An Open Space – by Luke Johnson
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This past week has had me thinking of my brother-in-law, who has been a part-time firefighter for several years now. To become a part-time firefighter, you have to make it through two weeks of intense training. According to my brother-in-law, it is not especially hard to make it through the two weeks of intense training, but the instructors do show you and tell you some pretty awful things during those two weeks. According to my brother-in-law, they show you and tell you these awful things in order to prepare you for the job, which, of course, makes sense. One of the more awful things related to my brother-in-law by his instructors and, in turn, related to me by my brother-in-law, concerns house fires and deceased children. If you do not want to know what they tell you at firefighter training concerning housefires and deceased children, then you should stop reading here. Because this is not a work of fiction.
“If you do not want to know what they tell you at firefighter training concerning housefires and deceased children, then you should stop reading here. Because this is not a work of fiction.”
The awful thing they tell you at firefighter training concerning house fires and children is real. I can independently verify it is real because I tried using it in a work of fiction once, a short story, and it would not go. It was too real for that fictitious story inasmuch as it had the effect of turning all of the other details in the story to ash. So, now I am using it here instead. This single real thing. But again, believe me when I tell you that it is an awful thing to know. And if you do not want to know it, then you should take my advice and stop reading immediately. Because what they tell you is that if you enter into a house that is on fire and cannot find the children that are supposed to be inside, and if you can hear the mother screaming at you from the front lawn to please save her babies – because this is what she will be calling them, regardless their ages, with the neighbours holding her by the hair to stop her from running back in there herself – then you should go immediately to the kitchen and check the refrigerator. Apparently, this is where many children go to escape the heat in the case of a house fire. They are drawn from their beds and through the flames by some desperate atavism, telling them to go to where it is cold. They burrow in there like animals, clawing food items from the shelves and shelves from shelf-holders. If they are lucky, they fall asleep in there and suffocate. It is difficult to imagine anybody falling asleep inside a refrigerator during a housefire, but apparently it is possible. If they are unlucky, the heat catches up to them and burns them alive inside the refrigerator, cooking the remaining items of food in the process. This is what was related to my brother-in-law during his two weeks of firefighter training and what, in turn, he related to me. It is a truly horrifying image. Too horrifying for fiction, as I have already noted. But one that has come to me again in the middle of this pandemic and left me wondering if, when it is all over, we will find parks and ovals and cycleways full of dead children, children who woke during the night and, responding to some innate instinct they themselves could not possibly have understood, fled their beds in search of an open__________________________space. ▼
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
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