Demon Dance of the Fire Children

I was twelve years old when I experienced the event that changed my life. We had just come back from a trip to Savannah, one of those day trips that departs from Atlanta far later than you wanted, so by the time you make it there, you only have enough time to soak it all in to an excessive degree. You forget all the essentials for your lilywhite skin; sunscreen, the umbrella, the beach chair that complements it, but it’s the late 90s, maybe the early 2000s and you don’t yet realize that the professionals haven’t yet figured out that the things that eat us alive with cancer are the things we consume. We still risk a visit to the old sunny outside a few times a year without protection at the expense of a good family outing.

The trip back was sticky as it always was. My mom, single at the time despite my dad always being an active, loving and most importantly, present part of our lives, had only given us just enough of a spray down at one of the communal beach showers so that we might get back to a Midsomer Atlanta in all of its comforting embrace.

I can remember my two divorced parents being happy to be back in each other’s arms when they first saw each other again after almost a year of bitter separation. Sure, they had fought, but they’d always kept it behind closed doors, and they were definitely still friends. Friends. That’s what they had always been, and always should have been. Just friends. I wouldn’t understand this concept until I was an adult. Young me always wanted to know why parents just couldn’t love each other and stay together?

They dated other people, but there wasn’t even an attempt at suckering money from one another and weaponizing me and my siblings to do it, and it showed at the beach. I don’t think I’d ever seen my mom that free of stress in a long time. Dad helped her apply the remainder of the only bottle of sunscreen we’d had in the car. We didn’t get any because we played outside more than her, and our skin was more accustomed to the sun. He helped her set up the beach umbrella, and the politely pulled the folding chair from beneath her. “Sugar cookies!” He shouted, rolling my freshly slathered mom around in the sand, making us all laugh. He landed on top of her accidentally, and for a moment, I thought they were going to take things a little too far.

“Get a room, you two!” I said.

“Hey, where’d you learn that!?” My dad snapped at me, wanting to be offended, but he simply couldn’t be.

“You dad, you used to say it all the time!” It was true, he’d playfully say it to teenagers he saw acting inappropriately at the movie theater, or to my drunken aunts and uncles at family gatherings.

“Great job!” I remember mom smiling and shoving him off of her, before they both lay by one another in the sand.

“Go watch your brother and sister, make sure they don’t drown, you little snitch.” Dad smiled and sent me on my way. Man, some people really were just meant to be together all the time, but only as friends.

On the way back home, after becoming sunburnt, I remember dad looking into the back of the car via the rearview mirror, “You guys wanna go get a movie?” My dad never rented a dang thing from Blockbuster, a company that was still king in Atlanta back in those days.

“Yes!” My brother and sister were both younger, with my brother being four years my junior, and my sister being two years his. They fought all the time, but I was always there to mediate. However, we all agreed this time. Dad never rented movies, he said it was a scam. He always complained about how they just wanted to upsell you on a tub of greasy popcorn and some candy, and yeah, he was right, but even he knew that it tasted amazing and you had to buy these things sometimes.

“What about Pizza Hut?” We screeched with joy, and mom elbowed him in the chest even though she was driving. Dad always wanted to drive, but she just wouldn’t let him touch the Caravan, ever since he'd wrecked his Mercedes. He swears it wasn't his fault, but he also wouldn't let her see the police report.

“Babe, save that for later!” I remembered him smiling at her. Ya know, I get it now. I eventually knew what he meant, but at the time, I thought it was some precursor to a fight.

“You can’t feed them junk!”

He intentionally ignored her, “With the cheesy crust also?” He looked at mom out of his periphery, causing her to giggle sweetly.

I remember my mom’s natural beauty back in those days. She had this long, full, greasy, auburn hair, and these big, tired brown eyes, but around dad they were always so full of life. She had such a glowering peachy tone and chubby cheeks, the rest of her face thinner and kinder. You could tell by its creases that life hadn’t been super sweet to her, despite her having been kind to everyone else.

I knew my pops had always treated her like an angel, and I always knew the hard work they went through to make sure we never saw them going at each other’s throats, and despite how hard they tried to hide it, I'd always known when we were struggling financially. You can always tell when you’re broke, because the first thing your parents do is cut off the cable, then pretend they don’t notice the empty fridge, and send you to the neighbors place so they can “babysit” you while they panic.

