Prescribed Burn
by Megan Callahan
When she wakes on Tuesday morning to the prickle of smoke in her nose, Janie’s first muggy thought is that her father has come home, miraculously—has simply walked in the door like he never left. Her second is that her mother has picked up smoking again. For years, Philip Morris had been her brand, but she quit three months ago, after the cancer scare, right about when Janie bought her first pack from Marché Duplessis around the corner. Her mother never lit up inside (“that smell is forever, Jay-Jay, it gets into the walls, think of the resale value!”) and neither does Janie. And yet the apartment’s creaky upstairs hallway carries the distinct whiff of burning.
Janie slugs barefoot down the narrow stairs in her underwear. From the living room windows, murky light seeps in. Her mother, thin eyebrows scrunched beneath greasy bangs, is sliding them shut, trapping the summer heat.
“Smog warning,” she sighs, swishing past into the kitchen.
“Again?” Janie trails after her. Her mother, sucking in her breath, is struggling with the window above the sink. That one always sticks. Finally, it shudders, groans, and thump-thumps closed.
Janie fills the kettle and sinks into a chair, sweating behind her knees. Her phone buzzes: air quality alert. More wildfires in upper Quebec. She scrolls through the news, aerial shots of mushrooming smoke and burning swaths of trees. Catastrophic, the taglines agree. Worst in Recorded History. Janie texts her friend Norah a screenshot with alternating skull and flame emojis. I guess Quebec’s the new BC, she adds.
Last year, Norah had suddenly moved out west, claiming she’d fallen in love with a folk singer named Pablo, and Janie still hasn’t accepted her absence, which came on the heels of her father’s vanishing act.
“Janie,” her mother barks. “Can you put that down and do something useful? Go upstairs and shut the bedroom windows. And get the masks from under the sink.”
Her mother, usually so complacent—mild as milky tea, her father used to say—has become a bottle of nerves over the summer. She’s distracted. Her editor has been calling for updates on the new book. But Janie’s mother hasn’t been writing. Most days she spends on their L-shaped balcony, tending the planter-box flowers or worrying over the wilting basil. Or else she flits aimlessly through the apartment like a trapped sparrow, heart thrumming, tiny bones clenched like she’s bracing for some unavoidable, neck-snapping impact.
“Done,” Janie calls from the landing.
She joins her mother in the kitchen, where they dunk strips of toast into runny eggs, watching the CBC on her laptop. Most of the fires, a journalist announces, are being left to burn out of control. Firefighters are stretched thin. Two deaths have been reported from smoke inhalation. Senneterre, Lebel-sur-Quévillon, Mistissini, Chibougamau: the list of towns under evacuation grows longer.
Shit!!! The text from Norah pops up on Janie’s phone. More fires? At least the weather says rain next week! She concludes with a line of pink hearts. Norah is sensitive to Janie’s eco-anxiety. Since her departure, she’s adopted the annoying habit of texting positive environmental news, what she calls Janie’s daily dose of happy. Stories like baby gorilla Yewande born at Calgary Zoo; the U.S. Army veterans working to restore coral reefs in Florida; the project to regenerate the Brazilian rainforest. Janie always replies with kiss and hug emojis. She pretends to read each story with keen interest but rarely scrolls past the headline. In truth, they make her angry. She can’t help feeling that she’s under attack.
Janie dresses for her morning shift—black jean shorts, black T-shirt—and wrangles her hair into a ponytail. Frizzy strands cling to her damp neck. Her mother catches her in the doorway and hooks a medical mask over her ears.
“Don’t take it off until you’re inside,” she orders, stern.
She pinches the wire hard, so it hugs the bridge of her nose. Janie hates the masks, their papery discomfort, and how she can smell her own breath. But her mother is adamant. Three smog warnings already, and it’s only June. Wildfire season has yet to begin. Janie’s mother has started buying the masks weekly. Boxes vanish from the pharmacy shelves as quickly as they appear.
