Free Nobody's Child by Austin Boyd

mysterious ardor unfulfilled.
    The scent grew intense. She reached for her housecoat and slipped on night shoes to cross cold floors. Her nose led her, drawing her from the bedroom. None of it made sense. Snatches of memories returned as she passed her coat and jeans, tossedlate last night on her bedroom chair. Feeding a calf. The barn. She stopped at the door, fingers to her lips, immersed in a fresh memory.
    Ian.
    But the smell? Laura Ann walked down the hall, daring to believe she’d lived a nightmare losing Daddy, yet desperate for proof that last night — Ian — had been real. She pursued the strong scent of cigarettes. Daddy home? Alive? In the house?
    She exited the hall where it ran down the center of the house into the kitchen, glancing out the back window. Light flickered in a strange pulsing way, yellow illuminating the landscape of a snowy barnyard. She ran now, slippers slapping at cold oak. The light intensified with each stride as she exited onto the back porch, then set her dark-adjusted eyes suddenly ablaze.
    The tobacco barn. In flames.
    For the briefest of moments, Laura Ann froze in place, unsure which dream to trust. Daddy alive? Ian embracing her? Her farm on fire? In the drafty cold, she smelled her answer. Burning tobacco. Her only source of revenue. The lifeblood of this farm — and the death of Daddy.
    She screamed.
    Laura Ann dashed for the bedroom, ripping off her housecoat and shedding her nightgown while on the run. She skidded to a stop aside her bed, nearly naked, and jumped into her jeans and shirt. Socks and boots, laces pulled tight but untied. She threw on her barn coat and raced back to the kitchen, plans forming, and reforming plans.
    She ripped the phone from its cradle and hit the light switch in the same movement. The bulb stayed dark. She flipped the switch twice more, same result. Above the phone, Ian’s card beckoned her, wedged against the wall. She had to call him, but couldn’t read in the dark. She punched 9-1-1, desperate for the ring, praying for a quick response. Kitchen clocks darkened,their LED lights snuffed out, she had no idea of the time. Five rings later, a gravelly voice answered.
    â€œPlease state your emergency.” The operator sounded tired.
    â€œLaura Ann McGehee. At The Jug. Our barn is on fire.” She screamed the last words, desperate to go fight the blaze.
    â€œLaur’ Ann?” the voice replied. “What is it, child?”
    â€œMrs. Harper?”
    â€œYour barn?”
    â€œOn fire! Call Ian Stewart!”
    She hung up the phone, slung open the back door, and plunged into a river of icy air. Yellow and red blazes lit up the sky as the fire roared a hundred yards away, consuming more of the barn by the second. The main power pole, planted at the corner of the tobacco barn, spewed sparks from a burning transformer, the base of the pole wrapped in flames.
    She ran, flakes of snow dusting her as they drifted down. Hot flakes. Not snow, but ash. The ash of ten thousand pounds of burning tobacco. A million cigarettes, ablaze at once. An unbearable stench.
    Laura Ann’s boots slapped at the ground, untied. She stopped briefly and whipped the laces about her ankles with a crude knot, then stood up to run again. Fifty yards away, at the corner of the tobacco field, Daddy’s last crop roared in a brilliant inferno. Flames licked at the roof, bursting from the ends of the barn through the many openings built to air out the drying crop. Behind her, safe in the red dairy barn, yet somehow aware of looming disaster, her cows mooed.
    â€œNo!” she yelled, closing on the tobacco barn. In the distance, the edge of the wood flickered in ghostly ways, lit up by this roaring beacon. Short stubby stalks of summer’s tobacco stumps stood in the frozen fields like a desiccated army, observing but not in the fight. She stopped a few yards away, repelledby the heat of the blaze. Her arms fell to her side, useless.