Those days, dad was working as an actuary, and was making enough money to put us up in that nice house that he didn’t even live in. Mom was a pediatric nurse, who’d moonlighted at Scottish Rite Hospital, and spent all the money on making sure we were always happy.

Dad lived in a nearby apartment in Chamblee. It wasn’t some heap, or a crappy basement room, but a three bedroom in a genuinely nice, gated complex, right across from this art store that I can’t even remember the name of. I remember he took us over to the art store once and we looked at these incredible, highly detailed miniature scenes for hours before he bought us all a massive bundle of art supplies, including some pricey clay that melted into mom’s carpet. I can still remember dad shaking his head at me one morning, as he dumped paint thinner onto the gooey smudge we’d made, mom standing over him in her pajamas, fuming. If dad hadn't been there, she might have actually whooped my butt.

I came back to the present and saw dad answer her, “We don’t, baby.” My dad smiled at her, “We never let them eat junk.” He was right. The worst thing I can ever remember us eating was white bread with an occasional Coke, and that was only when mom was in a hurry, and the three of us had to share it.

“What do you call this?” Her face was so twisted into such an animated and unrealistic smile, that it was almost like an emoji. I could tell how hard she was trying not to laugh.

“Call what?”

“What you’re doing!” She pretended to be angry, but gosh, mom didn’t have an angry bone in her body.

“I call it a family night.” Dad. Man. He really did know how to get onto her nerves in all the right ways.

“Feeding ’em trashy food.” She smiled and nudged his elbow with her right arm, but kept her eyes on the road.

“You always make sure they eat right, ya gotta let ’em cut loose every now and then.” She stared at him with that same innocent smile and stole a kiss. That’s why I loved my parents. They may have hated each other, but as an adult, I’d realize it was when they were legally bound together. My two parents, the friends, were the two happiest people on earth.

Mom looked at him for almost long enough to drive us off the road, but she seemed to keep things lined up in her periphery. “Alright.” She smiled wider and I can remember how happy we all were, especially when the smell of the real, original, traditional Pizza Hut filled the car. There was even a promotional where we got a PlayStation demo disc that came with five demos on it, the only memorable ones being Final Fantasy VII and the original Crash Bandicoot.

Dad had bought us a PlayStation years prior, and mom didn’t approve, so she sat and monitored what we played, and made sure that dad didn’t expose us to anything inappropriate. They were still married then, and weren’t the happiest around one another, so mom’s angry countenance wasn’t something playful and benevolent. Normally afterwards, in total silence, dad would hug us and kiss us before leaving, then mom would unplug the PlayStation and lock it up somewhere until the next time he came over.

We'd gone to Blockbuster, got our three movies, and had our big blue tubs of greasy popcorn, Milk Duds, gummies and soda. It was all things only our grandparents gave us, but just like we didn’t see our grandparents often, we didn’t see dad often enough, and this was our cause celebre.

“Shouldn’t they wait until we get home?” Mom asked in a meekish voice.

“Of course not, dig in!” So we did.

Man, I can remember dad ducking his head to get into the car while my siblings fought over candy and junk food. Normally he’d have intervened, but mom, with an armful of even more crap food and movies she refused to let my clumsy dad hold, ducked her head at the same time and the tops of their heads met, causing mom to drop it all. I can remember their smiles. I can remember mom flinging all the stuff at him and them laughing as they rubbed each others heads. I hadn’t seen them like this since I could hardly remember memories, and for the first time, I was as happy as they were. Why do we all grow up?

Yeah. I know. Maybe it doesn’t mean a lot to you, but those things had ended at some point then returned so suddenly on that day, and despite knowing nothing, I unconsciously knew that it would end again.

***

My sister was tired and grouchy, and my brother was wearing down by the time the front door opened, with my sister becoming mouthy as she clutched a stuffed animal she carried with her, eyes barely open, thumb in mouth, and my brother trying to harden up like the man pops had taught him to be.

“Alright, get ya dang thumb out of your mouth, you’re too old for that, and you quit trying to act tough!” Dad told them as he led them inside.

“Go hop in the shower and get into your jammies.” I remember dad still saying jammies back in those days. I can still see him swatting my two siblings on the butts, causing them to screech and scurry along.

“That means you too!”

“No, I’m not tired. I wanna watch a movie.” It was still light out despite the sun inching almost past the horizon.

