An Arsonists Lullabye

I knew the day I was born I'd be the most important person ever to live in Walltile, Minnesota.

Of course, I didn't know then what I'd do, or why. But with a father owning a bike shop and my mother, a stay-at-home radio contest call-in, who cares why?

The whole town was drowned and overdosed in sepia-toned morals anyway. A “Leave It to Beaver” backdrop on life that made you wish you had left it to Beaver and never touched it all. Copy-and-paste Tuesday line dances at the church. Copy-and-paste picnic basket school auctions like they're still chained to the 1800s and won't let go. Enslaved to this sick kind of nostalgia that people catch like the common cold on their birthday and sneeze through till they're buried in Walltile’s dry earth. Can't escape it even if you try to burn it out of you.

Nobody in Walltile was named Buster but me. And as far as I know, no one before ever was either. I asked my dad why he chose it, and he said they saw it on a glue commercial when they first got their TV. A big square box with only five channels and an antenna that was reminiscent of a praying mantis. The cowboy was wearing such a funny hat they bought the glue. Don’t know why the glue gave them the name. Straight like him to have that be the life moment to name his child after. There was no purpose in me being born. I think I just kinda caught hold of life like a lightning spark in dry grass—and I grew despite people trying to put me out.

I didn't gain any special awareness until I was about eight. Until then, I think the loud one (whoever they are) wanted me to blend in, learn to fit best I could. Then one day, bang—like breaking the neck of a soda pop bottle instead of twisting the cap—it was all there. Sticky and festering like soda on your hands. I felt the disgust, the enlistment to the cause. The knowing. Knowing that I was destined to flicker out and there wasn't a dang thing I could do to escape it. Unless I dedicated myself to taking in more oxygen than the rest, making the most CO₂, exhaling it out of fires like it was my own lungs at work. Create twice as much living as the rest of them, have my soul outside my body and untouchable. The people of Walltile called to me to release them. And I supposed, I had been to church enough to know I'm supposed to do good unto others. Now that I finally knew how I wanted it done to me, I could pass it on. Like baptism in brimstone.

I started small, taking apart blender bits and putting them back together again so nobody knew I took the wires. Then trying to take down the fire alarms so Mom ‘could make bacon without it going off.’ And the little lenses on Tommy Price’s missing glasses, sitting neatly in my now cramped treehouse so I could practice getting it started. (They never stopped posting those missing posters for Tommy Price at the movies. But nobody watches foreign films.)

I used to watch teens smoke from that treehouse. I hate smoking cigarettes. And almost everyone here deserves a pack-a-day gold star for catching cancer. Pops tries to hide it with that digital crap, but I know it when I feel it. I hate the way it smells, the way it contaminates something so distilled with the stench of nicotine. Gasoline or fire starters are a worthy sin, but no pocket drug dopamine starter waters down the experience for me. Not when the flames get going good.

I drive a pickup with no passenger seat. I collect mulch chips from each of my jobs in the glove compartment like my own personal Stanley cups. Hauling wood for work from one town to the other pays enough for me to keep driving. But I still live at home. I think my work is like playing leapfrog between two nowhere towns with nothing to hit me and put me out of my misery. My mother’s high score on Frogger was 42. The arcade in town got closed after the owner got lice. My mother said lice were the devil and should burn. Don’t know why I remember that, but I do.

I've drunk up to twelve energy drinks just to stay awake during the drive home on occasion. Caffeine works real good on keeping me thinking fast. I wonder if, like that Dickens book I read in high school, my blood will boil and catch fire—exploding my body into the air and haunting the town for ages with the stench. Wouldn't that be something?

My greater purpose, I knew, was waiting on the right hunch. The right twist of the gut or “Hey, Buster!” or Pink Floyd T-shirt on a girl who didn’t know anything but that everyone else was wearing it. Not that I listen to that kind of music. I only had one track on my Spotify Wrapped this year, ‘Apricots’ by Hollow House. They removed it last month, and when that itch hit, I lit the Taelen’s field.

