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    The Fires
    The Fires
    The Fires
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    The Fires

    By Alan Cheuse

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these twonovellas are linked so skillfullythattheyachieve the intensity ofa single novel in which some characters succeed and others failonseparate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish—to be cremated—only to find herself entirelyat sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism,"Tom Swanson begins to make sense of his lifewhen he retrieves his angry daughter from her exclusive New England college after her expulsion for setting fire to a grand piano.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSanta Fe Writer's Project
    Release dateMay 1, 2008
    ISBN9780981966137
    The Fires
    Author

    Alan Cheuse

    Novelist, essayist, and story writer Alan Cheuse (Washington, D.C.) has been described as "The Voice of Books on NPR." The author of A Trance after Breakfast, he has also written three novels and a pair of novellas. He is the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers' Workshop in a Book. He teaches writing at George Mason University.

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    • 3/5
      The Fires is a collection of two novellas, each concerning love and loss. In the first story, "The Fires", Gina Morgan travels to a former Soviet republic to retrieve the body of her husband who has been killed. In the second, "Exorcism", an unnamed narrator must deal with his own grief, and that of his daughter, after the death of his ex-wife.The two novellas were strikingly different - the first was pure intensity from the opening sentence; the second used humor throughout the story to lighten the mood. Both dealt with the death of a spouse, but in the first the couple was still very much in love, and in the second they had moved past each other. But the novellas were linked with one common factor - fire, which played a role in each story.Cheuse has a talent for engaging the reader immediately in the narrative. Neither of these stories is long - around 60 pages each - but he packs an immense amount of emotion into those few pages. Even though he is writing about grief, both stories leave the reader with a feeling of hope when the last page has turned. I have enjoyed Cheuse on NPR for some time, and now look forward to reading more of his work in print as well.

    Book preview

    The Fires - Alan Cheuse

    Author

    THE FIRES

    1.

    The worst news always comes at the worst possible moment. In Gina’s case, this happened to be while she was squatting over the commode in the upstairs bathroom, attempting to catch a urine sample for Dr. Betsy Cohen. She felt so ridiculous, the weeks of hot and cold flashes, the upswings and downturns of mood, the deep and nearly debilitating sense of longing for Paul, and then long stretches of absolute indifference, even—oh, this may just have been the worst of it all before the telephone rang—even wishing, yes, that he might stay away a while longer.

    This was, in fact, Gina’s third try at catching a sample.

    Steady, steady, she was saying to herself. I can fix a perfect Bloody Mary on demand, I know exactly when I begin to ovulate—or used to—and I can flip a pancake in a thirty-mile-an-hour wind—remembering that lovely camping trip they had taken in the Sierra just after a visit to Paul’s mother in Sacramento—but I can’t seem to collect pee in a vial.

    Actually, on her first attempt, she had done it perfectly, scarcely splashing anything on her fingers and hand. But then it turned out that she had forgotten whether or not the collection had been of her first urination of the day or her second. She was supposed to save a sample of her second. And she was almost sure this had been it. Except that she had a vague recollection of waking in the early dawn light and staggering into the bathroom. Or could that have been the morning before? Or might it have been a dream? Paul had come to her in the night, pulling a red wagon, the kind that small boys use to deliver sand to their neighbors while pretending that it is gold. Nothing portentous in that, yes? Then the dream changed, a wall of darkness became a scrim of rain, and there was her father—years since she had dreamed of him—in deep conversation with her first husband, and try as she might, Gina could not make out anything they said. Funny, how she had strained to listen, immediately forgetting the sight of Paul.

    The second try? She had gotten the timing right, she had peed in a jiffy into the container, and then, as she was putting the thing away in the freezer to store while she waited the appropriate time according to the instructions for collection of her saliva samples, she dropped the little collection vial, spilling some of her urine onto the kitchen counter.

    And now wait, here she was, just about to finish this third time, her pants down around her ankles, her skirt rucked up into her lap, tangy liquid gushing out of her, her knuckles damp but her mind focused—when the telephone rang.

    Damn!

    A few moments of comedy as she stood up, spraying her underwear, her skirt, the bathroom mat, the tile floor, and struggled to adjust her clothes even as she dropped the vial onto the mat and staggered out of the bathroom and sent herself stumbling toward the telephone on the bedside table. She was thinking this wouldn’t happen to Paul, he takes the portable telephone into the bathroom with him. Which made her laugh out loud.

    And then—more comedy—the doorbell rang—she would never know who it was at the door, because after a while they stopped ringing—just as she picked up the telephone.