“Since when haven’t you been instantly tired?” Dad hadn’t been there in a whole year, only having visited a few times, but he always made up for time lost in the most spectacular displays, even if mom wouldn’t go outside to meet him when he arrived to pick us up, simply watching through the blinds to make sure the local creep didn’t try and run off with us.

“Since you haven’t been here.” I didn’t mean for it to sound like that, but I could tell it hit him. I could tell it hit mom too. She wanted to side with him, but also seemed like she it would have been inappropriate, because it was true. I was just too young to understand the power behind certain words, but damn did dad know how to dance around it all.

There was a long silence and a pause. Mom stared at his profile, and he approached me. “Well. I’m here now!” I know it wasn’t a whole lot of effort, but the shake on the shoulders and hug he gave me meant everything. He really just didn’t let he and mom’s issues tear us apart. Few men like him exist.

He was muscular, and tall, and tough when he had to be. He liked to dress in sturdy button down shirts, with thick denim jeans, and hybrid dress-work boots. He'd grown up a farmhand in North Georgia, but had inadvertently turned into a city boy, but his inner tough guy never left him.

He had always spanked us lightly when words and other punishments weren’t enough, and spoken to us softly when a more heavy handed approach wasn’t correct. He had taken us for long walks when we were too energetic, and laid us down for naps when we just needed to rest. He always had an answer for us when we were sad. He was my dad. Can you really be better than a man like that?

No, I had no idea what I’d said, I really hadn’t, but it didn’t ruin our evening. It didn’t ruin mom cracking open the box of pizza and heating up the popcorn. It didn’t ruin the PG-13 movie they finally let me watch, and it didn’t ruin the two glasses of wine they let me try. In hindsight, I think those two glasses of wine were given to me in the hopes that I’d saunter off to bed so my two handsy parents could pop another one of us out, but those two glasses didn’t work, so they gave me two more, and I felt nice. Damn, I wish they’d have drowned me in booze. I wish that night had ended right there, and I wish the world had lied to me about everything.

We lived in a nice neighborhood within the Perimeter of Atlanta, somewhere northeast of the city, and southwest of Emory Saint Joseph Hospital around Byrnwyck. I can’t remember anymore.

If you’ve ever been to Atlanta then you know that it’s drowned in green, an ocean of trees the color of emeralds in the summer. It’s every part too, from drab ghetto, to upper class suburbia, it’s like the only city on earth where the people who built all the concrete and steel blights forgot to tear down all the natural growth. Atlanta then, just as now, was a great city to simply have a back and a front yard. Everyone had tall stands of trees that they tied hammocks to, and in the evening before the sun set, you’d hear old men mowing their lawns, and kids screaming during summer water balloon fights.

One of the last things I can remember in vague detail of that day was going to the brightly lit kitchen that had been built across from our living room couch, to the right of our big-screen, oversized TV, that almost blocked the doorway to get into it. Through the arch of the open kitchen bar, I could see that mom was lying in dad’s arms, her head in his lap as she softly mouthed something to him. The movie was about to begin. I’d run out of pizza and needed another slice.

Back in those days, carpet was still king, and our carpet was a light gray, easily stained, and we were forbidden from having food anywhere in the living room save for a strip of linoleum near the back door. Mom and dad only drank white wine so even if they got too wasted, they could still set it on the coffee table between the couch and the TV and pretend it hadn’t been knocked over and stained the place up. Silent stains, as dad called them. Out of sight, out of mind!

As an adult, I realized that the reason mom had stretched her legs across the couch was in order to subtly kick me off of it, so I was forced to sit on a tall bar stool that was placed around a tall table near the back sliding glass door, on the linoleum strip. I can still remember setting my pizza down on a cheap paper plate and looking out at the neighbors backyard.

They lived up a slight incline, a perfectly manicured lawn surrounded by tall pines, bright green, with a concrete patio, all of it only about fifteen feet away. To the left side of the single story, aging, ranch style home was a party of moms and dads gathered around grills, or sitting around heavy steel tables, leaning back in uncomfortable steel chairs. The mom’s all drinking wine, and the dads drinking watery beer. In those days, people weren’t as fat, mainly just the moms.

The dad’s all kept their figures and bragged about their cheap crap that each of them bought and tried to ignore the glaring issues of; boats, Mustangs and fake Rolexes, all from some estate sale, all glorified yard ornaments, all knock-offs bought at a beach in Mexico. I can remember them passing cigars and staring at them as if they were fancy, none of them knowing a single thing about what they were smoking, and probably all counterfeits, and lighting them with reeds, probably made of hardware store wood.

