We lit bonfires every Halloween in the gutter . You could kick the fire into the sewer if it got too high. Kind of scary, but controlled. My mother was like that fire. She was burning up inside, pissed off at me for reasons I couldn't figure out. She'd say something sarcastic, the corners of her mouth curling up like paper when fire touches it. She never let the full force of her words burn me, they licked around the corners of my face. The way I thought it might feel if she kissed me.
The summer Detroit burned I was thirteen. My mother was on an armchair resting her feet on a stool. Her ankles looked like elephant legs after a twelve hour day waitressing. Some movie we had watched with chained elephants trying to escape a fire came into my mind. They pulled and strained pushing forward but the chains would not break. How could a chain not break under the force of all that weight?
The announcer said "We're going live to Detroit." People crowded the streets, young men throwing bricks, chairs, newspaper racks, whatever they could pick up through windows. Glass shattered. They dived in and resurfaced with clothes, furniture, chickens. Not even trying to run, just piling up loot on the street, triumphant looks on their faces.
I saw my mother start to smile. Her eyes danced like they were lit by flames. As if the t.v. was getting warmer, like we were sitting around the fire telling stories.
She leaned forward. "Finally, " she said. "Finally, someone got what's coming to them." Waving her hands like I had seen people do when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech. I cried listening to that. "Do you have water in your veins?," she snarled. "You're always tearing up."
My water couldn't dampen her fire, but her fire dried me out. "I have a dream" he thundered.
She turned the corner of her mouth up. Who knew her dream was seeing a city burn? "It's a law of nature," she said. "You can only keep things down for so long before they rise up."
It scared me the way she said that.

Published in Primal Primers.

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