Fear of Getting Burned (Eternal Flame Book 1)

by Peter Styles

  “Interesting.” His tone was still even. His smile only made me angrier. “If everyone knows that, then why didn’t you do it?”

  “I was getting to it,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Ah, of course. It’s good to see that you manage to stay busy while your insolent little dog destroys your work and home.”

  “You know what? You don’t—I can’t—you—ugh!” I threw my hands up in the air, accidentally jerking Pongo along with me. He squeaked, and I quickly bent down to give him an apology pat. “I’m going to learn how to train my own dog, and he’s going to be the greatest dog you’ve ever seen,” I spat. “He’s going to be smart, and he’s going to be loyal, and he’s going to learn to hold a fire hose with his mouth!”

  “That doesn’t sound safe for anyone involved.” Rick’s smile had faded into a thin line. He was frowning, but I couldn’t tell what emotion was actually behind it. “I wasn’t trying to—“

  “I don’t care,” I snapped. “Come on, Pongo.”

  As I was walking away, I heard Rick call, “Before you leave, I have one quick question for you!”

  I sighed. I didn’t turn back, but I said, “Yeah?”

  “You keep calling your dog ‘he’ and you named it Pongo.”

  “So?”

  There was a tiny, muffled snort of laughter. “I hate to break it to you, but your dog is less of a Pongo and more of a Perdita.”

  I whirled around. Pongo yipped and bounced with excitement. I wondered if he thought we were dancing or something. It wouldn’t surprise me, considering how stupid I suddenly realized he was. “What are you talking about?”

  Rick was holding a hand in front of his mouth, clearly trying to hide his smile. “I’m talking about the fact that your dog is a girl, Kyle.”

  I looked down at Pongo, then leaned back to get a look at his butt. It turned out it was pretty clearly her butt. “Fuck!” I snapped. I turned around and stormed back toward the front of the store, but I could still hear Rick’s laughter ringing in my ears.

  I was relieved when I found Diaz standing at the door with a bag of dog food and several toys. “That took forever,” he reminded me. “What were you doing?”

  I led Pongo to the doors, scowling. “Talking to a bitter, mean, arrogant arsonist.”

  “Wow, man. That managed to both be extremely specific and totally unhelpful. I think you missed your calling.”

  “It was that guy from the station.”

  “The hot one?”

  I cringed. Even when I thought of that arrogant smirk, I had to admit he was pretty handsome. “Yeah. Him.”

  “What about him?”

  “He caught Pongo. Then he basically told me I’m a shitty dog owner and Pongo is a shitty dog and we’ll never be able to train her to be a proper fire dog.”

  Diaz frowned. “Her?”

  “Oh, yeah. Apparently, Pongo is a girl.”

  “How did you not notice that?”

  “How did you?!”

  He sighed and nodded. He hefted the bag of food higher on his hip and handed me the bag of toys. Pongo stuck her nose into the bag, but I shook it away from her. “Okay, so we both suck at this. What now? We can’t give him—I mean her—back. We’re stuck.”

  “You don’t have to talk about her like she’s a Toyota with a shoddy engine,” I said, affronted.

  “Don’t I? That’s pretty much what she is, right? She’s a lemon in dog form.”

  “No, she isn’t,” I said stubbornly. At a long look from Diaz, I added, “So she’s a little rough around the edges. Who isn’t? She wasn’t exactly being trained super well at her first home. You saw that place. It was a mad house. We’ll teach her everything she needs to know, and it’ll be great.”

  “Where is this coming from?” he asked as we neared his front door. He barely managed to nudge it open before Pogo was shoving her head through. When I let her off her leash, she bounded off happily, probably with the intent of destroying the first shiny thing she found. “Kyle, you wanted to get rid of her this morning, remember? You kept going on and on about what an inconvenience she is and how we don’t know anything about dogs. Did you get body swapped in the last few hours?”

  “No. I just see her potential now.”

  Diaz looked appropriately skeptical.

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, fine. You got me. She’s an absolute nightmare. Are you happy now?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy. But that’s not the point. What’s with the big change?”

  I stayed silent for a while. I sauntered off to the kitchen, got myself a beer, and cracked it before walking back to the living room and flopping down on the couch. I turned the TV to the first channel I could think of and settled in to watch some reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond.

  Really, I was thinking about what Diaz had asked me. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know the answer, because I did. The problem was that the answer was incredibly stupid, and I was embarrassed to admit it. Rick had made fun of me for not being able to take care of my own dog—the very thing I’d wanted ever since I was a little kid—and he was completely right about it. The truth was that I had no idea what I was doing. I was about as good at caring for Pogo as I was at sprouting wings and flying around town.

  But those words were never going to pass my lips. I wasn’t going to admit defeat: not to Diaz, not to the rest of the guys at work, and definitely not to Rick.

  “So,” Diaz finally said, “you think that guy’s a fire bug?”

  I stared at the TV. Colors blurred together and I had no clue after a few minutes what I was actually seeing. But I answered him as confidently as I could. “I don’t know if he lit that fire,” I admitted, “but I know one thing.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  I took a sip of beer and was surprised by how bitter it tasted. “The guy is an asshole.”

