Emily Rinkema
When John calls from London it’s just after noon Kelly’s time, and she tells him she’s fine, that she has the car packed and ready to evacuate. She’s on the porch watching the orange glow over the trees. The air smells of smoke, but the wind is blowing towards the fire, so she can breathe without coughing. John tells her she should leave right away, drive to his sister’s, which has always been their emergency plan. He’ll fly home tomorrow and meet her there.
“I’m leaving as soon as Kit comes back,” Kelly says, and then they’re in one of their favorite fights, where John tells Kelly the dog shouldn’t be out without a leash, and she tells him the only reason she agreed to move to the country was they wouldn’t need leashes. Kit’s never gone for long, usually a few hours at the most. Once she stayed out overnight and came back with a snout full of porcupine quills.
“I can’t believe you let her out in the middle of a fucking wildfire,” John says.
“To be fair,” she says, “the fire’s still across the river.”
“Promise me you’ll evacuate without her if you have to,” he says.
***
It’s three o’clock and Kit’s still not back. John calls again, but the signal is too weak and it goes straight to voicemail. Kelly texts him to let him know she’s okay. He wants to know if she’s on the road.
It should be bright and sunny right now, one of those perfect early summer afternoons when the sky looks fake it’s so blue. But the sky is muddy gray, orange. The colors are wrong, but that orange is so beautiful. She had a foster mom once who would sit with her when she was scared and tell her to “find the beautiful thing.” She would stay with her until she was calm enough to point something out, a tree, a chickadee, a color in a poster on her wall. Kelly said it to John once when he was pissed at her, told him to find the beautiful thing, and it made them both laugh so hard they forgot why they were angry.
***
At four o’clock, Kelly gets back in the car and drives down the long driveway again looking for Kit. She honks the horn, hoping her girl will hear it this time and come running. Kit loves the car, loves to put her head out the window, tongue flapping. John says it’s dangerous, but Kelly lets her do it when he’s traveling. She turns onto the road that heads down the hill, snaking back and forth into the valley, but the fire has jumped the river and she can see it now, see actual flames. That orange.
She doesn’t know what to do. She can smell smoke even though the windows are closed. If John were here they’d be gone by now and Kelly would be screaming at him to turn back around to get Kit. But he’s not. And she’s waited too long to make a decision. John hates that. He says she lets life happen to her. Now there’s nowhere to go but back to the house.
Kit’s on the porch. She’s covered in burrs and dust. She’s panting.
Kelly lets them in the house and tells her it’s okay, that they’re okay, that they’re going to be okay. She tries to remember what she learned in the fire seminar they went to when they moved here. She puts all the towels in the bathtub and turns on the water. Kit follows her as she closes all the doors in the house and Kelly talks to her, tells her about when they got her as a puppy, her origin story. She had been abandoned at a dump, her leg broken in two places, her skin growing over a collar that was too tight. They’d been at a party with the vet, a friend of a friend’s, and they had asked what was going to happen to her. The vet said she probably wasn’t going to make it and by the end of the night, John and Kelly had agreed to pay for any care necessary. The next day, when they met her, John had sat down next to the cage where she was recovering from surgery. Kelly remembers thinking that she would never leave him, this man who sat on the floor and sang Bob Dylan to an unconscious dog.
Kelly rolls the wet towels and puts them around the bottom of the front and back doors and then takes Kit into the bathroom. She shuts the door and puts a towel along the bottom. They sit, Kelly’s back against the tub, Kit leaning against her. Kelly’s not sure when she started crying, but she takes deep breaths to stop, tells Kit that the fire could miss them, that there are always homes left standing, that they’re in the safest place in the house.
She looks at her phone. There are a dozen texts from John, half a dozen voicemails. His texts are still coming through, but she knows they won’t for much longer. Her battery is low.
They are supposed to remodel the bathroom next month. John asked her to pick out paint colors while he was away, but she hasn’t yet. She looks around, at the wet towel under the door, at the sink with its broken faucet, at her sandals, stained with brown paint from last summer, at the hook on the back of the door, John’s robe still hanging from it, at Kit. Beautiful Kit.
She starts typing and deletes, starts and deletes. She knows that John can see the dots on his screen, that he knows she’s there. It’s after midnight now in London. John’s going to need his sleep. That, she can give him.
“We’re okay,” She says out loud as she types. “We are out and safe,” She types. “See you tomorrow,” she types.
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Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Variant Lit, Flash Frog, and Fractured Lit, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).