Free Fire in the Night by Linda Byler

Are you? Good. That’s good. But you know how much your cows will drop back in production? Way far. I told Elam that family has no idea how great their loss will be yet, even if you have Amish fire insurance. It never covers it all.”
    She stopped for breath and then bent to pick up a stray dryer sheet, holding it to her nose for a quick sniff.
    “These dryer sheets don’t work.”
    Mam raised an eyebrow, enough of a reply for Fannie to keep up her verbal onslaught.
    “Have you heard about Junior’s Melvin? Our Junior? He had such a stomach ache….”
    Sarah watched a young girl slumped in a blue plastic chair near the door, her legs sprawled in front of her. Her light brown hair fell over her cheeks like a curtain of privacy, a signal, along with her drooping shoulders, to leave her alone. She was thin, almost painfully so, and her hands picked restlessly at a thread along the bottom of her beige shirt.
    Sarah felt a tinge of pity, then concern, when a small white vehicle pulled up to the front window. A young man hopped out and tore open the steel framed door, almost colliding with the girl in his haste.
    She pulled her legs in and wrapped her arms around her middle. Her shoulders squared as she turned to face him with large, dark, defiant eyes. She recoiled as he lowered his head and hissed something quiet but deafening with a menacing force.
    Sarah turned away. This was none of her concern. She watched though, unable to turn her eyes away as he hooked a hand beneath the girl’s elbow and clawed at it, forcing her to stand and follow him, her head bent, the fine brown hair falling over her cheeks.
    A white vehicle.
    Well, no sense in making the comparison. There was none. Who could ever find the person in a white vehicle that supposedly lit their barn a few weeks earlier?
    Sarah half-heartedly listened to Fannie and watched the small red light on the washer, the suds banging up against the glass and churning the clothes inside to a clean maelstrom.
    The rain fell relentlessly as lines of traffic hissed past, water streaming off them. The stoplights, signs, store fronts—everything was wet and shimmery with water.
    Sarah tried to imagine Noah’s flood in Bible times. It would have rained a hundred times harder. Then the springs of the earth would have opened, water gushing from the ground in a way no one had ever seen before and wouldn’t again, ever. The water would have covered the streets, then the vehicles, the signs, the stores, the stoplights. People would be drowned by then, or clinging to treetops or high buildings. She shivered, thinking of it. Water everywhere.
    Fire was the opposite of water but just as destructive.
    Already, Sarah missed the barn. It was on days just like this that, as a child, she had played in the haymow with her brothers, the clamorous rain drumming down and sometimes drowning out their voices. The only thing between them and the sound of it was the old sheet metal and a few wide lathes.
    It was safe and cozy and crunchy with hay. They piled bales to make perfect houses, brought lunch and had dinner in it, spitting out the prickly hay seeds if they dropped onto their sweet bologna sandwiches.
    Allen claimed people could eat hay if they chewed it long enough and then promptly inserted a long strand into his mouth and chewed furiously. Abner told him to get that out and quit it—cows had two stomachs, humans had only one and weren’t supposed to eat hay.
    The washer clunked and then stopped. The red light went off, so Sarah got up, opened the door, raked the wet laundry into a large, wheeled basket, and pushed it to a dryer.
    Fannie came rolling over. Rolling was the only way to describe her—rounded and tipping from side to side, like a child’s plastic ball that bounced along.
    “Sarah, don’t you have a chappy (boyfriend) yet?”
    From behind the door of the dryer, Sarah shook her head, “No, I don’t.”
    “What are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?”
    “Soon twenty.”
    “My