On the stoop, Janie pauses to adjust to the haze. Orange sky, acidic red sun. The edges of her eyes tingle. It’s rush hour but the streets are ominously quiet. A distant dog walker, few cars. Janie hefts her shoulder bag and walks up to the Lachine Canal. Ducks and geese paddle beneath footbridges, treading the algae-green water. For miles in both directions are abandoned flour mills and sugar refineries, textile factories-turned-condos.
On a map, the Point looks like Montreal’s calloused heel. Her father grew up here, back when it was poor, in one of the crumbling red-brick row houses. He’d tell stories of canned-spaghetti dinners and ugly clothes from the church donation bin. Torn sheets for curtains, the blue roses faded to teal. And his mother, Janie’s Gran, waiting on the stoop like everyone else for the postman to deliver their unemployment cheque. Now, developers are creeping in. Pilates studios and fashion boutiques exist between food banks and community centres. Luxury condos look out at mouse-infested apartments.
Janie misses the suburbs, where the streets were tidy and innocuous. They had a colonial-style house with a wraparound porch. But after her father set the basement fire, which devoured the first floor and chewed up the second, and their insurance denied their claim, Janie and her mother sold what they could and moved to the Point.
“Fire-starting,” her father once said, with nostalgia. “It’s a real art form. Did you know that?”
At night, in the gloom of her bedroom, he often revealed things to her. All his stories began the same way: This is a secret, Jay-Jay. No telling. Pinky swear.
He said, “The first car I lit up was a silver hatchback. Rusted wheel caps, one broken headlight.” Her father loved cars. As a kid, Janie spent long afternoons in his auto repair shop, ducking under the pneumonic lifts, watching him work on antiques: a cherry red Parisienne, a baby blue Camaro. But that silver hatchback, he said, was a clunker. Janie’s aunt, age twelve, bricked the rear window. Their cousin soaked the upholstery with lighter fluid. And Janie’s father threw the match. “It was so fast,” he said, exhaling the last word like a sigh of longing. Hands on his knees, still smelling of grease and gasoline and hand-rolled cigarettes. For the rest of her life, Janie will love those smells.
“You two,” her mother used to say, raising her eyebrows. “Peas in a pod.” Janie would often catch her observing them from a doorway or peering into the garage while they tinkered with the car, her face naked with longing. “I’m not part of his tribe,” her mother once said, shrugging in surrender, as she clipped on her freshwater pearls.
Janie arrives at the café early, so she lingers near the water, leaning her elbows against the sun-warmed railing. She watches the ducks. A few bikers, undeterred by the smog, race past in spandex. She unhooks her mask and hunts in her bag for her cigarettes. She imagines her lungs as plastic bags floating in an oil slick, billowing in a pool of black liquid like dystopian jellyfish. But the withdrawal is real: a rising headache, a twitch above her eyebrow. She shimmies a cigarette from the dented pack of Philip Morris Special—Tobacco is addictive and harmful!—and thumbs her sparkwheel lighter.
A few yards behind, in the patchy grass beyond the bike path, is a blue camping tent streaked with birdshit. A person shuffles inside. The man who lives there looks about her father’s age. Lanky, but with a potbelly. Tattoos on his chest and an Old Milwaukee baseball cap, the brim worn to threads. Janie has seen him a few times. Once, gulping down what looked like rainwater from a bucket, and weeks later, shuffling near the Atwater Market, a cardboard sign swinging around his neck from a frayed string: Homeless due to hypnosis gone wrong! His sneakers flip-flopped at the heels, three sizes too big.
Here is another secret: Janie’s father was once a runaway. As a teenager, he lived in abandoned buildings, slept in bus shelters and metro tunnels, and ate discards from takeout containers. He sparked wild, spontaneous fires in the bones of half-built condos. Janie remembers how he’d vault into tirades any time the news mentioned encroaching developers. “We’re not meant to live in cubes,” he’d say, waving furiously at the images of razed construction sites and billboards promising Opulence and Sanctuary. He called condos Jenga towers: cheap and flimsy, a collapse ready to happen. Now Janie can see, with a clarity that’s almost precognition, her father hunkered on a square of flattened cardboard, face sunken and swallowed by a crinkly beard.