I can’t remember what was on the television, what movie we had rented, only that we were eating the only pizza I could stand, which was pepperoni, but at some point, my eyes peered through the neighbors black sliding glass door. They were notorious safety freaks, and perfectionists. I can remember them bragging about their gas burners, and double paned, Plexiglas windows on everything, with slide-down “riot shutters” that could take a hit from a rocket, which of course probably wasn’t true, but when mom and dad had met them, all they wanted to do was show off their house. Mom and dad had left, nonplussed and never really made it back over there.

Inside, beyond the Plexiglas back door, I could see dozens of children, aged anywhere from two to fourteen, all running around, screeching with joy, and I wondered why I hadn’t been invited.

I felt something wash over me, “Mom, I wanna go next door.” I was compelled, the words were almost not my own.

Mom spoke before dad could, “No sweetie, it’s almost bedtime.”

“It looks fun.” It was also still relatively early.

“Come on, let him go have some fun.” Dad interrupted.

"Yeah, mom." My eyes were fixated on a point in space and my voice almost came out as mechanical and hypnotized, "Let me."

They would run from one side of the living room to the other, back and forth, over and over again, the oldest kids making it first, with the next oldest making it second, and the youngest making it last, half of them at a near crawl, and some of them crying for being excluded, as the mouths and hands of the oldest moved in a chastising manner. I could see it all on their faces. I was so annoyed that I couldn’t be included. Why had they not invited me?

“No, he’s not going over there!” Mom seemed more serious than she'd been all night.

The grills smoked, cooking cheap meat, the dad’s raised their beers with each syllable in their speeches as if they were their own personal Caesar, and the mom’s raised their glasses too, so they could let out uproarious laughter over stuff that they apparently found funny. I looked from each situation to the next, then it grew hurried and rapid.

“Come on, he hardly has any friends.” It wasn’t true, but dad hadn’t been there in a while.

I could feel something, something that to this day, I don't know.

I don’t know.

“Just two hours, babe.” Dad was swaying mom in my favor.

“How about just an hour?” Mom was still silent, the back of her head in dad's lap as he stroked her hair, her face pensive.

I don’t know.

“Thirty-three minutes?” She finally said trying to come to a deal between deals and be a little ridiculous.

“Forty five!”

I don’t know.

“Forty five?” I can’t tell you what I felt. I looked at the grill, I looked at the living room, I looked at the grill, I looked at the living room. I felt something coming over me and my breathing increased. I can't tell you what I felt. I don't know.

“Okay.” Dad had won.

“You can go.” They both spoke at exactly the same time

Suddenly, a boom shook the entire world, WOOMF! Everything rattled with an amount of violence, immeasurable to anything I’d known up to that point.

Evil is a demon that seeps between the cracks of everything. He knows no solid walls, or protection from the insane world beyond your secure barriers. He doesn’t care if you coat yourself in armor. He is indifferent and unfeeling, and even beyond the confines of that Plexiglas sliding back door, of which the parents had locked, the demon struck.

I can remember the house ballooning outward almost a foot, somehow failing to explode into shattered splinters, the flame being contained inside before it sucked back in slightly. I can remember the children being lapped up in a mere moment, I can remember their shadows like black silhouettes running this way and that as if they were an ancient fire worshiping people dancing to their evil gods, their hair instantaneously erased from their bodies.

They were all suddenly burning alive, a gas leak having ignited, the double paned Plexiglas having done its job to keep the house from falling to pieces, but some parent, of whom I never found out, didn’t even know where they’d put the damn key.

To describe the screams I heard on that day, I can’t. I heard children dying, children my age and younger, I saw the flames burning them alive without remorse. They ran through the fire as shadows, their little minds unable to comprehend a way out, fighting for any reprieve.

A primordial instinct within me wanted to leap up and help, an instinct of which I had no control over, but when you see what I saw, it’s no different than if you see the entirety of a thirty story building come down on a man’s head, or a plane slam nose first into the ground from thousands of feet, or a knife stab a heart a thousand times. Another instinct kicked in, one that told me not to bother with trying to save those that were irreparably destroyed beyond repair.

