Matchstick
Michael Obilade

In the eleventh grade my brother fell in love with a girl made of fire. He pulled me aside one day at recess, and asked me to follow him. I was a grade younger, and brother or no brother, this was odd. We almost never spoke at school, and I pushed him away. He smelled of smoke.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I've got someone to show you, Julie." We stole away from the schoolyard, past the building, until we were beside the forest. I looked around. "There's no one here." I turned to him. The smell was stronger. But it wasn't like cigarette smoke. It was heady, like incense. I grew curious. "You know Mom says we shouldn't smoke, Dural."

"I'm not." He grinned. I watched him put his hands into his pockets. He took a few steps forward, and called a name I couldn't hear. A girl stepped out from behind a tree. She was a pale thing with a pixie cut, a thin frame full of bird bones.

"Hi." She smiled at me, and then at my brother, biting her lip. "I'm Josie."

I didn't know much about Josie, except that she was made of fire, and my brother loved her. I wasn't even sure of these. She didn't go to this school - no one knew her - which meant she was either home-schooled, or from another town. We spoke briefly. She said she was sixteen, like Dural, but she looked like she still belonged in junior high. My brother wasn't evasive about many things, but he was doggedly secretive when it came to her. The only conversation I ever had with him about her occurred on a morning when I caught him peeling blisters off his hands in the backyard. I sat beside him, and stared at the sun, pale white in a blue sky.

"I really like her," he said.

"Why?" He laid patches of skin on the grass, and wrung his hands in the air. "And what happened to you?"

"She isn't like any of the other girls at school." He looked at me and sighed. "I know that doesn't seem like a reason, but it is. She's like a. . ." he picked up a twig. ". . . she's like a matchstick in a world full of toothpicks." He laughed. "We've been going steady for a month now."

I pictured the skinny copperhead who bit her lip and was probably teaching my brother to smoke. I pictured her stealing away his innocence, the two of them drunk on corn whiskey.

"Every matchstick burns out eventually." I sometimes say cruel things, but I managed not to say this aloud. I don't know how much I might have hurt him if I had. Instead, he looked at me, expecting me to answer his toothpick analogy. I thought of something else.

"Do you really like her?"

He nodded. "What do you think of her?"

I shrugged, and went to find something to keep him from further blistering his hands.

* * *

After that recess, I didn't see her again until a month later, when Dural opened the door to our home and she rushed in after him. Sticks and leaves blew inside with the coming storm. I shut the door, and peered out the window. The sky was turning green.

"Where's Mom and Dad? I think we need to head for the cellar," he spoke while moving around behind me. I pulled myself away from the swiftly-moving clouds heading our way. I saw a dark finger of a funnel cloud. It was half a mile away over the farmland.

"We have to go." I said it quietly. As if on clockwork, the man on the radio announced the tornado warning. "I've been waiting for you. We should go. Now."

"I'll get them, and we'll go down to the cellar." He ran to their room as I told him they weren't there. In the back of my mind, I blamed Josie for this. "Where are they?"

"They went to the city today, remember?" I shouted, but softened after I saw Josie sitting in a corner, turning pale. I glanced through the curtains. The wind grew louder, and the steady drumbeat of hail mixed with rain began clattering on the roof. "Let's go now."

I grabbed the radio, a box of candles, and Josie's hand. It was incredibly painful. Instinctively I recoiled, as if I'd touched an iron. Josie stared at me, then at Dural, who was staring at us both. I looked at my hand, hoping it wouldn't, and cursed as the pain came anyway. I smelled a familiar tinge of incense, and wondered in the back of my mind why it was familiar.

"What's wrong with you!" I shouted, running to the sink. A branch the size of a lead pipe flew out of nowhere and smashed through the living room windows, narrowly missing my brother. He jumped back and cursed it.

