Flaming Horizons

What is the true meaning of "family"? Does it even have a meaning today? Jake and Stu, two brothers from Michigan find out. A story of brotherhood, violence, hope and salvation found in destruction.

I

It was noon when I got the phone call from the city hospital. It wasn't unexpected, not by long shot. Grandma was old and sick, I was just a matter of time, honestly. I was working when I got the call so I didn't have time to mourn or anything. Simply put the phone down and carried on. For a while now I've been practicing for this day, in front of the mirror and stuff. “She's old” I could hear myself say to my reflection. “At least she was happy in her final hours” I would say, my reflection giving me a bit of a concerned stare, a stare that said a hundred words. You don't care.

To be brutally honest, I wasn't sad, I was slightly happy. She was a nice woman, someone I almost didn't know. We went to her house every Sunday when I was younger and she always smiled while gramps sat in his recliner, flicking trough his newspapers and smoking his smelly cigars. It was a happy marriage,or so it seemed, the two never letting anyone know what was going on behind the smiles and the old newspapers.

Weeks passed, the early spring slowly morphing into the sludge-like summer's dawn, cold rains becoming less frequent, afternoon storms coming and going. It was seven weeks after the funeral that me and Jake decided to go and check on the old weekend home my gramps had bought down in Michigan years ago, even before him and grandma were married. Jake, being the ever-prolific big brother, decided that he did not have any time that week so we had to wait until his schedule cleared up, something that I wasn't exactly too keen on as you imagine. Seemed sort of disrespectful, y'know?

Anyway, it was around eleven in the morning on a warm May day that Jake decided to ring me up and tell me that he was ready to depart, even though I didn't pack yet. Cue about thirty minutes of me frantically running around my house, cursing Jake, gramps and my life while my wife packed the suitcase. I told her time and time again that I didn't need a lot of things but you know women, right? She packed me as if I was going to the north pole for three months.

Jake arrived just shortly before lunch and we ate at my house, burgers and french fries, nothing fancy or expensive. We threw our stuff into my Ford and set out east. Chicago is not an interesting city, particularly not on a Saturday. The city center was mostly empty, it's sidewalks host to the commuters coming and going from their jobs, some idly waiting for the trolleys while others hailed taxis. It was the sort of semi-dead atmosphere you could experience in a bustling US city, nobody caring for one another, people bumping into each other, drivers giving the finger to their fellow commuters.

We drove past Olympia, where me and my wife used to live before my kid was born. The sun was already almost setting. According to the old map I kept in the glovebox, the best way to get to Mainstee was to hit the 90 until we reached the 195 where we'd peel off for the 31 state highway. We had a two hour drive ahead of us so I decided to start a conversation right off the bat. No use sitting around and not talking, now is there?

“Hey Jake” I said, almost thirty minutes into the journey “What did you know about Grandma?”

I wanted to know since personally, she was a mystery to me. We talked little and I knew only what she said while we ate lunch, nothing useful in there at all, like I said before. Smiles and cigars.

“Nothing really, she was a nice old lady, is all” he said

“Really? That's all you know?” Jake looked bored, utterly uninterested

“Yeah, what the hell else do you think I know? We ate lunch at the woman's house an' for all I care we aren't even related to her. Why do you wanna know anyway?” he asked and honestly, I didn't have an answer. Jake was like that, pathetic, shallow and an idiot all 'round. When we were younger, he always used to f**k with me, calling me “writer-boy” and all sorts of other crap.

“Well, it's seems odd, don't ya think?” I replied nonchalantly, my face contorting with an unseen hatred I harbored for the yuppie that sat beside me “We had lunch at her place every Sunday for almost twelve years and the only thing we've been told was to love her and to kiss her when she told us to.”

He said nothing, just sighed loudly and that's that. We were silent ll the way until Wyoming where we began talking about baseball for some reason. I don't even care about f****n' baseball but Jake here kept going on about it as if it was the goddamn meaning of life or something. I still had gammie on my mind. What was that woman hiding from us, I wondered. It's nothing, replied my consciousness, stop worrying. I decided to shut my mind off and keep talking about s**t with Jake.

He had a new girlfriend and stuff, he was happy, he had cash and he was about to buy himself a new car or some other sad crap like that. I wanted to tell him, right then and there, that I don't give half a f****n' s**t about him or his stupid sad old car I keep hearing about every time we try and have a decent conversation over the phone. I was about ninety percent sure that he took better care of the car then his damn girlfriend. Idiot.

We hit the 35 where the traffic became a lot less dense, the sudden onset of silence in the car making us both feel uncomfortable. Jake took out a flask from his sock and unscrewed it before taking a nice long gulp.