  Chapter Five

  A couple nights later, enjoying a night off with an Ambien and a warm glass of milk, I had a waking dream I’d had way too many times.

  I knew it was a waking dream because the weirdness just wasn’t there. Numbers didn’t go all screwy, none of the clocks broke, and lines of text didn’t float off into the ether. But it was all there in hyper realistic Technicolor, the same thing I’d seen a thousand times before.

  The same memory, all of it true to life.

  I was ten years old and playing outside my parents’ trailer. There wasn’t really much for me to do there or many places to go in the trailer park. Two trailers down was a sex offender, the neighbor directly on the other side was a prostitute, the folks a little ways behind us were meth cookers and dealers, and the person across from us was yet another sex offender. My only choice was to sit on the cold, rusty, metal steps of the trailer and play with whatever it was that I’d been given or I’d managed to find.

  That day, I was trying to MacGyver up a terrarium for some tadpoles I’d found in a ditch by my school. Young and naïve as I was, I didn’t believe my parents when they said our home was way too small for a dog. “Dogs need exercise and a place to go to the bathroom,” my mom told me around her cigarette one day. “Where do we have that around here?”

  “I can give up my room,” I said enthusiastically. “The dog can sleep in my bed. That’d be enough room for a chihuahua or something, right?”

  My mom let out a long, smoke-fueled sigh. “No pets, Kyle. Now go find something else to do, huh? Just stay away from the kiddie diddlers.”

  On a related note, I didn’t talk to my parents much after I left home. Go figure.

  In spite of the warnings, I was determined to show my parents how responsible I was by showing them I could raise and keep healthy frogs all the way through their life cycle.

  I was in the middle of picking some grass from one of the few little islands of greenery in the park when I heard both of my parents screaming.

  I turned around, ready to fight to solve whatever problem it was—even then I was deter
mined to be a hero—to see the entire trailer going up in a blaze.

  I didn’t even think; I just ran for the door. Later, I would realize that I had burnt off my fingerprints grabbing at the metal handle before my dad pulled me away. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” he yelled, shaking me by my collar.

  “The frogs!” I gasped, trying to kick my way out of his chokehold. “My frogs are in there!”

  “Frogs?”

  “Tadpoles!” I wailed. I knew my dad hated it when I cried, but my tears overflowed regardless. “I have a whole family of tadpoles in a tank! We need to save them, Dad!”

  My parents couldn’t do anything but watch and wait for the fire department to arrive while all of our earthly belongings were consumed by flame. I sat on the ground and wept uncontrollably, thinking of the poor little tadpoles trying to skitter around with their burgeoning legs while the water around them boiled. I had named them all, and in that moment, they were all gone.

  My dad ignored my tears. My mom, though, came over and stood beside me. With a softness and gentleness she very rarely displayed, she ran a hand over my hair until my cries died off into sniffles. “I’m sorry, kid,” she said quietly, under her breath so my dad wouldn’t hear. “We were both taking a nap and the place just went up. Sorry I didn’t get to grab anything for your first.”

  I wiped hard at my eyes. I didn’t want there to be any evidence of my tears once my dad stopped being hypnotized by the fire. “I don’t care about stuff. I care about my tadpoles.”

  She took a deep pull on her cigarette and let it out, watching the fire pensively. Both of my parents looked dead behind the eyes most of the time, as if their souls had left their bodies and they were just brainless automatons, but in that moment, I saw a spark of something there. Sadness, maybe, or a memory flashing across her face. I had never even considered that my mom might have faced losses and disappointments in her own life until that moment. I’d never felt so connected to her.

  Finally, she dropped her eyes to look at me, her hand still brushing my hair. “I told you no pets for a reason, kiddo,” she whispered, barely heard over the roar of the fire and the sirens in the distance. “You can’t have anything that’s too nice or that you love too much, because this is what happens.” She looked back into the fire and watched the glass in the kitchenette’s window burst out, and we both watched while Mom’s dreamcatcher—the only decoration in the entire trailer—melted off its hook. “If you care about something, it could get destroyed. And losing it hurts a lot more than having it will make you feel good.”

  The next morning, all I could think of was my mother’s words. I had always resented what she said so much. It wasn’t just horrifying and painful, it was rage-inducing to me. I felt like I was the only person who couldn’t have good things. I wondered why other kids got pets and four-wheelers and nice clothes and I couldn’t even have a single tadpole without God raining punishing fire down on me. Even after I discovered that the fire had been started from a cigarette my dad dropped in his sleep, I still felt like it was somehow my fault. I worried that I’d gotten too cocky, or maybe too happy. I had expected something good to happen, and I had to be punished for it. I spent years trying to get past the idea that I might never be able to have anything good in my life.

  I looked around my apartment while I ate breakfast. It wasn’t exactly difficult to do; it was a studio apartment with a bathroom the size of a linen closet and a murphy bed. I saw pretty much everything there was to see within five seconds.

  I had told myself for a long time that I’d gotten over the fire and my mother’s words. I had gone to therapy and talked it out, gotten a prescription for an antidepressant, and I didn’t really think about it unless it was directly following one of those dreams.

