IGNITE | catch fire
𒐁 Ignite these bones of mine.
Strange things were known to happen in the sleepy town of Ambrose. Lost deep within the forest's belly, off the grid of Louisiana, cut away from the rest of the world, population unknown, the town w...
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ELOISE
When they buried my brother's empty coffin last autumn, I prayed to a God I wasn't sure existed any longer. I asked for the body of Loren to find his way into the oak box by the wrath of mother nature, for his bones to fill their way back into his flesh, and for his soul to still be intact. Above all, I asked for his fists to break him out of the ground. First, through the wood and the soft lining within. Then, palm his way out of the soil, away and to the side by the handful, sifting out a tunnel for his passage.
There, he could sink his hands into the thin air hovering above his makeshift grave and bathe his dirt soaked skin in all of the hope I held out for him. He could crack open his lungs and howl into the night, reminding all of us that he had made it out alive. I wanted others to believe in my brother like I had continued to, I wanted others to pray for his return, continue over and over, and over. Prayers like the ones I mustered, like many had uttered before, did not come true, though...they never would.
It had only taken eight months after his disappearance and presumed death for our parents to decide on the type of wood they would bury their son in. Oak, it ended up being, solid, strong like iron, just like my brother. The only difference between the two was that the coffin was meant to sink six feet deep, right down in the hole dug especially for it, and Loren was not. His memory and the oak box were buried under a tree in my home town's cemetery, the kind of tree that blossomed olive green in the spring and broke out in red hues in the fall.
The resting gave the remnants of Loren's memories some shade on sunny days, comforted him on chilly mornings, and offered my parents rest, a place where they pretended their son truly laid in peace. A spot in the grass was reserved for my mother to weep on skinned knees about better days, where my father would sit in silence, shifting his eyes to where he wished to believe his son occupied. Then, there was myself and the quiet visits I made on my own, ones where I drove down from college on the weekends and sat on the same patch of grass my parents were fond of.
I spoke to Loren, asked how his days played out, reminded him I was there, bled for advice, but I knew he wasn't listening, he never would; there wasn't anyone beneath six feet of soil. My brother was gone, dead even, but he wasn't laid to rest in the cemetery. Unlike my parents, I wanted to believe I had come to terms with that fact, that Loren Lane wasn't put to rest like they pretended. Perhaps on top of the rest, it offered my parents more comfort than misery, pretending that my brother was truly dead, shoved away in the oak box that had reeled them into debt. And perhaps that was better than the two of them pining way over a boy who couldn't find his way home.