"I'm sorry!" she shouted back. It wasn't a shout - it was more like a whisper. If her voice were a thermometer, it never rose above room temperature. Dural looked at me as I whirled around, still clutching my hand under the tap. "I'm sorry, Julie, I should have warned you." He looked at Josie, who was still against the wall with her knees pulled up to her chest. "But we've really got to go." I turned and grabbed a rag to soak with water, but not before I saw him. He didn't see me. He stretched out a hand to Josie. She grabbed it, and he pulled her up. With the tap and the wind, I didn't hear the faint sizzle I'd heard when I was the one who'd grabbed her, but even from the kitchen, I could make out the small wisp of smoke that rose from their touch. I saw my brother wince.

"Now, Julie!"

I rushed after him, and the three of us ran into the cellar. We forgot the candles, but none of us dared retrieve them. I bolted the door with my good hand, and we fumbled about in the darkness at the top of the stairs feeling for the lightbulb chain, until a quick succession of lightning and thunder lit and shook the house. I found the chain and pulled. Nothing.

"Power's gone," Dural said. Somewhere in front of me, Josie gasped. Her hands - the hands she'd used, deliberately or not, to burn me and my brother - began to glow. It was faint, but closing and opening my eyes confirmed it was real. She held them at her sides. They turned red. Then orange. Then they began to burn. Twelve years and two sons later, I can't forget the sight. I have a husband, a mortgage, and a house in the city. But the image doesn't leave me. It's one of two moments with Josie that I carry with me from that day. It isn't a nightmare; it's not an obsession. But no matter how far I am from that cellar, from Josie and my brother, my strongest memory of being fifteen is the sight of her face, his face, and the blue jeans I wore - lit by a pair of frail and burning hands.

"You can't tell anyone about this," Dural told me as the three of us sat out the storm in the cellar. His voice was urgent, but against the shriek of the wind all around us, it was a prayer. Josie sat beside me, rocking slowly, looking around the dark room. Her hands were no longer aflame - she insisted on "turning it off", as she put it, as long as there wasn't a way to clear out the smoke - but they still glowed a warm orange, which allowed us to make our way around the cellar without crashing into shelves and spices. The rest of the house creaked and groaned above us like an old, stubborn tractor. Rain and thunder continued to pound against the shutters, and it felt like we were on the Ark.

"I won't," I hissed back at him. The person on the radio cut in and out, his voice drowned in static whenever lightning silenced the signal. He said a tornado touched ground a quarter mile from the high school. I knew I should have been more scared, and I was, somewhere inside, but on the surface, all I could think of was what I'd just seen.

"How long have you been able to do. . . that?" I asked Josie. I didn't know what else to call it. She looked at me, breaking eye contact almost immediately. I wondered how my brother had even managed to meet her, much less to win her trust. She had the temperament of a butterfly.

"It comes and goes," she said simply. "I'm still learning to control it."

I remembered it was rude to stare, and stopped gazing at her hands, even though she did the same as she spoke. In the shadows, her hair was the color of her hands. It was mesmerizing.

"I'm really sorry for burning you. I didn't mean to."

"That's all right," I said. In truth, my hand still ached, bandaged as it was. But it seemed forgiving her was the least I could do in the midst of a tornado. "I won't say anything," I whispered to her. She looked at me, and for the first time, she didn't look away. Dural was bending the radio antenna back and forth, trying to clear the static.

"I think the man said it's heading in the opposite direction." He set the radio down. "Just to be safe, we should probably stay down here for a little longer."

Our parents didn't return until the next day. Mother called five or ten minutes after we left the cellar, telling us the roads were blocked, and they were helping with the rescue and recovery efforts. We talked about the storm, about where she took shelter and how we did over here.

"Are you sure you're okay, honey?" she asked. Her voice was warm, reassuring. But underneath, I could hear the worry, like distant thunder. Or maybe I was imagining it. I couldn't tell anymore. In a moment of panic, I longed for the age when my parents were still invincible.

"Yeah, we're fine, mom."I answered while looking at my brother and Josie. They were sitting together on the floor, facing one another. Touching fingertips.