Janie smokes and watches the blue tent, wondering if the man will emerge. His sign is propped outside. This time it reads: Pigeon doesn’t taste like chicken! She considers leaving him her lunch, a soggy and crustless tomato-on-rye. She’s nineteen, nearly twenty, but her mother still insists on packing her lunches, believing that routine and repetition will keep her daughter safely corralled. She used to grow her own tomatoes in their scrappy backyard: beefsteak and roma, a few lumpy green heirlooms. Their stalks leaned against the sun-bleached wooden fence, somehow surviving the racoons and squirrels that plague Montreal West. “Your mom could grow food in the desert,” her father used to say, laughing. “Me, I’ve killed weeds. Can’t keep a damn thing alive.”
As Janie squashes the butt of her cigarette onto the railing, she wonders if she should tape a note to the shit-streaked tent. She could include the creased photograph that’s always in her wallet, of her father smiling or maybe squinting in the sun, and write: Have you seen this man?
In August, he’ll have been missing for a year.
She’s read about arsonists. Or at least, the famous ones. Raymond Lee Oyler burned down vast expanses of forest west of Palm Springs with just a box of matches and Marlboro cigarettes. In Los Angeles in the eighties, John Orr—“The Frito Bandito”—became an arson investigator just so he could set fires without getting caught. And then there was Thomas Sweatt, a guy in Washington who made his own firebombs using milk jugs and gasoline.
None of them sound like Janie’s father.
Her father was funny. He was always messing around, even in church, back when Janie’s mother still dragged them to mass. He’d sing the hymns louder than anyone, with exaggerated vibrato, and stand at the wrong times just to see how many people would follow. “Lemmings,” he’d whisper to Janie as her mother swatted his arm, mortified. Janie’s father fed the street cats and struck up conversations with old ladies. He kept his empty Coke cans in a separate plastic bag for a homeless man named Petey. “If I had the sense that God gave geese,” he’d sigh to Janie as he carried it, clink-clink-clink, to the curb, “I’d lug these to the quarter machine myself. Who knows how much cash I’m losing?”
Janie is a barista at a café called The Grey Dove. It’s third wave and minimalist. Inside, Scandinavian pop echoes and bumps against empty tables. Behind the curved ceramic counter, Florence is alone and pacing.
“It’s over,” she exclaims as soon as Janie swings open the door. “I’m dead.”
Janie winces. Florence is loud and abrasive. Every day of her life, it seems, is a tragedy written for the stage.
“I forgot to lock the back door last night,” she wails, as Janie slips into the back to grab her apron from her locker. “And some shit’s missing!”
Florence is twenty-five and has a bachelor’s degree in art history. Her favourite painter is Titian because of his “incredible reds.” She can write the specials in flawless freehand and draw lifelike portraits on paper napkins, but can’t do basic things like unclog the toilet or figure out the new coffee grinder. Or remember to lock the doors. Making latte art, Janie thinks, is her only life skill. “Let me take your photo,” Florence pleads, whenever she sees Janie. “You have such an unusual face,” she’ll say, gesturing to Janie’s long nose. She also nude models three evenings a week at various fine arts schools. All the baristas, it seems, have side gigs. Everyone is hustling except Janie.
She knots the black apron around her waist and sighs. “What did they take? You called the cops?”
Florence throws up her hands. “Obviously! They spent a whole five minutes here taking my statement.” She rolls her eyes. “Nothing missing except food. A lot of food. The kitchen was a wreck, I’ve been in there all morning.”
While Florence refills the tins of organic loose-leaf tea, Janie takes inventory. She counts what’s been taken and makes a resupply list. They don’t leave cash in the till overnight—not since the last break-in. The Grey Dove has only been in business for a few months but already, it’s been robbed and vandalized three times. Bricks through the storefront, graffiti on the walls. But the owner, Archie, a bean-to-cup enthusiast who loves floral shirts and wears too much pomade, is determined. He thinks he can outlast the “haters.”
