St. Albans Fire

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Bobby Cutts lay on his bed, watching the bedroom ceiling, its shadowy surface painted by the downstairs porch light in a pattern he’d known forever. This room and the barn across the road had always been his sanctuaries-places of private celebration during high times, as when Beverly Cable allowed him a kiss in the eighth grade-and harbors to which he retired in pain, as now, when Marianne had once again suggested that they should try seeing other people.

He hated that euphemism, knowing too well what it meant. Marianne and he had been dating for a year, and it had happened twice already, counting this one. In fact, he’d been the one being “seen” when they first met, as she was dumping Barry Newhouse. He remembered the groping at the drive-in, the more serious stuff on her uncle’s office couch one afternoon, and finally those hours in complete silence in her bedroom as her parents slept down the hall. Recalling that night-the smells of her, the taste of her kisses, her willingness at last to let him remove all her clothes-ran at odds with his frustration now, lust interfering with indignation.

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