"I love you, Jules," she said. "Please take care of your brother, would you?" I listened to my mother while watching Josie. She was saying something quietly - not so I wouldn't hear her, or because I was on the phone, but because, as I was beginning to understand, that was the way she was. My brother listened, because that was the way he was. I found myself grateful, though I couldn't say why.

"Julie?"

"I will. I love you too." I put the phone down.

Josie's parents didn't call.

The three of us spent the evening talking softly, telling stories. In the distance, we heard the high, rising sirens of ambulances and the low, sonorous beatings of helicopters. Downed power lines criss-crossed the backyard like spent matchsticks. We took out the ice cream from the freezer, telling ourselves we were eating it so it wouldn't melt and spoil. Eventually, my brother decided to have a look around outside, before it got too dark to see. Josie sat in the doorway. She didn't want to come.

"I'll be right back," Dural told her. He turned to me. "You coming?"

"Go ahead. Don't wander too far."

"All right. Send out a search party if I'm not back in an hour." He grinned, and headed off. I sat beside Josie, and we watched him step over broken glass, dog collars, picture frames, and other things that could only have come from dozens of houses that no longer existed. He ventured out into the street, and walked up and down, surveying the damage. I stopped following him and stared at the sun, wet and low in the sky. Everything smelled like cows.

"You can use the phone, if you like." I'd been thinking it for several minutes, and eventually I said it aloud, without realizing it. Josie didn't say anything.

I looked at her. "You know, to call your folks and all."

"Thanks." She suddenly stared straight at me. We made eye contact, flickering like candles. "They're out of town today, so it's all right." She suddenly looked away, and repeated herself, ". . . so it's all right." I felt a flash of heat press against me, then subside - as if someone had opened an oven with a cake inside to check if it were done, and shut it, realizing it wasn't ready. She looked at me, and winced. Her cheeks flushed and it happened again. I fought the urge to edge away.

"Sorry. I'm not used to talking about myself much. It - it's a side effect."

Side effect. Like some sort of disease. Where did she learn that?

"Nothing about you is a side effect," I blurted out. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise." Now I was the one who turned red. "You're fine, Josie." I finished my thought.

"Thanks," she said. "I mean. . . thank you." The second time, she said it a whisper louder. Then she began to talk, staring at me, then at her hands, then back at me as she spoke.

She went on and on. But the longer I listened to her, the less I understood. I couldn't tell if everything she was telling me - how her father was, ironically, a firefighter; how she never handled newspapers because she couldn't keep herself from burning them; how she slept beside a bucket of water, which she'd had to use twice to keep from setting her bedsheets on fire; how her mother decided to home-school her after the principal expelled her for wearing through six desks in three years - was true, or not. But I believed her, and I wanted to believe her - even though I didn't want to believe the things she told me. Her truth made me dizzy.

* * *

Five years later, when she'd call me in the middle of the night, squealing into the telephone that my brother had proposed to her, that they were going to be married, that everything was perfect and that she knew to call me because no one else would understand what "perfect" meant to her but me, I'd realize there were things - so many things - he still didn't know about her, that she would never tell him, that I could never tell him. Some were things she had told me when I was too naïve to know if I really wanted to know them, while others were things she'd told me when she was far too young to know if she could trust me to keep her secrets. This was the second memory I would always keep of her. Her fire was a visual magic, but her honesty was an aural one. This was the memory of when we first realized we could be sisters.

* * *

Eventually, she stopped talking, and let out a long, blissful sigh. From then until my brother returned, neither of us said anything. I wondered, in a quiet daze, what had drawn them together. I still didn't know how they'd met, where she lived, what she liked to do. Yet underneath it all, there it was. I started playing back the conversation we'd had about her in the backyard a month ago.

"He really likes you, you know." It came out again, unconsciously. I said it while watching Dural wander back in the sunset, waving languidly at us. I waved back. "Be good to him."