XLV. "Come Back When It's in the Yard"(Part I).
Author’s Note,
Went on holiday, but I'm back and do have something new for you all! Just an initial draft, though I might just build this one out into several chapters...
As always, a big thank you for reading!
-Charlene Iris
*An Initial Draft*
The fire had jumped the ridge sometime after midnight, and by eleven a.m. the sky over Cedarbrook Lane had gone the colour of a healing bruise. Watching the neighbourhood empty itself in real time, dripping in a blazer she'd sweated through twice already, Linda thought it was a very good evacuation to shoot.
Visually, anyway. There was a woman across the street loading some purses into the back of a Subaru like they contained the last living specimen of something precious. There was a teenager dragging a duffel bag that outweighed him, carving two deep lines through a lawn no one would be mowing for a while. There was a father hurrying back and forth across his front yard, performing that particular paternal emergency dance of walking briskly toward everything and reaching nothing, as though urgency itself were a kind of help.
Linda Ferris had covered four hurricanes, a mudslide, and one memorable chemical spill in which she'd had to deliver her segment wearing a respirator that made her sound, in her own assessment, like Darth Vader doing the weather. She considered herself unshockable. This was, she would later admit, a gross failure of imagination.
"...and as you can see behind me," Linda said into the camera, in the voice she used for disasters, the one that was calm but textured with just enough gravity to suggest she took this seriously without suggesting anyone should panic, "Cedarbrook Lane is being evacuated block by block as the fire line continues to advance from the ridge. Officials are asking residents to leave immediately and to take only..."
Her cameraman, a soft-spoken man named Desmond who had filmed a tornado from inside a Boston Pizza, was panning the lens slowly down the block to catch the exodus in one long, sweeping shot, the kind that would look good over her voiceover in the six o'clock recap.
Subaru. Purses. Duffel bag. Father walking nowhere. A woman two doors down, doing something very focused with a garden hose. And then, past all of it, on a side porch that Desmond's lens drifted over on its way to the next dramatic tableau:
A man in cargo shorts, flipping a burger.
Nobody in the truck noticed at first. Linda kept talking. Desmond kept panning. It was only when the feed cut back to the studio, where Marcus and Priya were anchoring the desk, that anyone said anything.
"Hey, Des, can you..." Marcus's voice came through Linda's earpiece, low, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to interrupt breaking news for this. "Can we go back? Just... back left a little. Is that guy..."
"Is that guy grilling?" Priya finished, off-mic but not off-mic enough.
Linda stopped talking mid-sentence, which she had not done on air since 2019, and turned to look at Desmond, who was already swinging the camera back with the specific, delighted urgency of a man who has just been handed the best B-roll of his career.
There he was. Mid-forties, unbothered, tongs in one hand and a can of something in the other, standing over a gas grill on a side porch not forty yards from where the woman with the garden hose was still coiling it (no, uncoiling it) in what Linda now understood was probably an act of pure denial. Smoke rose off his grill in a lazy, contented column, and behind him, smoke rose off the ridge in a much less contented one, and from this distance, from this angle, the two columns were doing an almost perfect visual rhyme, as if the universe had staged the shot itself and was very pleased with its own work.
The man saw the camera. He did not startle. He did not duck. He lifted the tongs in a small, friendly salute, the way you'd wave to a neighbour from a moving car.
"You want a burger?" he called out, easily audible over the idling engines and the distant, unhurried whine of a fire siren. "I got extra."
In the studio, Marcus and Priya had gone quiet, watching the monitor and not entirely sure what to do with their faces on live television.
"Linda," Marcus said carefully, "you might want to follow up on that."
She did.
The porch, up close, was tidier than she expected. A cooler. A folding chair with a cup holder built into the arm. A citronella candle, still lit, doing its small useless work against a sky that had bigger problems than mosquitoes. The man, who introduced himself as Gary (no last name offered, none asked for), flipped his burger with the steady rhythm of someone who had done this ten thousand times and intended to do it ten thousand more.
"Sir," Linda said, holding the mic the way you'd hold something that might go off, "I have to ask. Do you understand there's a mandatory evacuation order for this street?"
"Yeah, I heard something about that." Gary pressed the spatula down, and the burger hissed in a way that felt, to Linda, almost aggressively casual.
"And you're not evacuating."
"It's Tuesday." He said this like it settled something. Like it was, in fact, the only relevant fact in the entire scenario. "I do burgers on Tuesday."
"There is an active wildfire," Linda said, and she could hear her own voice sliding half a register higher than professional, "half a mile from your house."
Gary turned and looked at the ridge with the mild, appraising squint of a man checking whether it might rain on his laundry. The smoke behind him had thickened in just the last few minutes, folding over on itself, close enough now that Linda could smell it under the smell of the burger, and the two smells had started, unpleasantly, to smell like the same thing.
"It's been half a mile since Thursday," Gary said. "Come back when it's in the yard."
"That is... sir, that is not really how fires work."
"You want it medium or well done?" He said this warmly, generously, the way you'd offer someone the last slice of something. It was the single most disarming sentence anyone had ever said to her while she was standing inside the outer edge of a mandatory evacuation zone.
Behind her, a fire department cruiser rolled slowly down the street, its PA system repeating the same looping instruction it had been repeating for an hour: "This is a mandatory evacuation. Please leave the area immediately." Gary lifted a hand and waved at it, the same easy, neighbourly wave he'd given the camera, as if it were an ice cream truck.
The cruiser did not stop. Whoever was driving it had apparently already met Gary.
Back in the studio, Priya had her hand pressed flat over her mouth. Marcus was staring at the monitor with the expression of a man watching a nature documentary reach a scene he suspected the narrator had underprepared him for.
"We'll..." Marcus said finally, quietly, mostly to the control room. "We'll check back in with Linda after the break."
They did not go to break. Nobody could look away.
On screen, Gary had set two burgers on paper plates and was holding one out toward the camera, toward Linda, toward the fire department cruiser now turning around at the end of the block, toward the whole unraveling street, with the open, easy generosity of a man who genuinely believed that whatever was happening today, there was room enough in it for a decent lunch.
"Seriously," he said. "It's a good burger."
And the terrible thing (the thing Linda would think about for years afterward, longer than the hurricanes, longer than the chemical spill) was that some small, disloyal part of her wanted to take it.
For what it’s worth,
-Charlene Iris
Comments