After we moved away, drought and wildfire scorched and burned away half the town and my bedroom where my smooth plastic Hello Kitty figurines and yellowed Goosebumps books were always arranged in neat lines and my parents’ bedroom upstairs, the netting beneath their bed frame where our cat gave birth – we heard the mewling and one by one, as if pulling rabbits from a hat, we held tiny new born furred beans with vivid pink mouths and the living room where my baby sister sat in her toy box and watched SpongeBob and the kitchen where my dad cracked the door with his fist and my mom screamed as he shattered the chandelier and the back yard with the hammock where I read my books and imagined I could not hear them and the mossy boulders and my friend’s labyrinthine dirty yellow house and the other’s dark creaking mansion on Mt. Laguna.

My dad always came home smelling of smoke with an ash-stained face.

He carried his badge in his worn leather wallet for years after we left.

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Alexis Burnett is an MA Creative Writing student at the University of Nottingham and holds a Bachelor’s in English Literature from Grand Canyon University. Her short stories and poems will appear in The Purple Breakfast Review and Laced, an upcoming student anthology. She is an American currently living in England with her partner and two cat-children.

Photo: Colin Watts