Scott Miles

When the city sleeps, I make strategic moves.

It’s time to feed people their misery,
to make blackened rubble
from a neighborhood home
that has no promise, no future,
only soot, only sickness.

The moon—a yellow crescent
that claws at the sky
like an infected toenail.

The house—a damned vessel heaved ashore
by the unmerciful gods
of real estate.

The wooden front door groans from forced entry.
My, how this house has starved.
My, how this house has suffered.
Destabilized through a rash of reckless mayors,
devalued in the shade of an anti-Semitic car maker,
and foreclosed on in the aftermath of the city’s ruinous riots.

Inside the house, there’s a dining room table
with saltshakers gone missing.
Someone has replaced the dinnerware with rat droppings,
the plates with hairy nests.

There’s a foyer with no place for keys.
Not even a coatrack, only a mop bindle,
dry-rotted, standing in the corner.

This house.
This house is ripe for a good fire.
This house yearns to be the glowing orange crater
it’s always dreamed about—the remnant of a fucking meteor
spat from the heavens, molten, phosphorous.

Near the fence line jut the cobbled faces of small burial plots—
little cat tombstones, lined up neat, next to an upended birdbath.
There’s a speckled-green garden hose, its head severed
like a decapitated swamp rattler.
A sprinkler system that once knew grass, yearly maintenance.

I look around.
All the nearby ghosts roll their hands in anticipation.
Burn it, they say. Burn it all.

I think most don’t understand
there’s a desperate need
for the transformative nature of arson.
History hides here, a pest.
You think it disappears into the gulf of orange.
You think it dies along with the house.

But history never dies; only finds new terrain,
seeks new passage,
sniffs out a portal
through humanity’s wounds.

Gasoline is the perfect accelerant.
Rubbing alcohol works in a pinch.
Dry curtains are a huge advantage.
I drizzle my snake oil, leave off near the front door.

I flick the match to the river of hiss,
watch the orange and purple trail
as it runs along the floorboards,
where a baby
once scraped its knee,
learning how to crawl,
or learning how to die.

It’s climbing. The fire is climbing.
The crackle begins. The spread. The heat.
My favorite things.
As the flames find the withered drywall,
the only question is: Do you stay to watch?

The answer: You stay if you believe.
You have to.

Bio

Scott Miles is from Downriver Detroit and lives in Chicago. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he’s had his short stories published in magazines such as LIT, Cimarron Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Mystery Tribune, and forthcoming in BULL. He is the author of the short story collection The Downriver Horseshoe and has also been shortlisted in the Best American Mystery Stories series (2014 and 2018).