What If We Were Somewhere Else by Wendy J. Fox

Author:Wendy J. Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, short stories, women, family relationships, office settings
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2021-02-09T21:51:54+00:00

Laird

Wish in the Other

In my life then, working at my office, I’d say there was this element of always being on edge about what would happen next like in a video I’d seen of teenage boys throwing smoke bombs down a canyon in Oregon. The shaky recording cuts out just after the spot where the wispy smoke begins to rise, but while the potassium nitrate has burst from its container, it’s still encased between the rock walls of the canyon, and this is the most dangerous part, lit sparks loose in the dry valley. It was like how I figured my face must have looked when my boss, Kate, fired me: a slow smolder.

In the online video I could sort of see how everything would play out and also kind of not see anything, and while the boys must have eventually walked away from the ridge and gone back to their campsite or their car, when I first watched it, I already knew that it was not many frames away from the emergence of disaster. The boys are reckless and wide-eyed, like if they just had thrown a little harder, they would have hit their real target, like they would have known what they were throwing toward.

I was in my apartment when I saw the news report of the unintentional blaze—hot, dry conditions, a lighter passed back and forth, the fire igniting the forest floor then burning through the understory of the forest and up the canyon walls. I’d grown up in and still lived in Denver, and I’d never been to Oregon before, but it looked like a beautiful place, even with the hillsides glowing wrong and the river water so hot, it must have been bubbling through the bowl of the Columbia Gorge.

*

It was hard to know what to do with Cale when he called. We’d both been out of college for a few years, and when he contacted me, it was in the first week of losing my job. I’d been finished with school for much longer than Cale because he had gone on to do a PhD. I had some money saved, but I was considering moving back in with my mom—she’d offered, and honestly, besides me keeping up some kind of appearance of being an adult, there was no reason for us to live apart. It had been just us two since my dad left. My dad wasn’t supposed to leave her, but that’s what he wanted. I didn’t want to leave her, but that’s what I was supposed to do.

“I’m sure you’ll find another job soon,” my mom said over the phone, and I hoped she was right, but I learned a long time ago not to pin too much hope on anything. My mom, when she was in a mood, used to say, Well, you can shit in one hand and wish in another and see which one fills up first.

I think it had been close to a year since I had really talked with Cale.

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