First Breath
By Wes Hutcheson
It was nearly seven, and the moon showed pale overhead. The air hung fetid and thick with mosquitoes, the evening heavy with heat. The overturned vehicle burned among overgrown trees gone fat from nearby water.
His car rocked like a turtle on its back as he threw himself against it, failing to shatter the glass. Its reflection swayed in the creek below, a sun in charcoal water. “I’m trying, I’m sorry,” the man cried to his son, to himself, or perhaps to no one.
Sweat ran down his face and chest, leaving milky lines against blistered skin. Flames erupted from the trunk, licking the man’s arms and chin. He removed his shirt, and the hair and outer layers of skin came with it, exposing raw sinew beneath. He wrapped the shirt around his fist and punched the rear passenger window until his knuckles were bone.
First responders howled warnings from a distance. “Move back. We can’t get to you.” But he railed at the glass. The screaming in his chest dragged him back to the boy’s first cries, how his son’s gasps burned like his own now, how the boy’s mother had traded her last breath for his first. The infant screamed into his face, slick from the womb, lungs raging for air.
The boy had beaten this same window with his palms a year earlier, breath blooming and vanishing as he cried, “Daddy, it’s hot. I can’t breathe.” The keys sat inert on the seat between them. The father had stood just outside the glass then. “I know, buddy,” he’d said, as if the words might open a door. “I know, buddy, I know.” Above him now, the fire found the treetops.
The glass surrendered to his bare hand, and the vehicle exhaled plastic and leather, skin and hair. The boy’s body was light in his arms, impossibly light, as if the smoke had hollowed him out. His skin was still warm, fresh from a second womb. The familiar raging in the boy’s chest, the same screams. Then the boy fell silent, and the father did not.
THE END
Author Bio: Wes Hutcheson is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College and a co-founder and staff editor of Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature. His fiction explores the darker corners of the American South, with a particular interest in family, loss, and the ways people carry the past. He lives in Tennessee.