  But when I looked around my apartment—the place where I was supposed to be happiest and most at ease—I realized that I hadn’t gotten past it at all. In fact, the only thing I’d ever done for myself in defiance of what my mother told me was getting Pongo. I certainly wasn’t funneling my time and resources into the little cube I lived in where there were perpetual black spots on the ceiling above my shower and three different types of peeling wallpaper in equally ugly shades. I was eating my breakfast on a desk chair with no desk, for God’s sake. I wasn’t treating myself any better than my mother had told me to, no matter how much I wanted to tell myself I was completely over it.

  The worst part, though, was that I hadn’t treated anyone or anything else very well, either.

  I went over to Diaz’s place that morning with a renewed sense of purpose. He was surprised when he opened the door. “Aren’t we off shift for like another week and a half?” Even though he was my best friend, we didn’t see each other all that much when we were off shift. We got just about as much of each other as we could take when we were living in the same cramped room. Diaz preferred to spend his time off drinking with old college friends, and I was usually busy sleeping and working out.

  It didn’t strike me until I was standing in front of him that my visit must have seemed pretty weird from his end. I decided to just commit and do what I’d gone there to do. “Yeah,” I said, “but I wanted to come take Pongo for a walk.”

  Diaz frowned. “You sure? Because you don’t seem so good at this whole leash-holding thing, and that’s a pretty big part of the actual walk. At least, that’s what the internet has led me to believe.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. I just…” I shrugged pathetically. “She’s my dog, man. She may be kind of a shitty dog, but she’s mine, and she’s my responsibility.”

  “Is this your way of admitting how shitty it was of you to try to pawn her off on me?” he asked bluntly.

  I winced. “Yeah, it is. That was really, really crappy and unfair of me, and I know that. I’m sorry.”

  His irritable expression snapped into a grin. That was Diaz; once he got an apology, any grudge he might be holding was over. “Good,” he said. “Because she didn’t shut up for a single minute last night.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Barking the whole time. The cops even showed up after a while to see if I was abusing her.” He folded his arms in thought. “This probably sounds weird, especially since you only adopted her a little while ago, but I think she’s really attached to you. Like, I think she knows who her owner is.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “Wow. That’s actually really cool.”

  “Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “Now wait here while I go get the devil dog so I can release her into your custody.”

  I sighed. Of course. The grudge may have ended, but the teasing never would.

  I had always thought of dog-walking as a kind of relaxing hobby. It always seemed fun to me to walk down the sidewalk, looking around at the world as it lived and breathed all on its own and having a beautiful moment of bonding between man and beast. Sure, you occasionally had to pick up shit, but it was worth it for being able to share the sheer majesty and beauty of nature with man’s best friend.

  It turned out that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  I wiped my forehead, trying to scrub away the sweat accumulating there. “Come on, Pongo,” I complained. “Just go already.”

  She looked up at me from the tree she was squatting beside and opened her mouth in a wide puppy grin, her tongue lolling out as she panted.

  I wiped my forehead again. I couldn’t blame her for the panting; it was at least ninety degrees, and we’d been walking for half an hour. Every time I tried to bring her back to Diaz’s, she would whine and complain. I tried giving her treats to encourage her to go inside, and I even sat in the living room and tossed her toys around in what I hoped looked like an appealing fashion, but she wasn’t to be swayed. Instead, she’s paw and whine at the door until I brought her back out, and she clearly thought that the best use of her time was to sit on the grass, decidedly not peeing on anything.

  After a few minutes, she got up and started trotting exci
tedly ahead of me again, and I groaned. “Really? You drank like two gallons of water, you monster,” I reminded her. “And you’re still not going to pee?”

  Although she couldn’t answer me in words, her tail suddenly reminded me of one giant, extended middle finger.

  After another block, I almost jumped out of my skin when I heard shouted German commands. I looked around wildly, half expecting to see some kind of skinhead parade, but soon realized that the orders were coming from behind an old, squat building of yellowed brick with a sign that said, “Van Buren Obedience Academy and Kennel.” I decided that the voice sounded familiar, but I could have been biased; other than Diaz, I’d only ever heard one person speak German.

  “Come on, girl,” I muttered under my breath to Pongo. “Let’s get out of here before that jerk comes out here to talk smack about you again.”

  She looked up at me, let out a huff of air, trotted to the sidewalk, and flopped down into the grass.

  “Pongo!” I hissed. I shook the leash. She rolled onto her back, thrashing happily on the grass. “Oh my God, you dumb dog! Don’t prove this asshole right on his front step! At least try to look smart and trainable!”

  I tugged at her a few more times, but she wasn’t going to budge. She had become completely entranced by a ladybug on her ear, and she spent at least ten minutes trying to see if she could eat it. She nearly managed to get the tip of her ear in her mouth when I heard chuckling from behind me.

  I turned to see Rick watching me in amusement. He was wearing shorts and a tight tank top, and I had to remind myself that I was supposed to hate him. I managed to keep my eyes away from his hips and crotch, at least, though I was still visually molesting his shoulders when I snapped, “What do you want?”

  He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Absolutely nothing,” he assured me. “I just enjoy watching people play with their pets.”