“Whiskey” He said, his tongue stumbling a bit here and there. It didn't take much for Jake to get drunk, a fact that I had remembered from my childhood. He threw his head back once again and took another gulp.

“Hey Stu, want some?” He asked, leaning over and spilling some of the brownish liquid onto my tweed jacket. I pushed him back into his seat, threatening him with my finger without taking my eyes off the road.

“You dumb f**k” I was genuinely pissed. Michigan was known for it's tenacious cops and I didn't need a DUI on my license any time soon. “What the hell, Jake? I'm driving over here and if the cops catch me with my drunk lunatic brother trying to pour whiskey down my throat, what do you think they'll say?!”

He waved his hand, not giving a s**t about my anger. He was tipsy and that's all he cared about. Drunk at 3pm, I said to myself, Jesus H Christ Jake, you really let yourself go. I turned on the radio and decided to forget about. He was an a*****e ever since we were kids and I had no illusions about him changing his ways anytime soon.

The trees whizzed by in a blur as the sun crept behind the hills, covering them in a vaguely orange hue. Everything seemed to slow down, as was customary for the middle of the afternoon. In his drunken stupor Jake fell asleep, and I was sitting in silence once again. The forest on our right became smaller and smaller until it finally gave way to the great expanse of lake Michigan, it's calm waters glistening in the setting sun.

In the distance, you could see Chicago and the hundreds of offices and skyscrapers that make up the waterfront district. Hundreds of people were stuck in traffic jams all across the city, waiting to get home the their families. They would kiss their wives or husbands, grab a beer from the fridge, sit down in front of the massive television set and drink until they forgot all about the doubts they had. It was the time of day when you are too tired to think, resorting to a number of different braincell-killing pastimes. They'd watch the commercials on TV, secretly envying the pseudo-perfect families that danced across their screens. A perfect mother, cooking, cleaning and taking care of the kids coupled with the good-looking, not-balding-even-though-he's-middle-aged dad and the two kids, one male and one female, always smiling and not complaining about anything.

Then, the already exhausted cubicle jockey would turn around, look at his own family and sigh. In the kitchen, the wife, cooking and smoking at the same time, who's only concerns in life are fingernails and house-parties. She couldn't give less of a s**t about the three little broken condoms running across the house, breaking the expendable discount crap, viewing them only as a small setback in her busy schedule of coffee-drinking and phone gossiping. The kids themselves don't matter at all to any of the two adults in the house.

They simply get dragged along to any family festivities where they would suffer an endless parade of elated relatives, all of them exclaiming how “Much they've grown” or “how smart they are”. Again, the relatives come only because it's tradition. No matter how perverted or depraved of a tradition it may be, the TV teaches them that they must uphold it no matter what, so the relatives come, masks on, gifts ready and with plenty of hollow compliments as well.

None of the kids now the warmth of the TV family, where the father is always ready to dish out advice and the mother is always there to serve a warm meal. No, in their lives the father is a sad, washed-out old f**k who only listens to his kids if they have something to say that involves money and the mother is a faded tramp who married the father only because he was the most popular guy in the class during high school.

Oh, how she loathed that balding a*****e who sat in the living room, beer and TV remote akimbo. If only he knew that she was screwing the mailman on a daily basis and that two of their three kids were his. But he didn't. Why? Because it didn't make any f*****g difference. Instead, all five of them smiled for the family photos, waving at the unseen relatives who would flip trough the family album and upon seeing the photo, exclaim “oh, how lovely you look” or “wow, nice hair there Janet”.

My mind went from the consumers to my grandparents. Did they have the same problems? Did my grandmother screw the mailman for nigh-on twenty years? Were all the smiles, kisses, handshakes and hellos as fake as the TV families? Or was it all real, built on actual moral values and somehow less depraved then the rest of American society? I sighed and lit a cigarette. Smoke, it's all smoke and mirrors, isn't it? All so god damn fake, plastic and made up. F**k all of us, I hope that we all burn at the hands of the Russians and their nuclear bombs.

The smoke from my cigarette must have woken Jake because he was drinking again. He ran out of whiskey and fell asleep again, his face giving away nothing but pure bliss. Jake was as blind as the rest of them were.

So, we drove on, away from the setting sun and into the approaching night. What did the mysterious weekend lodge hold for us? I did not know, but I had a feeling that the life of my family wasn't all roses and smiles as they would like me to believe.

II

As we hit the city limits of Mainstee, Michigan, darkness set and the sky became a battle between the dark blue of the forthcoming night and the orange glow of the descending sun, all the while distant stars flickering into life. The city's lights glowed like a faint halo on the horizon, my old rusty ford creeping in from the surrounding hills. Jake was still soundly asleep, his snoring causing me considerable concern for his health.

