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The Fire

...You couldn't say it was easy: bending endlessly, jerking to free the ears, grating your palms on the shucks. But you felt you'd done something when you looked back over the rows as you headed home, and afterwards supper was piled high, hot, and savory, to settle comfortably in your stomach as you did your studies and hit the sack early. At the end, when you'd gone over every inch of the field, you almost hated to sell the ears. You hated to give up the lonely field, the rountine yet satisfying work, for those few bills. Then the work made the money special, too, as hard to spend as it had been to earn. Kevin remembered how he'd waited 'til Christmas to spend last fall's earnings.

At the horizon a dark cloud was forming. A storm? Kevin stepped forward to resume his work. Occasionally he glanced across the field. His friends worked steadily, silently. The dark cloud grew, upwards and to the east, filamentous and thinning as it grew. Kevin shouted to the others.

"Hey! Look! A fire!"
 		Short Stories



1974-1977

When I entered the engineering program at Illinois Institute of Technology, I embarked on a frenzy of short-story writing that continued through graduate school at Stanford. The story excerpted here was awarded a literary prize in Chicago.

My stories were divided about equally between tales of family and childhood in the Ohio Valley, and science fiction. I wrote some of them during my lunch breaks on summer engineering jobs. I would go out and sit in my car and write while eating a sandwich. The Ohio Valley stories revealed rampant, yet violently repressed human sexuality, in an environment of unbounded natural fecundity, which is still one of my strongest impressions of that region.

I dutifully submitted every story to a number of top magazines, receiving "form letter" rejection slips from every one. One of my science fiction stories was finally published in a student journal at Stanford.

 ...A jumble of old appliances filled the back yard. Pigs snorted and butted the planks of a pen somewhere. His eyes stinging, Kevin looked up at the house. The roof was gone, and bricks tumbled off the jagged crest of the wall. Sparks and floating black debris shot up in the dense smoke that mushroomed from the cavity where the roof had been. Kevin remembered that brick was used to insulate furnaces. He wondered if it was hot enough to melt glass in there. All the windows had already blown out, and the heart of the fire, the deep crimson flames, danced wildly inside.

"Wonder where the girl is?" said Tom, wiping his sleeve across his forehead.

...Tom leaned closer to the hole. "Heyyy!" This time an answer came from somewhere deep in the smoke. It sounded very faint, very high, and then abruptly stopped. Tom eased himself through the hole backwards, his legs kicking out gingerly. He disappeared in the smoke, and Kevin followed hurriedly. His hands scraped across the hot bricks, then they both covered their faces. The heavy, water-soaked coats screened out much of the smoke. They began to feel their way along the wall. Tom shouted, but the sound was muffled. Now there was no answering cry. They came to a thick wooden brace. Kevin's shoulder brushed against it and he felt it shake. "Down!" he yelled into the darkness. The brace slammed against him, and he stumbled, his hands grasping for a hold. He fell sideways, and he was still falling when something sharp hit the side of his head and he tumbled off into unconsciousness.