A House Like a Binding

by Greg Tebbano

Once on the beach in Oregon, Sasha and I watched the local fire company burn down a condemned ranch house. Residents came out in a parade—couples in matching windbreakers, kids with lips a guilty red from Twizzlers or Mike’s Red Hots. A fireman in a heavy uniform did the honors, touched a butane torch to exposed floorboards inside the entrance and then, gently, closed the front door. 

“Oooh,” Sasha whispered. “A man with manners.”

Sasha and I were engaged but had gone too long without setting a date. We’d wandered into a sort of purgatory and had come to the coast for the weekend in search of something, an earlier version of us before all the updates, when things were still clunky and unpredictable, when nothing would come in on the television and Sasha’s eyes would momentarily glaze over in a test pattern rainbow before resolving to ancient green. When I might stop what I was doing, and kiss her for no reason.  

Coming across the coastal range, the innards of her old hatchback began to knock. When we get home, Sasha said, we should take apart the engine until the sidewalk is filled with chrome and rubber hoses to see if we can build anything else with the parts. 

“I don’t think you can,” I said. 

“Well,” said Sasha. “That’s a problem.”

Firemen moved dutifully, hosing down the shingles of neighboring roofs, talking over radios. The demolition seemed timed to the sunset. For a few fleeting minutes, the horizon and the fire shared a color. Where a picture window had been, the flames began to lick and curl and the crowd made a sound like children in a park drop lit by fireworks.

“Imagine if there were someone in there,” said Sasha. “A widow, say.” 

According to Sasha, the widow had raised a family here in this beach house, molded a husband out of wet sand. Just because the county said she couldn’t take care of her home didn’t mean she should simply surrender it. Goddamn if she wasn’t going to rise with it into the night. 

“She must have had to sign a few waivers,” I said. 

“Her hand cramped up,” said Sasha. “From all that trying to make her mark.” 

I used to be able to picture Sasha and I married—we even got our license. Now I couldn’t. But I could remember imagining it. It was like remembering a dream. How we would grow old in a studio apartment with Ball jars full of kasha and dried kidney beans, hermit and crone. Or how we would—somehow—raise a child, a front lawn where she could run. A house like a binding for all our stories. 

Sasha scoffed at how normative my fantasies for us were. She thought the American dream was a trap. Of course it was. It was easy to say you were not a materialist. Less easy to throw your phone in the ocean or peel off your clothes in a crowd. And anyway, sometimes the earthly was what mattered most. My hand under her T-shirt, on her back where the inferno raised a sweat.

The first five minutes of the fire were the most thrilling, when the blaze swelled and each eye was tethered to it. Humanity rose up with fire and our fortunes were tied to it still, its power to illuminate or destroy, as if there were a difference. Eventually, the town grew tired of the devastation and everyone loped off to their seaside bungalows to turn on a television. Not even to watch it. To have it on in another room, where its flickering might be mistaken for a candle, loud enough so the broadcast voices might supplant their own. Sasha pulled out a cigarette and we watched the fire crew pack up while ashes swirled.

Earlier that day we had hiked ten miles on a series of coastal trails. The only sneakers I brought were Converse. By mile six I could no longer feel the back of my knees. The problem, Sasha said, was my shoes.

“See here.” She kicked the side of one of my Cons with her boot. “Flat soles.” 

Then—and this is what I loved about her—she started smoking cigarettes as we hiked, snubbing them out on tree trunks and stuffing the butts back into the pack, a couple cigs per mile until her cough kept pace with my limp. It was the only way we knew how to care for each other—to be a mirror for the other’s suffering.

“If you die first, that’s my plan,” said Sasha, the two of us alone now beside the house’s smoldering foundation.

“You mean, you’ll be the widow?” I said.

 “Yup. Cremation a casa. I’ll just sit in a recliner reading Millay while they do it. We can invite everyone who came to our wedding.”

“Wait, ‘we’? I thought I was dead.”

She looked long at me, then at the ground. “You are.”

When I proposed to Sasha she looked like I suggested she lick the floor. All I wanted was some modicum of stability, to introduce her as my wife. A small thing, I know. It meant something to me even if it didn’t to her. We fought about it until the downstairs neighbors came up and asked if everything was all right. No, we said together. On this one thing we agreed.   

Now here we sat on the beach, before us a ruin, behind us, the sea. If you were going to script an existence as we were, with no comparables, no children or jobs that mattered, art and activism settling like adhesive into all the fissures, you were going to have to lean into imaginary endings, which is how I interpreted Sasha’s house-as-pyre fantasy.

“‘It will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—it gives a lovely light!’” she yelled into the dark. “Except, said by flames.”

That was when a cop on a motorbike called down to tell us the beaches closed at sunset. By way of apology, I told him Sasha and I were tourists here. As we were everywhere, I didn’t say, even in the places we had lived.

In the months that followed, Sasha took a hospital job as a unit secretary. She would come home introspective, explaining how the floor had rallied around a code blue—the nurses, the doctors, the techs, everyone intertwined like a net to intervene against death. Her heart buckled most for the patients who had no one—no children or friends who came to warm the room, only the cool indifference of a muted television.

Then one day Sasha came home and said, simply, “Yes.” Only, it had been so long. I had to ask what she was talking about.

Years later, I stumbled upon a video of the Oregon demolition fire on a backup hard drive. I couldn’t remember Sasha filming it and I wondered if she had searched for and then downloaded it, to sate some hole in her memory. She did that sometimes. She wanted a complete record of us. What I couldn’t turn away from—what rattled my fingers as they hovered above the trackpad—was the stunning resemblance of that burning ranch house to the one we bought. The deck-like front porch. The picture window which faced the field out back where, while she was pregnant, Sasha sat cataloging the different birds each hour brought to the feeder. She didn’t smoke once the entire nine months, but kept an unopened pack on the bureau in case of a spiritual emergency or to test her will. I was never sure which. 

When I called her in from the other room her mouth fell open. There was no need to explain what she was looking at. I felt her grip the chair, heard the wood groan as her hands began to turn and twist. The overhead light was on and so, there we were—our own pained expressions reflected back at us from within the inferno.

“Turn it off. Please, turn it off,” she said.

I don’t know why I thought she meant the light. I flicked the switch, and in that same instant, the fire took us.

Published May 8th, 2022