Mainstee was just like any other small US city. The houses were built after the war-. It was all very quiet and peaceful, making you, the visitor, feel like some sort of peeping tom, an invader of sorts if you will. The town center looked like any other, most of the buildings home to small shops, owned by the people living in the apartments above. Nobody was out after 7pm and we were the only car around. Invaders, I tell you.

The motel on the edge of town was as homely as you'd expect it to be here in the north, the walls decorated with random folk paintings made by nameless local authors. Man, the rooms looked like s**t. Walls made up in your average hotel room yellow, the sort you'd expect from a place like this complete with ancient, faded end-table lamps, the whole place smelling like a sad, lonely sexual affair.

We had a good night's sleep, Jake waking up with a massive headache the next morning as expected, and we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Marmalade too. I like marmalade. The coffee we were served was thin and cheap, as you'd expect it to be in a diner, not even waking you up properly. Silently, I suckled on mine, my mind completely empty. What does one usually think of when they eat breakfast? Lunch?

The air outside was stuffy, surprisingly so, considering that it was only nine o clock in the morning. We decided to split up for now, Jake annoying me terribly. I decided to take a walk by the docks, right on the waterfront. Most of Mainstee was still as asleep, as you can probably imagine, everything giving off the air of a perfect Sunday morning in a perfect little town. A gentle wind blew the old, faded newspapers and plastic bottles around the docks. I turned my attention to the glistening mass of Lake Michigan, in all it's glory.

The horizon was chock full of small fishing boats and other assorted vessels, most of taking to the waters because of some early morning fishing, alongside them a few tourist ships as well. Overall, nothing out of the ordinary. Chicago was now completely invisible to the naked eye, reduced to nothing but a series of small lights and reflections at night. If you took a pair of binoculars, you'd probably be able to see the Bank building on the waterfront.

For a while I just stood there, taking in the beauty of American nature. It was all fine and dandy in this town, no worries anywhere, everybody knew everyone else, most of the young people gone back to the big cities for the jobs or college. I lit a cigarette and sat down on one of the nearby benches, watching the great church across from the piers getting ready to release it's countless visitors into the early morning bustle.

I took a drag on my morning cigarette and thought about God. I hated him, always, mainly because his non-existence brought pain to so many. I pointed m middle finger at the sky and swore. F**k him and his holy damn kingdom, everybody down here dying of loneliness and despair. He didn't give a f**k. He never did.

With a flick of my finger, the cigarette left my field of vision and I stretched my back, relaxing slowly. It was a good day, a nice day. Above me nothing but sky, below me nothing but the earth and for as long as the eye can see,nothing but the tranquility of an early afternoon. The birds were singing behind me in the luscious oak trees that lined the docks, the waves crashed onto the beach below and all was fine.

After a few minutes of lounging in the sun, alone with my thoughts, an old man sat down next to me and opened his newspapers. I ignored him and he ignored me. We were the perfect couple for the time being. He flicked trough his papers, not even giving me as much as a look and I kept my eyes partly open under my sunglasses, watching him from the corner.

I sighed and closed my eyes, the sweet noises of the trees floating around my ears. Eventually, the man got up and left and I decided to do the same. It was time for me and Jake to go and see the damned house. Still, a part of me wanted to know the place.

Jake was still in the hotel, smoking in front of the Ford, calmly tapping his foot, with a slight trace of annoyance in his general demeanor. Without a word, we got into the car and drove off towards the house. It wasn't a long ride, we had to go over Veteran's Lane into Beachfront Rd. until we reached the turn for Piney Road. The house of my grandparents was there, right on Piney Road 43.

If you were to look at it, you wouldn't think much of it, a simple waterfront resting place, it's rear porch overhanging the waters of the lake. From the outside, it looked like any other old house, blue shingles lining it's facade, complimented with a few rustic-style windows here and there. The whole place was built on stilts of sorts, to prevent flooding during the winter.

We spent a good deal of our time just looking at the place, taking the feel in. It felt extremely calm, as if someone bottled any old Joe's idea of home and then put it on the edge of a lake in rural Michigan. The front door was old and neglected, the whole place in a generally forgotten state if you will. It took me and Jake quite a lot of forcing to get the rusty lock opened. It was dark inside and we sought out a flashlight from the back of my car.

The air inside was heavy with dust and old age, most of the furniture reflecting times long gone, the kitchen smelling of meals long eaten and the dusty beds on the second floor saturated with washed-out dreams and traces of sleepless nights. All in all, it looked like the love nest of some couple from the old days, forgotten by time, abandoned during the sudden onset of mediocrity and adulthood.

