to think of that year, the year filled with the bliss that comes from not knowing any better, instead of what followed, as she sat up in her camouflaged guard tower. It was her turn to keep watch, and as she looked around she chuckled to herself, realizing what her father liked to refer to as the guard tower was more like a tree house piled on all sides with branches. Her dad knew that they would be getting visitors soon, and they had to all take turns watching for cars coming up the mountain in order to conserve the fuel they would need for the generator. Besides that, Poe and her father viewed it as one more opportunity to establish in a very visceral way that they had the upper hand. Once she saw them, it was her job to tell her mother or father over the radio that they had arrived, and to greet the newcomers. She would guide them up the mountain and into the one visible entry point to their property. Of course there was another, but the strangers never needed to be told that information.

  New people were dangerous. Poe knew that. Her father had told her that from the beginning, and no one had ever done anything to prove otherwise, except perhaps one person. Everyone else she had ever met had stayed true to her father’s word, so though she appreciated the exception to the rule, she knew her as just that: the exception.

  Her mother had made the mistake of signing her up for a playgroup at one point during her aforementioned sixth year. She had begged her mother not to; it was Harper’s idea of course. But no amount of pleading would sway her. “Harper can do it by herself,” she’d said.

  “Nonsense, Poe, it’ll be good for you. You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see. Once you get there everything will be fine.” Their mother: the eternal optimist. Poe considered herself more of a realist, and she really knew it was not going to be the fairy tale her mother had hoped for. She also wondered why it seemed to never occur to her mother that their definition of enjoyment could be two different things. To her, it was enjoyable to spend time in her room and to talk to the farm animals that they raised on their land. Of course sometimes she got lonely…very lonely. But maybe everyone on earth was just a little bit lonely anyway, a crowded planet filled with solitude.

  The day they (everyone is a “they” when you have no friends) almost got her was the day that her playgroup supervisor decided to take them to a park. Harper had caught the flu, so Poe was forced to go all by herself. “You’ll have fun,” her mother declared.

  How wrong she was.

  The swings were wide plastic yellow rectangles, and she remembered her pants getting caught in the small gap between the chain and the seat. Luckily, she managed to free herself before the tear became something more than a small hole. The whole scene that she avoided played out in her head nonetheless—her pants ripping wide open, and everyone, including her supervisor, pointing and laughing: because laughing at the misfortune of others is what people do.

  As always, the other children had dispersed like a flock of birds, flying away to all different corners of the playground. There was a small shed toward the far end of it, covered with a thin layer of moss and brown film, and Poe had thought she could hide out there until the supervisor called them back to go home. The woman was very easily distractible, sitting on a bench, legs crossed, with her nose deep in a celebrity magazine during every playgroup activity, so Poe slipped past her with no issue. Glancing backward, she noticed the woman kept her feet slightly elevated off the ground as she sat there, and Poe guessed she was trying to make sure her heels didn’t dip into the mud.

  Poe had just sat down in the grass behind the shed when she heard a voice from the other side of the chain-link fence that surrounded the park.

  “Freak,” it said.

  Poe glanced up from the blades of grass that she had been weaving into a tiny braid. “What?”

  A group of kids from the other side of the fence seemed to emerge from the pavement, multiplying before her eyes: girls that seemed to be carbon copies of one another, each with almost the same scowling face, just with different outfits. They looked like a pastel-laced hit squad, and Poe knew she was their next target. The leader stood closest to her. “Tell me, freak, does your father keep dead bodies up there? Is that why you live in the mountains?”

  She looked down toward the ground. After the birthday party, she had learned that sometimes it’s best not to tell the truth to strangers: actually, it was probably best all the time. “No. We just live up there. We farm and stuff.” Her explanation wasn’t entirely a lie: they did farm, they did garden, and they did live off the land.

  And when she was old enough, her dad would teach her how to shoot a rifle.