Their little bodies ran and ran futilely back and forth, and the parents ran around outside, screaming horrible screams of true pain that forced me to cover my ears as my eyes grew wide. They fumbled for the key that no longer seemed to exist on this realm, grabbing for chairs that couldn’t break the barriers that had been erected to protect them, and watching as their children crumpled into stiffened black forms, like over -charred meat. For the first time ever, I learned of something that most people would never learn of, and that was the abysmal point of no return.

“Don’t look!” My mom let out the worst scream I'd ever heard come from her and she grabbed me, and with a violent yank, drew my face into her stomach, clenching me tight, just as my siblings came screaming from down the hallway, before she pushed them back into their room, and with a fury in her voice, told them they needed to go back to bed or they’d be whipped harshly, a punishment my mom hated to use against us. She tossed me down the hallway, and yanked the blinds shut, but dad wasn’t there, I didn’t know where he was.

The world became different after that moment. My dad disappeared for quite a while after this. I never found out the precise details of what had truly transpired after that day, or why dad only appeared here and there, completely transformed into something unrecognizable. Mom became forever silent. The neighbor’s house became a husk, the interior scorched black. I was old enough to know what I saw, but my developing brain would fight with me to tell me it wasn’t real, and my mom never confirmed nor denied it, but it never answered the nagging question, where was dad?

We moved out shortly thereafter, because even putting a tall wooden fence up wasn’t enough due to it being on a hill. If we were going to fence it off, we’d need a fence two, even three stories high.

I can remember dad only coming over after that point to build that fence, because he looked stressed, and his craftsmanship was lacking. It was like he was trying to build the wall as fast as humanly possible, and he and mom argued in hushed tones, with dad looking as if mom's presence was just annoying. I saw him downing powdered Aspirin to ward off what I'd later identify as severe hang overs, and a belly began to fall over his belt, despite the rest of his frame being skin and bones. His beard was gruff, his clothes were dirty, and his physical form was unkempt and shaggy. Every time I approached him, he’d give me some mumbled answer to a question I hadn't asked, refusing to look at me as if ashamed.

A for sale sign would eventually pop up in our yard, but only after the house behind us had been torn down and its memory forgotten. Mom was always glad it wasn’t our home, because if that home had not been torn down, and allowed to turn into a wood lot, we didn’t have to be honest with the next people who would move in, “Hey, is that the one house where all those kids caught on fire and got burned to a crisp? I heard there were like twelve different families here when that happened?” they could ask all they wanted, but we didn’t have to give an honest reply. “I wouldn’t know, it’s not my house.”

It wouldn’t be until I was in my late twenties, as my mom was on her deathbed, her liver failing from drug and alcohol abuse to cope with it all, that she finally told me more about that day, and that I found out that my dad had rushed up that hill and fought tooth-and-nail to get inside. He never made it, instead being there when a police cruiser smashed its way in through the front door way too late, most of the flame having been snuffed out due to the lack of oxygen.

Dad hadn’t died in that house, and he hadn’t died in the flames, only his resolve and spirit had died. Mom had tried her best to console him, but he always believed that he’d almost killed me. He died not too long after when he’d been found in a pool of his own vomit. He’d stared through that back door after having used all of his strength to try and smash open a hole with a steel chair, he’d seen it all, only inches away from little hands grasping out towards him, with only inches in-between, their skin sticking to the melting panes of Plexiglas.

By the time it was all over, he was the only one there, on his knees, staring into the empty eye sockets of the lost innocents, like little black statues of Pompeii, their parents having all been forcefully shoved into ambulances and whisked away screaming so savagely that I rocked back and forth in my bedroom, with my fingers shoved into my ears. Dad was the last one to have a blanket thrown over him, but he’d lost no one. He’d been so lucky where they hadn’t.

That wasn’t what stuck with me though, no. What stuck with me was what no one else saw, the thing that had compelled me moments before. I had seen it, a shadow standing behind them all, tall as the ceiling, with a mask of stolen flesh stitched together, and grinning. I could hear his growl and felt that his power was waning at that moment. He needed to feed. He flexed his ab muscles, and then clenched his fists, and as if at some Mister Universe competition, flexed his arms to show off his raw might and ancient power. Oh he was so ancient. An evil that had been with us for a very, very long time.

He looked me right in my eyes, the eye sockets of his own mask drooping and black as I saw his shadow standing over all of them, silent, unmoving, only moments before they were cooked alive, and I could hear him, he did not speak, he growled, and through him, I could hear them sizzling and popping, and I could feel their pain and anguish, and I could see him grinning, knowing that he’d almost taken me.