Sometimes that's all it took to set me off.

Nothing big, just a little tug of anger or numbness or a tick bite—and that Superman version of me with heat vision would speed ninety down the road back home. Then like an animal I’d dig the matches out of the kitchen drawer like bone from skin and get to work. Then I wouldn't get hungry again for a while.

Boy, I wish the voices would always sing how they did when the little flecks start floating in the air. There's this noise with it, I can't explain it. It's calming though. It all the other noise and nerves curl up like a pill bug that I can crush real easy forwith a good stomp. A good crunching crack, like walking over fall leaves, or opening a bag of chips. One time popping bubble gum was enough to set me off on my biggest burn. Other times I'd just take up bowling. I've never gotten a turkey.

But tonight it was my Ma. All laid out, like a corpse at a wake, her lipstick was red and overlined. Dressed for church and covered in doughnut crumbs like confetti. Spit mummified on the edge of her lips as she snored blissfully unaware of how irritating the sound was to anybody else. Her own personal eulogy of everything wrong with this town. It hit me just then how much I hated her. How much I hated this house. These shoes. This feeling of waiting. How much I would enjoy seeing the toaster in the kitchen fall off a burning counter. Or watching the cat acrobat off the roof and escape to the tree like a rebelling teen. Or seeing which rafters caved in first. I wanted to know if any of the posters in my room would survive it. I dunno—call it scientific curiosity. Call it psycho. I call it truth.

Matches weren't enough for the occasion. I had to conduct the orchestra of the idea while it was still tuning up. I found the little flamer under the microwave in an Amazon box—the one Ma used for crème brûlée once on their fifth anniversary. She was going to return it, but never did. It wasn't like she didn’t have the time. So I took it and started small. I watched the flame lick the edge of the barstool. I like to start with corners. Something special about lighting up where it all comes together and watching the rest fall by the wayside.

They found me in the backyard after, drinking a 7-Eleven slushie. Said you could see the smoke from the water tower and it was the biggest burn in state history. They put me in the ambulance. I didn't notice my burns, I guess, though they were helpful with avoiding misunderstandings about my cause. Nobody asked me if I started it; simple folk don’t think of our higher calling like that. Riding without a seatbelt on that stretcher, my mind was clearer than Brita-filtered water. I was like the Fourth of July celebrating my independence, watching it all go up and crack and spark and speckle and split. We were in a drought and the fire trucks were stuck helping Allison Okenely’s sheep out of the empty well. That's why it burned so long.

It died. The sheep. That was too bad.

But it bought me some time anyway. The whole house got to the ground. I remember a nurse who played bingo with my Ma telling me all that was left was some bricks and curled laminate on my Satantango poster. I think my mother got out; I don't remember asking anybody.

I ripped out my IV and bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus to Atlanta. I heard it's hot there—I think Jen Telly told me that in fifth grade. Maybe the heat will incite them (whoever they are) into abducting me. Or maybe Atlanta will be more discerning and embrace me and the new ways. Anyway, I still have dreams about Walltile being blown up completely or washed over by a tsunami of fire. Or sometimes I walk through town when I’m lucid and everybody is deep asleep. In those ones I can wander to and from as I please, and fly and see what they hide behind those curtains. I like it best when I dream of the town in black and white, and I know that in those kinds of programs all the actors and the set are dead. It kinda is in a way. Nothing will ever remind me of Walltile but myself. It’s like a stench I can’t wash offa me.

My name is called at the McDonald’s counter, and I pick up my empty cup for a medium soda and four large fries. My first meal in Atlanta tastes like burnt salt and oil. Burnt but still cold and limp, and kinda chewy. The girl taking orders has red hair. Does red hair burn differently? Maybe people with red hair are forged in fire. Maybe they just like to hear the music of it all. Yeah, that seems to make more sense. Maybe she didn’t want to turn up the fryer enough to feel the heat. That might set her off.

Maybe Atlanta knows she’s meant to rise from the ashes she creates.

Maybe I can help

her with that.

Wouldn’t that be something?