Come Sunday: A Novel by Isla Morley

Author:Isla Morley [Morley, Isla]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312429775
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-08-03T05:00:00+00:00

IT DIDN’T MATTER that my mother started the fire that almost burned down our house. Only why. It might have been an “honest-to-God mistake,” just like she said later, but I wondered if she didn’t mean to, in a volcanic moment of defiance, burn up the house and its rotten contents with it.

I would not have been at home when the fire started if Mrs. Beasley from two doors down had not seen me walking to the store for my mother’s jar of tartar sauce and offered to give me a ride on her way there and back. What my mother knew would be a forty-five minute errand, if I took an extra ten minutes to sneak a read of the latest comic book, turned out to be a little less than quarter of an hour. Long enough for the crackling and spitting oil on the stove to tire of its unattended pot. I heard, when I walked back into the house, the soft poohf it made when it leapt out of the pot and we watched the shiny flames climb the checked curtains like a cat after a lizard.

“Jesus Christ, Louise!” my father yelled, running into the kitchen. As he barked orders at me to bring wet towels and cursed till I felt sure hell had come to swallow us up, my mother stood rooted in one spot like a witch tied to her stake. That’s when it first occurred to me that this was no accidental kitchen fire, but arson. I watched the orange and black shadows writhe and twitch on the hallway wall like some kind of monster. By the time he had put out the fire, the monster had turned the house into a black cloud, my mother into a lump of coal, and my father into a white-hot poker.

It took a week to wipe away the oily black grime, but nothing was the same after that fire. If anything, it seemed only to blaze on in my father’s chest. It was he who needed my grandmother’s lake, its waters to lap at the edges of his infernal anger. If I thought before, having overheard my mother’s ghastly prayer, that she had a death wish, after the fire I became even more convinced. The only question unanswered in my mind was by whose hand the wish would be granted.

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