Free Burning Down the House by Russell Wangersky

in the same places or have the same memories.
    Bit by bit, you write your own shorthand.
    The man who came from the propane company to teach us about how stable the gas could actually be had a trick at the end of the lecture, where he’d flick a lit cigarette, end over end—everyone smoked in the fire hall then—into a glass he’d carefully filled to the top with propane. Falling into the glass, the cigarette was supposed to go out, proving that propane will only ignite when it’s perfectly mixed with air—and the trick worked, every time.
    Until there, in front of the fire department blackboard, when we were treated to a slapping great sooty explosion, a fireball that reached to the ceiling tiles and a drinking glass that blew apart in bits.
    â€œThat’s never happened before,” the propane safety officer declared, shaken.
    â€œIt’ll never happen again,” the chief said, “because that’s the last time you’ll do it here.”
    The rest of the department climbed up off the floor and stood up the grey-enamelled metal folding chairs that had toppled over as we had all thrown ourselves down.

SIX
    Going to an autumn fire in White Rock, and the pumper was racing along the narrow Nova Scotian back roads. I watched the high grass whip by on the shoulder without knowing what was in front of the truck, without ever knowing what was coming. Hanging on tight, hearing the air brakes muscle on, feeling the truck tilt down in the front end and my shoulder press into the back of the truck, the hose nozzles dangling down and banging hard against the metal plate.
    The house in White Rock was burning fast; I could tell that from the pillar of dirty yellow-black smoke I could see when the truck was at the crossroads a mile or so away. A big thumb-smudge of smoke, the kind of smoke that made one of my hands check the front of my fire coat, that made me mentally walk through the steps of putting on breathing apparatus and pulling hose. In my head, my left arm was already through the loops that hung from the attack line and my body was bending away at an angle with that first tug. I was pulling those loops in my imagination long before the truck stopped, spilling the flat yellow coils across the grass, waiting for the pump operator to pull the lever and fill the line with water, snapping the flat hose round and popping the sharp kinks into smooth curves.
    The house was an older two-storey, white with a black-shingled roof that came down over the sides of the second floor, a television antenna half broken away from the chimney leaning awkwardly. A fan trellis on the side of the house with a tangle of climbing clematis, but only a few late, deep purple flowers. A clothesline, hung limp with laundry, ran out diagonally from the back corner of the house towards the fence. There was furniture out on the lawn, the front door wide, windows broken and smoke pouring out upstairs. In the driveway was a red car with both doors open on the passenger side, photo albums piled on the seats in the front and back.
    The pieces I picked up in my head and actually remembered later were scattered and arbitrary, accidental snapshots that wound up fixed in place and then defined everything later, after the hose had been loaded again and the trucks had driven away.
    It is a disturbing concept. High on the pointed thrill of adrenalin, I would gather up images fast and at random, as if I’d won one of those old-fashioned radio contests where you get an empty shopping cart in a department store and you’re allowed to keep whatever you can grab and stuff into the cart in the three minutes you’re permitted to run loose down the aisles. Afterwards, the winners must look down at their carts in sheer amazement, wondering just how it is they wound up with thirty cans of beef stew and not a single steak. The thing is, after you’ve collected a collage of random images of a place, maybe, just maybe, you