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Wish You Were Here!
By Andrew Michael Roberts
© 2006 Portland Review Literary Journal

Bored, so I throw on my chaps and helmet and go dig a gas can out of the garage. I come back inside and gush fuel willy-nilly and set fire to the sofa. Right away the heat is unbearable. I watch from the doorway as long as possible. Things aren’t made the way they used to be; the sofa melts quick and drips from its black bones, and now the loveseat’s on fire as well and sort of imploding. The room swims with toxic smoke and ignited hunks of floating foam. I clear out. A few minutes, and the whole house has caught. “That one’s for you!” I yell from the stoop, though there is no ‘you’, and that’s maybe one of the issues here, and maybe not. I pop a beer outside the garage and tip the visor up before huffing down the driveway, hand torch in one hand, two cans of lighter fluid in the other. A leaf blower strapped to my back. Some things aren’t anyone’s fault. Sometimes nothing’s wrong. Burning it all down just makes sense. I sit on the curb to think outside a nice two-story job. Lights out, nobody home. Some people are here to give and some to take away. Others just survive. I squirt a shrub by the front porch and light it up, gripping the blower’s pull-cord handle. I send up a thought to no one in particular, who isn’t listening anyway. One step up from just surviving is living, I tell them, and that’s what I’m doing here.