Meliorism

Rapid Oxidation

            He returned to the house. Of course they’d told him that there was nothing left, that there was nothing else to retrieve. Still Keith was surprised to see the nothing embodied: where his childhood home had once been, there was now only charred soil, birds feeding on the ground, leaves and twigs scattered all over. Even the things that the fire spared had been cleared and thrown out, per request of his siblings. Father would have wanted the same thing, they’d say when Keith asked why they didn’t just gather it for safekeeping, or at least waited for Keith to get home from Switzerland and inspect those that could be saved for the sake of memory, of nostalgia.

Keith was still in the car, on the opposite side of the street, watching the birds as they settled on the ground and flew away, disappointed but peaceful still. He was afraid to step out—afraid to find out, most probably, that the earth would again burn under his feet. Fire. His house, aflame: broadcasted in national television, taking two minutes of the evening news’ two-hour running time. His father’s demise and the house, still aflame, but now in sordid detail, accompanied by the fact that it took the firemen three hours to kill it: the leading news article in the tabloid, squeezed uneasily at the bottom of the front page. The three weeks that had gone by since the incident went by so fast, and yet so painfully, so crucially, especially for Keith, who had always been away.

Now Keith was here. He opened the car door slowly, taking his feet out one by one, and stepping on the asphalt as carefully as he could. He closed the car door behind him and looked ahead, where the emptiness, which he had dreaded as a child and which he dreaded now, lay. He put his hands in his pockets and started to walk towards where the house had once been. The wind was steady. There were no cars around, or people. The only sound came from his steps—and the birds’ flight.

He was thankful for this silence. He stepped onto the pavement and stood for a few seconds beside the lamppost which stood a foot from where the gate used to be. It was the only thing from his childhood that the fire spared, it seemed.

A memory sharply came to him: him, as a child, spending hours in daylight under this lamppost, waiting for the dark to come and thus for it to light up, his mom shouting for him to come inside and eat dinner but him, this bony kid of seven, resolute and hopeful, wanting still to be bathed by the light just a few minutes more.

Kid, they used to call him. He was always such a weak boy, so frail and so pale. His elementary teachers always had to force him to the clinic just to make sure that he was not in fact sick. He grew into high school still weak, but with a certain aura around him; he was quiet, only speaking when absolutely necessary. And when he spoke, everyone listened. Everyone was intimidated by him, even his teachers. In college he did not anymore look weak: he had gained redness in the cheeks. In his last year as a college student he met Teresa, a small but beautiful girl who shared the same birthday with Keith. He would later marry this girl, and they would together move to Europe.

Many lovers had come before Teresa, of course. Lovers that Keith regretted loving. Lovers that Keith missed. Lovers that he wished he still loved. Lovers that, standing beside the lamppost, he so fully and achingly remembered.

He was still staring at the ground. Somewhere there was his father. When he first heard of his father’s death, he consoled himself by thinking that the soil absorbed his father’s being and soul. The soil that he used to tend every day, for years. It took him back, in gratitude, Keith thought. And still indeed Keith was thinking these things as his eyes were fixed on the charred ground, on the dead earth of his father’s death.

Nothing remained of his father but bones. They found only his bones.

Keith closed his eyes and gripped the lamppost. He could not anymore bring his feet forward. There was, anyway, no reason to bring his feet forward, so instead he took one last look at the emptiness and then turned around to walk back to his car.