Free The Firebug of Balrog County by David Oppegaard

sweetheart—”
    â€œFuck spirit. I’m not eating family breakfast and I don’t want some stupid fleabag dog.”
    Haylee turned and rushed out of the room, the hem of her robe catching air and fluttering behind her. We listened as she stomped up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door.
    Dad turned off the stove burners. “What the heck is wrong with that girl?”
    I shrugged and brought my plate over to the stove. “Fill’er up, sir. I’m here to report for family breakfast.”
    Dad laughed. He filled my plate and then his own, wielding a spatula with surprising grace. We sat down and the dog settled back under the table, where he prodded us with his snout and breathed noisily, praying for scraps. Dad and I dug into the food, elbows on table, and we ate that breakfast like it was our job.

    After I loaded the dishes and started the dishwasher, I brought Chompy upstairs and led him to my sister’s bedroom door.
    â€œBe good,” I told him. “Be good you crazy, slobbering beast.”
    I turned the knob on Haylee’s door and cracked it open. Chompy hustled immediately into the breach, his black tail wagging, and disappeared into the shade-drawn darkness beyond. I wished him luck.

The Tornado
    B alrog County gets its fair share of tornadoes. The worst twister in my lifetime showed up when I was twelve and home alone while the rest of my family was shopping in Thorndale. I was watching a movie when my mother called and told me to get in the basement immediately—a tornado had been spotted south of town. Right as she called, the town’s emergency sirens sounded and my skin started crawling like it wanted to head off on its own.
    I told my mother I’d go into the basement ASAP but instead I went outside and stood in the driveway. The sky had turned a surreal lemon-yellow and an enormous cloudbank was approaching from the south, dark as night and as big as a Magisterium Zeppelin.
    The wind was blowing like crazy.
    I felt alive, every nerve.

Firewall
    T h e Saturday night crowd at the Le gion turned out to be a collection of sullen old men with rough hands and furrowed brows. They sat around the bar in ones and twos, staring into the bar’s majestic collection of Budweiser-themed mirrors. They spoke in low, guarded tones, like political radicals, and broke abruptly into lung-rattling coughs.
    â€œRegulars,” Butch said, nodding to the room. “They wouldn’t sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ if you held a shotgun to their head.”
    One old coot named Ox Haggerton sat in the middle of the bar by himself, directly in front of the taps. Haggerton kept himself propped up very stiffly and seemed to constantly be in the process of lowering his drink (whiskey neat) or raising it to his lips. His face was so wrinkled it was puckered, like an anus, and his nose was beet red from half a century of drinking. I never saw him turn to his right or to his left but I could tell he was listening to every conversation in the bar, his hairy ears perked like a cat’s. Whenever I crossed his line of sight I could feel Old Man Haggerton’s eyes burning a hole through my forehead, searching for what, I did not know.
    Finally, around midnight, Haggerton stood up and pushed his bar stool back. The old man hadn’t tipped me all night, paying for each whiskey as it came with a series of damp one dollar bills. He cleared his throat, a sound somewhere between phlegm and standard German, and glanced around at the other regulars.
    â€œHe’s George Hedley’s grandkid, right?”
    The regulars nodded and murmured amongst themselves.
    â€œWell, kid don’t look like no veteran to me. He looks like a goddamn pansy boy who thinks he’s smarter than a whore.”
    The regulars chuckled. Butch came down from his spot at the end of the bar, holding his hands up. Haggerton waved off the bartender and started for the door, surprisingly steady on his