We split up once again, Jake wandering off in search of the house's more technical areas while I, the mad and crazed poet, was left behind to revel in the solitude that this place provided. I gave the master bedroom a good look. In the middle of it stood the old, faded oak double bed, surrounded by end tables and chests of drawers, all rotted and derelict. In the corner, next to the massive wardrobe, stood a tiny desk, on it's dusty workspace lay a few papers and other oddities without a drawer to call home.

I dug trough them idly and found a photograph with my grandparents on it, embraced and happy, smiling, my grandmother holding a baby. They seemed happy. I threw it back onto the desk, the dust rising off in small clouds, forming strange shapes in the eastern sunshine. The drawers drew my attention next and I rifled trough them relatively quickly. Most of them contained junk, except...

The last drawer interested me more then the others, mainly because it required more force to open, meaning that something was clearly lodged in it's mechanism. Somehow, I got the feeling that it was lighter then the others too, probably hollow as well. I decided to remove the contents, a few bills and some old envelopes, so that I may dig deeper.

Apparently, the drawer had a false bottom, hollowed out to provide cover for some (possibly) sensitive information. But alas, it was protected by a lock and I wasn't even nearly prepared to go and break any today. Still, my curiosity got the better of me and I quickly searched the room for something sharp that I could use to force the lock in question, since it seemed rotted anyway.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted something, lodged in-between the desk and the wall. It was am old letter knife, rusty but still sufficiently sharp. I attacked the lock with all of my strength and it didn't take long for the sucker to pop off. The false bottom opened up seamlessly, it's mechanisms still in perfect operating condition. Inside I found a notebook.

It was simple and marble-patterned, looking like any other school notebook you could find all over the United States. The blank space on it's cover, where one would write his name, remained empty, home to only one desolate word and a number, both written in hazy red lettering.

Memories #342 it said, that and nothing more.

I opened it, read the first page and wept.

It was really a set of memoirs, written by my grandmother during her stay in this house. She documented all of the events around her very aptly, particularly the ones a normal person wouldn't exactly want to document. She was sad, delusional and crazed. Why?

I remembered my grandfather, all smiling and happy, smoking on the leather chair in Oak Park 56, reading his newspapers with a perfectly calm and content demeanor. Right next to him, in the kitchen, stood the woman who he beat every day of her goddamn marriage. He would brutally hit her every time his tea was cold, he would kick her every time she complained about anything at all. She was his stress-ball, the little b***h who dared to complain and whenever she had the goddamn nerve to, she would pay with her tears, with her blood and with the clumps of hair he would tear out of her head.

My fists clenched and I ground my teeth, still clattering in the grip of my angered weeping. Lies, all filthy lies all along. The f****r never loved any of us, he never cared. He hated us and if he could, he would have killed us all. If the notebook I found was only memoir number 342, there had to be more. I needed to dig and fast. His crimes will be known and he will be exposed like the dog he was.

What hurt me even more were the lies of a happy childhood I lived, with an abused woman right in my midst, right under my goddamn f*****g sad stupid old nose and I was too damn blind to see. More, there was more and I knew it. I could smell the pain, the fear, the anger. It was all there, plain to see.

The house that, no more then half an hour ago, seemed like the perfect love nest, turned into a series of cells, a prison block of grief. Everything grew warped, wicked and disgusting and I hated every inch of the filthy place. The bookshelves came down as I tore everything away in my rage. Every single book had been hollowed out and filled with the same looking, same smelling notebooks, all identical to the one I had found, all labeled with numbers. I opened them, I threw them, I screamed and I kicked. I became an animal, alone in my rage, filled with contempt.

I did to those books what I would have done to that abusive old f**k. I ripped and stomped, I gnarled at them, I threw them out of the windows and I broke the walls of illusion around me. Fukc everything, lies and filth all around me.

Eventually, Jake came running and when he saw me standing in the middle of the second floor drawing room, with an opened shirt and covered in torn paper, he simply leaned against the doorway and lit a cigarette, as calm as always. I could feel my eyes glow, I knew what I looked like and I knew what I had done. We said nothing. Eventually, Jake spoke.

“So, you found out, huh?”

I nodded

“What now?”

I said nothing. He sat down beside me and took one of the notebooks, flipped trough the torn pages, found one that was in tact and cleared his throat. His raspy voice filled the room.

“January the 11^th Nineteen Fifty Five. Today, he hit me twice, once because I dropped some coffee onto the floor when I was leaving the kitchen. Torn dress, some hair, broken a few nails, head hurts bad but overall, better then yesterday.