Janie didn’t go to university. With her high school record, the only programs she might’ve squeezed into were depressingly absurd. Communications? English lit? Janie couldn’t imagine another year of swallowing, digesting, and regurgitating useless trivia. Not when the world was literally on fire. Florence, the most academically inclined person Janie has ever met, spends the shift deep-sighing about her summer Renaissance class, how the professor is a brutal grader. “And this smog!” she exclaims. “How am I supposed to think, let alone study?” Later, Janie hears her crying on the phone in the bathroom, arguing with her bank about her overdue student loan payments. Janie drinks too much espresso, feels the thrum of caffeine in her fingertips. On her break, she sits on the back steps, smokes a cigarette, and looks up men’s shelters on her phone. She sends emails with her father’s photo attached: Have you seen this man?
Sometimes, in these emails, Janie gets into the details. She writes:
My father is a skilled mechanic. He understands how things fit together. He has greying brown hair that used to be red and a mottled, pink scar across his right palm.
She never writes: He used to drink. She doesn’t mention his old temper, how it came and went in terrifying flashes, or how he once hit her mother with a white-knuckle fist. These are pre-grade school fragments of her life, mostly forgotten and disordered—what her mother refers to as the Before times. But before what?
When her shift ends at three, Janie reaches for her cigarettes as soon as her sneaker hits pavement. Outside, the air hasn’t cleared. No breeze, not even a whisper. The headphones clamped over her ears blast Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. She’s been working her way through her father’s favourite albums: classic rock, prog rock. It helps her feel close to him. Like sorting through his clothes, except she doesn’t have any. Most of her father’s things were lost in the fire, and whatever could be salvaged was boxed and bagged, then neatly labelled and taken by the police. Evidence, they said. Janie has forgotten their names, but she does remember their smell, like stale coffee and cigarettes, and their half aggressive, half lazy voices in the bland motel room. They spoke too-quick French despite her mother’s thick English accent. “Pardon,” her mother kept saying, “Pardon,” as if the whole mess was her fault. She sat motionless on the bed, gripping Janie’s hand as the officers revealed that her husband had a history of fire-starting; that they suspected him for a string of arsons across the city: in parks and empty houses, on a handful of construction sites. To Janie, it all made sense, her father’s disjointed stories rearranged into a timeline. But for her mother, the truth was like a chokehold. Every day since, Janie has watched her flutter through their apartment. Struggling to eat, struggling to breathe. The detectives filed a report and said they’d be in touch, claiming that finding Janie’s father was their “plus haute priorité.” But they didn’t visit again.
Janie finds the squished butt of her morning cigarette untouched on the dirt path. She pauses there and lights up, savouring the burn in her throat. When she exhales, it’s like she’s expelling tailpipe fumes. The sky seems to crouch down, heavy and grey. As if on cue, Norah texts: Your daily dose of happy! The story, linked from a European news site, is about wild horses mitigating bush fires in Spain’s Iberian Highlands. Grazing herds, Janie learns, eat the grasses and shrubs that would otherwise become dry kindling. A sour taste rises to the back of her throat and she coughs into her elbow. You’re the best!!! she sends back, mashing a dozen heart emojis, and stifles the urge to launch her phone into the canal.
In seventh-grade ecology, Janie’s class had a chapter on forest conservation. Her teacher taught them about the importance of prescribed burns. Janie liked the word prescribed, how it implied that fire was medicine for the forest. Fire, she learned, breaks up decaying plant matter. It disperses nutrients in the soil and lets sunlight breach the canopy. Prescribed burns help to reduce the likelihood of wildfire. In her heart, Janie believes that this is what her father was doing: small, prescribed burns to stave off something worse.
Lately, she’s been dreaming of rain. In her dreams she’s standing in the burn area, beneath a stretch of skeletal trees, and the downpour is like a flood. Water rises around her sneakers. Sometimes she’s with Norah, other times with her father, but they never speak or call out. Rain blurs her vision and trickles into her mouth. All around her, dead trees collapse and disintegrate. Nutrients disperse. Seeds rouse and open.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Megan Callahan is a writer, French-to-English translator, and language enthusiast. Her stories have appeared in various Canadian and American publications, such as filling Station, The New Quarterly, Carve, FreeFall, Nashville Review, Room, and PRISM, as well as in several anthologies, including 2021 Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal with her husband and daughter. @meganc_writes on Instagram. megan-callahan.com