  Another voice: “All alone? Must be a reason. I bet your dad’s a murderer. That’s what everyone says. I heard he went all crazy in the middle of the bookstore too. Scared some poor lady to death.”

  And another: “Yeah, no other reason for somebody to be all the way up there. That’s where murderers go. They hide in the woods. Someday the cops’ll get him. They’ll take him away and you’ll never see him again. Ever.”

  Something inside Poe twisted and bubbled, and for an all-important moment she lost all reasoning. “What do you know anyway? Maybe your dad’s the one who’s a murderer.” As soon as the words slipped from her mouth, she winced. A voice in her head told her she should have just stayed silent. They would tire of tormenting her eventually; they always did.

  But she had spoken up. And because of that, there were now four girls twice her size starting to climb over the fence, and her supervisor was nowhere to be seen. As their hands clawed the wires, she could see the dirt under their fingernails. Or was it blood?

  They shouted at her as they rose, growing, hovering over her as they climbed. “I’ll teach you! Don’t talk about my dad!” and “Yeah, Victoria! Get her!” Her brain told her to run, to get away from this angry mob disguised as preteen girls, but her feet wouldn’t move. Their eyes were wide, and they were gritting their teeth so hard that spit was flying out of their mouths like the ravenous werewolves she had read about in countless books. And now they wanted to do what all wolves do: hunt their prey, and tear it apart.

  As they reached the top of the fence, Poe shut her eyes tightly. Even if the supervisor saw her, she’d never get there in time. She could cry out, but her voice was stuck in her throat, and doing so would have made her look like a coward anyway. So instead, she shut her eyes. She would not give them the satisfaction of cowering before them. Maybe not knowing when the blows would come would make them less painful.

  Maybe not.

  But instead of the beating she was expecting, she heard several “thuds.” And the thuds were not coming from fists pummeling into her. They were coming from the other side of the fence. She cautiously opened her eyes just in time to see the last girl be grabbed by the collar of her pink polka-dotted dress and pushed down hard onto the pavement. Poe looked up to see another girl, much older than her or her potential attackers, hovering over them. She looked about thirteen, and her blonde hair was pulled tightly back in a ponytail. She was in a soccer uniform, and Poe guessed that the girl had stumbled upon her situation on her way to pr
actice in the park. She watched as the girl grabbed each person in the group one by one and turned them toward herself. They were still grabbing at themselves, clutching whatever area of their bodies the girl had elected to pummel. “You leave her alone, do you hear me? What gives you the right to treat someone that way?”

  “But she…” one of the girls started.

  “But she nothing. You’re going to have plenty of crap coming at you in your life just because you’re a girl. The last thing you should be doing is being mean to each other.” Poe couldn’t tell which one, but one or several of them started crying. “Now go home and get it together. I don’t want to see you doing anything like this again, got it?”

  They all nodded like little bobble heads as they ran down the sidewalk and back to wherever they had come from. As Poe watched the cloud of Easter egg colors disappear down the street, she pictured them running home and telling their mothers their version of what happened: that a big mean girl pushed them down and yelled at them through no fault of their own.

  But at that moment, it didn’t matter.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The blonde girl smiled. “No problem.” She shrugged good-naturedly. “What did those girls want with you anyway?”

  Poe shrugged. “I don’t know. They called me a freak and said my dad killed somebody.” She took a deep breath, afraid that her guardian angel might think her impolite. “So I said ‘what do you know,’ and that her dad was the one who probably did that. She got really mad.” She managed a nervous chuckle. “Not the best comeback ever, but I tried. I’m not used to talking much.”

  The blonde girl nodded knowingly. “Got it. I know that girl. The chubby one.”

  Poe giggled.

  “I heard her dad’s in jail for something or another.” The blond girl snickered. “Maybe you hit a nerve.” She wiped her calloused hands on her pants, perhaps to wipe the bully-germs off her skin. “Good for you for defending your dad like that. You take care of yourself, okay?”