spreading fire through the sagebrush and wheat grass, which were
baked and brittle from the parched summer.
—I’D STACKED THE DIRTY dishes and was filling the kitchen sink when I
heard it—a shrill, strangled cry that began in one key and ended in
another. There was no question it was human. I’d never heard an
animal bellow like that, with such fluctuations in tone and pitch.
I ran outside and saw Luke hobbling across the grass. He screamed
for Mother, then collapsed. That’s when I saw that the jeans on his left
leg were gone, melted away. Parts of the leg were livid, red and bloody;
others were bleached and dead. Papery ropes of skin wrapped
delicately around his thigh and down his calf, like wax dripping from a
cheap candle.
His eyes rolled back in his head.
I bolted back into the house. I’d packed the new bottles of Rescue
Remedy, but the base formula still sat on the counter. I snatched it and
ran outside, then dumped half the bottle between Luke’s twitching lips.
There was no change. His eyes were marble white.
One brown iris slipped into view, then the other. He began to
mumble, then to scream. “It’s on fire! It’s on fire!” he roared. A chill
passed through him and his teeth clattered; he was shivering.
I was only ten, and in that moment I felt very much a child. Luke was
my big brother; I thought he would know what to do, so I grabbed his
shoulders and shook him, hard. “Should I make you cold or make you
hot?” I shouted. He answered with a gasp.
The burn was the injury, I reasoned. It made sense to treat it first. I
fetched a pack of ice from the chest freezer on the patio, but when the
pack touched his leg he screamed—a back-arching, eye-popping
scream that made my brain claw at my skull. I needed another way to
cool the leg. I considered unloading the chest freezer and putting Luke
inside it, but the freezer would work only if the lid was shut, and then
he’d suffocate.
I mentally searched the house. We had a large garbage can, a blue
whale of a bin. It was splattered with bits of rotted food, so rank we
kept it shut away in a closet. I sprinted into the house and emptied it
onto the linoleum, noting the dead mouse Richard had tossed in the