Went to neighbourghs across the road, had coffee, ate buiscuits. Nice people, like them, Jeremy doesn't. Says too damn busy poking their heads into other people's affairs. Beat me again when we came home, in bedroom, because I spoke one too many times. Shouldn't get him flustered like that, high blood pressure and all.

I hope that I won't anger him again, I don't like it when he hits me. I still love him though. Always, Jeremy. Always.”

He closed the notebook and put it down beside him, gently tapping it as he did, as if he was making sure it was safe and sound. I sat in the old recliner in the corner of the drawing room, my head in my hands, weeping like a madman. Pain, so much pain here, almost too much. I needed to do something. We, as brothers, needed to do something.

“How long?” I asked

He said nothing

“How goddamn long, Jake?”

Nothing, he just sat there, smoking, as calm as ever. Slowly, he turned his head towards me, tears streaming down his stubble and onto his pristine, navy blue shirt. No one spoke and no one moved, we were interlocked, our souls bending in the winds of our pasts. He nodded slightly, and then nodded again, more tears falling from his face, now obscured by his long hair.

“Burn it.” I said, the words coming out of my mouth impulsively.

“All of it?” He asked, wiping his tears with his sleeve

“All. Of. It.”

III.

It took me and Jake quite some time to get the gas from the sheds around the house, most of it kept around for the derelict old boat that stood tied to the waterfront patio. Overall, we had three cans, three big, red, metal cans, complete with two blowtorches.

Then, we waited for a while. Just that, waited, our eyes firmly fixed on the blue house. Soon, I said to myself. Soon.

We moved quickly, covering the lower floor first. I went in first, can at the ready and opened, prepared to spew it's deadly brown venom everywhere. The living room was the first. Jake worked the kitchen in the meantime.

The old, faded, homely brown couch suddenly turned into a gasoline-soaked sponge, the TV turned into a wooden bomb, the LP racks turned into a bunch of crumpled up paper sleeves, adjacent shelving became kindling in the flash of an eye. The gasolene erased, like a big tin of black paint, covering all without mercy.

Fumes rose up from the wooden floors and the foamy seats, my nose enjoying the scent of utter destruction. Soon, I said to myself. Soon.

We ran upstairs like some sort of vicious, insane duo, spreading our liquid destruction everywhere, our anger saturating the carpets and the stairs.

The top floor was sparsely covered. We were saving up gas and we knew why. Then, we hit the room. In the middle, heaps of papers and notebooks, some torn, other brutally ripped. We poured, making stains on the walls and the beds, soaking and dissolving the papers of pain. It turned into some sort of flammable yellow sludge, the stench it kept giving off prompting Jake to vomit loudly onto the carpet.

That was that, my can was empty and we left the two metal containers next to the pile. All will be forgotten, purified, cleaned and erased.

We nodded to each other and descended back downstairs.

Outside, it was a beautiful sunny day, the birds were singing and the sun was already past it's zenith. We watched the house again, smelling the gasolene that wafted from the inside.

I lit a cigarette. Jake opened the trunk of my Ford and retrieved a single roadside flare.

“You ready?”

Jake nodded

I dropped my cigarette.

He lit the flare.

The trail of fuel at my feet ignited like the tail of some demon, violently twitching before entering the house. Jake threw the flare trough the living room window. There was an explosion.

I don't know how long it lasted or when it exactly ended. It didn't matter. We stood and watched it burn. For all we cared, we could have stood there for days, maybe even weeks, not moving. This was our last will and testament to the broken world. The last message to the illusion.

The living room went up without any fuss, the TV causing the biggest bang, it's cathode tube filled with pressurized air. Goodbye TV families, I said to myself, take your filthy lies and go. The kitchen exploded under the violent combustion of the gas main, the entire waterfront part of the house bursting out towards the calm, glassy surface of the lake.

Goodbye cruel world, f**k you and your lies

The upper floor boomed and roared, the flaming tongues of revenge obliterating the roof, blowing it off like a fall leaf. We watched it fall into the lake, it's burning mass sinking beneath the boiling waters. The house collapsed, windows exploding one after the other, masses of paper shooting out like cannonballs, the ashes of the notebooks dancing around us like perverted fireflies, warped and twisted by pure hatred.

With a final crunch, it was all over, the house falling into a pile of embers, the ensuing wave of dust washing over the two tired figures in front of the house.

We sat down onto the curb, rubble behind us, squabbling onlookers all around us and fire sirens in the distance. Jake took out his flask, unscrewed it and pointed it towards me.

For the first time in years, we shared a drink.

Author's Note

Edited a bit of it, changed some things.