The Incinerator and the Sinkhole by Christopher Miller

Dad always told me there was an incinerator back here behind the gas station. Just didn’t think I’d ever see it for myself. And I especially didn’t think I’d see Mom’s stuff burning inside it. But life comes at you fast. Very fast. You have to keep up. Keep up or you’ll die. 

“Keep up,” Dad says. He’s signaling with his cigarette hand that I need to grab more from the back of his pickup truck. Pointing at the bed. Then taking a drag off his cigarette. Pointing again.

He doesn’t like that I’m grabbing such small loads. “You’re hardly grabbing anything,” he tells me. There’s so much smoke pouring from his mouth and his nostrils and even his eyes it looks like. Maybe that’s just from the incinerator behind his head though. All the smoke looks the same to me.

I’m grabbing such small handfuls because I’m trying to figure out what I’m throwing into the fire. What of Mom’s is going to burn. There are slippers me and Dad bought her for Christmas. Do these really need to burn? A joint gift? Why did he even bother buying them with me?

“Bet she’ll miss those.” He laughs. “Never wore them. Not once.”

That hurts in too many different ways to explain. I throw them into the flames, recognizing how completely unused they are. Pristine and pink. The tags are still on them…

I’m grabbing old family photos and trying to make sure they aren’t really just of me. Checking to see if Dad is trying to kill two birds tonight.

I could probably fit into the incinerator, if need be. If the night turned.

I’m flipping through some old pictures of Mom looking like she’s my age. Too young and dumb to realize life was about to jump out ahead of her, take off and never look back. She looks too happy for anyone to handle, really. So I toss them into the flames and watch Mom’s face warp into something entirely different. Something gross. The smell of the plastic is even worse. Dad has a mound of gardening magazines teetering sideways in his arms. He’s trying to balance them but his anger is making it hard. He has to lunge forward and let them fall into the incinerator. Some miss and hit the floor. It’s alright. It’s all trash now.

I get up in the truck bed and help Dad with a workout bench Mom used to get in shape. The beginning of the end. His eyes look on fire while we carry it, but it’s just the reflection from the flames behind me. He really doesn’t look like my dad at all right now. He looks like rage. If rage was a man.

I want to ask him if he really thinks this is going to help him get over Mom. But I don’t want to know the answer. I’m afraid he’s going to say this has nothing to do with getting over her. And that this has everything to do with getting back at her. And here I am, the idiot son, asking what of Mom’s needed to be engulfed in flames next. I have a stupid smile on my face the whole time too. I want Dad to think I understand this all. That I’m on his side.

I want to seriously check if there’s room for me inside that thing. Save the embarrassment. Maybe I’d feel okay if I burned with everything else. If I could be scorched and turned to ashes along with all of her things, then I couldn’t be held accountable. An accomplice to the burning. An unwilling pawn in a game made of flames. Just stashing Mom’s stuff in an incinerator behind the gas station where Dad buys his cigarettes. I want it to be my final resting place. Put a rose on top of me when it’s all said and done.

“Stop staring at it. You’re just making yourself sad.”

***

Mom says there’s a massive sinkhole behind this farmer’s house. A hole so big it’s like God opened it up himself. Opened it wide and said this is how much he loves us. I did get a little choked up when I saw the size of the thing. It seems otherworldly. Like it’s still growing. Like it’s in its early stages of ending the world. The baby apocalypse.

Mom’s van is full of Dad’s stuff, just clanking around. It’s making me cringe every time I hear the sheer amount of things we packed inside. I’m an accomplice again. Neglected but never forgotten to be used.

“The guy lets you pay a flat fee and you get to toss in whatever you want, no questions asked,” Mom says and looks at herself in the rearview mirror, adjusting her hair for whatever reason, making sure she looks good and ready to do some proper disposal work. I’m a natural now. So I don’t have to look at myself.

We are next in line and I watch four men push a school bus into the sinkhole. A bastard of a school bus, I guess.

We’re up.

She grabs cowboy boots that I know for sure Dad wore. He loved them. But they’re already rolling down the hill toward the black hole. I’m beginning to wonder how both Mom and Dad got each other’s personal items. Stacks of it. Filling vehicles to the brim. But then I remember how powerful hate is. And I just keep grabbing stuff instead of thinking too hard on it.

I snatch up Dad’s favorite chessboard, his wood carvings, and a wristwatch I don’t recognize. They tumble around awkwardly in the crook of my elbow, fighting for the top spot. I drop them all down the hill without hesitation. There is no favorite. There is no top. They’re all just rolling toward the bottom of the world now.

Mom almost falls over trying to toss in his dumbbells. I grab them off the grass and roll them down. A John Wayne poster zips past my head. I don’t know what the rush is for.

“He’s signaling that we need to hurry up,” she tells me as she stumbles with Dad’s paints and Dad’s spirals of drawings. His pencils.

I ask to help so I could skim through them but she doesn’t hesitate to let them go into the air, letting the wind take them the rest of the way. The spiral opens up midflight and shows me a drawing that looks just like Mom but a little different, because the eyes seem a tad off. The imperfection is what makes me want to jump out into the air and grab it. Grab it and free fall into the hole. Disappear into darkness as I study the moment when Dad attempted to capture Mom’s beauty… and failed.

But I don’t. Of course not.

I just watch it vanish. And I don’t say a thing.

CG Miller

Image: the inside of an incinerator, just flames, huge, yellow and red flames from Antoine Taveneaux, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons