Declarations Over the Pire

It was June 22, 2008, I’ll never be able to forget that date because it was the only thing people talked about on the local news for a long time. That morning, my papa had gave one of his declarations “Whatever you give to the world will always come back to you—if you give gifts, you will receive gifts, and if you burn, you will burn.”, my mama wrote it down immediately in that green pocket notebook that she always carried with her.

A little later, I saw Mrs. Davis walking her dog. I waved my hand, but she didn’t wave back, though that was normal for her. “People are strange in their own ways, Aaliyah,” my mama had told me once, and she was right.

We had also heard the sound of a soccer ball, around midday, hitting the house’s garage door across the street. It was funny to see Mrs. Miller get angry at the kids. My gram and I spied on her for a little while from the living room window as she asked them to play somewhere else. Max, the Davis’ oldest son, was in that group. Those hadn’t been signs; they couldn’t be. Those were just the last moments we saw them, and there was nothing really special about them.

I was sixteen—the age of enlightenment, at least according to my gram Pearl, though she always said that the number didn’t really matter. “Most of the time, nothing happens on your birthday, but during the period until the next one,” she had explained. My birthday had been in November, and still, nothing had happened.

The truth was, I wasn’t excited about the occasion. I knew very well that it wasn’t something I could share with anyone. My mother was more optimistic, which my grandmother resented. She thought if handled correctly, any gift could be useful, like my father’s. What she didn’t say was that there were consequences to making that choice. This happened to my grandfather— very talented but reckless.

That night, my mama was braiding my hair, trying to shape it—it was very long and very curly. She always told me she would never let anyone straighten it, that my hair was beautiful, just like my papa’s. That night, she was trying to finish, after hours of effort and with the best of her skills, a set of braids she called “timinis,” though I called them cornrows. She had started doing my hair a year ago, when we moved from Savannah to Spartanburg. She had improved a lot—I later found out she had taken a course, though she never told me. I was patient with her because I could see she was trying, even if one or two braids ended up a little tighter or thinner than the rest.

Gran sighed when she saw my mama’s finished work after practically the entire day.

“Mariana, honey, you are getting really good at this,” she said, her tone full of concentration as she carefully examined each row of braids. “I’ll do your baby hairs after dinner, my Liyah. Now go help your papa!”

When I walked to the kitchen my dad stopped me saying, “You ain’t touching any pots sugar, go set the table for me”. When he cooked, the entire space had to be his—he was a perfectionist, as someone with his abilities should be, the same ones I would inherit. Despite his insistence, I set the table—first my grandmother’s tablecloths, then the glasses, followed by the napkins and silverware. There were only going to be four of us, but we always used the formal dining room—it was prettier and gave us space to play board games after dinner, like a dessert.

That night’s game started before dinner and ended without plates on the table—because I had dropped them on the floor.

I had seen it so clearly that I didn’t believe it when my dad said there was nothing there. It was a woman—I couldn’t see her face; it was hidden among the flames. And yet, she didn’t writhe in pain. She just screamed, like an alarm or an animal—maybe comparable to an eagle, though really, there was no sound I knew that could compare. It was pure pain and suffering, transformed into a frequency that couldn’t belong to this world but to the one from which my papa’s declarations came.

I screamed in terror because she wouldn’t leave, and now it wasn’t just her burning—it was our house. The house was collapsing; it would fall on us after filling our lungs with the black human ash rising from that incorporeal woman’s body.

Then my grandmother screamed from the yard: “It’s burning! The Davis’ house is burning!”

The vision, the enlightenment— didn’t matter, couldn’t matter. My body was shaking as if I were cold, but all I could see was the fire, the wood disintegrating, the smoke flooding the hallways like a tsunami of black water coming down from the upper floor.

I remembered my dad’s words from that morning as we ran out of the house, untouched by the flames of my vision. Our yard connected to the Davis’ yard, so we could see the fire growing inside. The firefighters’ sirens arrived quickly, and I was grateful for the loud sound and flashing lights because they made me realize where I was—not inside the house, but in front of it, barefoot, surrounded by worried neighbors, some gossiping, most of them in shock, and I was no different.

There was an explosion—I knew it had come from the kitchen—and the house finally collapsed. If not for the rain, that fire would have spread to other houses, but it didn’t.

I saw Mr. Davis holding a baby in his arms, but Max and Mrs. Davis were nowhere to be found. The man was devastated, in shock, as if he had seen a ghost too.

I didn’t sleep that night. The woman, now black and charred like a spent match, watched me from the corner of my room until the sunlight passed through the curtains of my window.

It was Mrs. Davis—I knew it from beneath my ribs and the sharp pain in the middle of my chest, the sign of terror, and I didn’t know if it was entirely mine or hers.

I looked out my window. The smell of smoke and burned wood still lingered in the air. I looked toward the destroyed house, and there, among the darkened grass and shattered glass of a window, was Max—wearing his Clemson t-shirt and pajama pants, both stained black. His disfigured face left no doubt that his death had been slow, painful, and given with cruelty by a punishing god.

I was never able to stop seeing them. Every day, when I passed in front of the house, especially on the cold winter mornings, I could see Mrs. Davis standing among the ruins, now so silent. And when I walked to the neighborhood entrance to wait for the school bus, I could hear Max’s timid footsteps behind me.

What crime could a child have committed to deserve such hatred? Because that’s what it was—hatred and vengeance. From the morning after the fire, I knew their taste—sweet and cold. I could feel them in the air around me, and they never went away.