A Fire Like the Sun
by David Hutto
The night the Wilson’s barn blazed like Mount Vesuvius, Claire was brushing soft damp branches away from her face, walking by the creek. She and their border collie, Yoyo, lingered in the mist as Claire tried to unwind the strands of bedlam tangled in her head. The darksilver water of the creek barely reflected moonlight sifting through the trees, and she thought what simple relief it would be to fade forever in the sweet darkness of that moment.
Holding the rough bark of a sapling, she thought of her husband Mark, back at the house watching television in a grey Auburn T-shirt with the brown streak from painting the front porch last summer. Animated Mark had laughed—anguished Claire had listened—about having an extra slice of pie while she took a walk. How could he not know? Because, she told herself, because you are good at deception. The dog came running unexpectedly, sudden by her side, and without thinking, she ran her hands through damp fur. Then Claire moved further into the wildness of grasses, of bushes, of branches along the creek.
Mark had been cheerful at dinner when the pie appeared golden apple brown on the table. In ten years of their marriage, her craft and expertise with cakes and eclairs had gradually urged him up twenty pounds. She wondered if she had baked a pie tonight from guilt, granting him that gift as a small apology he was unaware of. He didn’t know that every day at noon she rushed on heartbeat wings upstairs at the florist shop she ran near the courthouse, that she closed her eyes as if in prayer to make a phone call.
By the muffled voice of the creek, Claire flinched at emotional lashes snapped in the night from her own whip. Barging in against her will, memories came of Mark smiling and happy: at a party, dancing with one finger from each hand in the air, laughing as he spun, or the look on his face one Christmas, knowing he was giving her the expensive set of gardening tools she really wanted. The assaults of memory seemed to demand look hard at what you’re denying. And she saw Mark as he was when she first met him, hair that always needed brushing, talking excitedly about architecture, stopping suddenly in the middle of a sentence with a concentrated look, thinking of how to complete the thought. She remembered the way she felt in his arms, contentment as wide and deep as forever.
Forever, it seems, stretches through endless rooms of time until you realize your husband holds his job in his arms like a mistress, treats architectural drawings like drugs to be consumed on long evenings, and on a beautiful fall day, rather than going for a drive together, wants to shout joyfully at a football game on TV. Claire had thought about couples counseling, but how could he, when could he, would he even? If the love she had felt for Mark had faded, then surely love was a ruthless illusion.
If so, it was an illusion that had snatched her again into the air above the earth, suspended in the madness of moonlight shimmering, yearning for Aaron. To see him smile with the crooked tooth in front and the way he blinked several times when he took off his sunglasses. The way he paused and lifted his head with such gladness when he saw her and how avidly they fell into their conversations. And oh Lord, to feel his hands across her body, to touch him with her crazed hungry mouth like she was feeding on the fruit of life. Had she ever felt such incandescence with her husband, such fire that she would run zealously to be consumed? Sick with longing, she turned away from the creek, called Yoyo, and started back toward the house where Mark was waiting. Or not waiting. Watching television.
As Claire got closer to the house, she was surprised at the odd light, the yard glowing faintly. Had she left the backdoor light on? Then she came around the trees and up the hill saw the Wilson’s barn in a storm of flames. The fire thrashed with an intense yellow rage that darkened orange as it rose into the night. Small figures were running both toward and away from the inferno. Claire felt astonished and trembled, and then she was filled with the awe of realization. She knelt down, took Yoyo’s face in her hands, held it a moment, and opened the backdoor to let the dog into the house. Closing the door, she began walking down the driveway toward town. What exactly she would do when she got there, she did not yet know, but she kept walking into the darkness.
Bio: David Hutto’s work is forthcoming in Bookends Review and has recently appeared in Southern Quill and Avalon Literary Journal. In 2024 his work appeared in Paterson Literary Review, The Hemlock, Brussels Review, Literally Stories, Cable Street, Galway Review, Symphonies of Imagination, Mediterranean Poetry, and Mudfish, in addition to publication in Crazyhorse, Fiction International, and other magazines. His experience as a writer includes a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, as well as writers’ retreats in Mérida, Mexico in 2024 and Dublin, Ireland in May 2025. Website: www.davidhutto.com