    Hello? she said, hoping, of course, that it was Paul. She would tell him immediately about her immediate circumstances, squatting, aiming herself at the vial. He would—

    Missus Morgan?

    Thick accent, something out of Russia? Did she know a Russian? Did she know someone in Russia?

    Yes?

    Satellite delay, the connection fading in and out. This feeling of telephone limbo, an awful by-product of modern life. Sometimes Gina told herself that she might have been better off born into an earlier age. Just when that might have been, she couldn’t figure. Sometime when—?

    Missus Morgan, This is Mohammed Kirov. Your husband’s—

    It wasn’t that she cut him off, it was just the satellite delay made her overspeak his voice.

    I know who you are, yes, Gina said. Paul has often—

    And then the same thing happened to her as happened to him.

    —assistant, Kirov said. Here in Uzbekistan, the roads—

    —spoken about you. But why—?

    "—[words faded out] traveling, you understand—?"

    Why are you calling? Where’s—

    Silence at the other end, nothing there at all except the slight echoing in and out of the reflection of the silence in the space between here and some point above the Earth, or along the line where her voice bounced back down on his side of the globe.

    Missus Morgan? Suddenly his voice returned, stronger than before, emphatic, almost as though he had something to sell her or a message of great importance and he stood just outside the door to the room demanding to be let in.

    And then of course it came to her, and as if this Kirov, or some other man, an intruder bent on wounding her, pounding away at her, raping her, killing her, had smashed in the door and pushed her down beneath it, she felt all the air leave her lungs and she staggered back onto the bed, feeling the dampness between her legs, the legacy of comedy, but the comedy had ended.

    On the flight east, she had plenty of time—many times the time—to reenact the incident in her mind. The medication that Dr. Betsy had prescribed for her a few weeks ago, just after Paul had left on the first leg of this trip, hadn’t kicked in, or it wasn’t strong enough a dose. Her departure from home was just too hurried for her to worry about such things. But when she settled back in the leather seat after takeoff—luckily, she had gotten a place in first class, a combination of her frenzied state when she appeared at the airport and a sympathetic clerk behind the ticket counter—and God help you that you need such things to happen to you in order to travel in this manner—she knew that the trip was going to be the most difficult of her life.

    Turbulence over the Atlantic didn’t bother her. Dishes rattled, other passengers spoke in harried whispers, unable to sleep through the frightening bounces and jamming in air. She was awake, alert, and in her mind going over and over again the incident as Kirov had described it to her.

    First of all, Paul wouldn’t have been drunk. It had been two years since he had stopped drinking and there was no reason in the world—none, at least, that she could at first imagine, and her imagination was certainly racing along at least as fast as the jet she was flying in—that would lead him to start again.

    But then she tried to picture it, and suddenly, on the wings of this awful euphoria—the only way that she could describe it—of delusion in which you would think anything in the world no matter how illogical if it would bring him back to you—it didn’t seem all that preposterous that he could have perhaps taken one, maybe two, drinks. He was alone, tired, why not?

    The flight attendant came up the aisle, smiled, showing beautiful white teeth, the kind Paul always admired. (Gina had off-white teeth and always felt a little uneasy when Paul would point out the brilliant smile of even a particularly plain woman whom they might encounter.) What if he had met a woman with a smile like that? What if she had sat next to him? That might have led him to ask the flight attendant for a Bloody Mary, his old favorite. So what if he had one or two? He hadn’t ever been an alcoholic, he just drank too much. And he had decided to stop. On a long flight, the same flight that she was on the first leg of, any man might have succumbed to the urge to make himself comfortable.

    (But why wasn’t she drinking? She always enjoyed a drink, fixing at least one of those perfect Bloody Marys for herself for every two he drank. Why wasn’t she drinking? She couldn’t say. Well, yes, she could. Why lie to herself? The alcohol would combine with the tranquilizer and knock her out. She didn’t want oblivion. She wanted to stay awake, to think about him.)

    Paul had arrived late on the flight from Moscow. A foolish thing, to go through Moscow, but he had not been there for several years and wanted to see all of the fabled changes he had heard about, the markets overflowing with fruit from the south, the new boutiques, the flashy dressers on the street, herds of big expensive new cars. And of course he had wanted to see their old apartment. That thing he had for history, personal, public. It was just a hobby, nothing at all to do really with how he earned his living. But it was all-consuming. Digging about in his family’s past, pressing her for the details of her own past. Keeping a notebook. What if they had had children? (Well, a child who had lived…) That might have turned his eye toward the future rather than the past. Maybe. But when

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