ALSO BY ALLISON TITUS
Sum of Every Lost Ship
Instructions from the Narwhal
© 2014 by Allison Titus
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Etruscan Press
Wilkes University
84 West South Street
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766
(570) 408-4546
Published 2014 by Etruscan Press
Cover and interior design and typesetting by Julianne Popovec
The text of this book is set in Goudy Old Style.
First Edition
14 15 16 17 18 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Titus, Allison, 1976-
The arsonist’s song has nothing to do with fire : a novel by / Allison Titus.
pages cm.
Summary: “The Doctor was looking for the blueprint. Drawer after drawer he lumbered his way around the office, a map of the ribcage in his head. Last night he’d dreamed the wings again and the dream gave him an idea. More of the rib, dismantled, would make the wing frame more flexible. In The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire, Vivian Foster connects with an arsonist and a radical plastic surgeon whose mission is to build human wings. Allison Titus lives in Virginia with poet, Joshua Poteat, and their four dogs. She has also written a book of poetry”-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-9886922-7-5
1. Loneliness--Fiction. 2. Arsonists--Fiction. 3. Plastic surgeons--Fiction. 4. Friendship--Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3620.I87A89 2014
813’.6--dc23
2013046182
Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
To my family.
& to JP.
Sometimes people die trying to do things.
That’s OK.
There are things more important
than life or death.
—Mary Ruefle, “Elegy for a Game”
Contents
October 11, 1989
November 16, 1989
November 30, 1989
December 7, 1989
December 23, 1989
January 5, 1990
February 12, 1990
March 18, 1990
June 2, 1990
March 28, 1990
June 29, 1990
About Allison Titus
With infinite gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for a literature fellowship and the time it provided.
Thank you: to the editors of Ninth Letter and Verse magazine for publishing early excerpts from this manuscript. To my friends, some of whom were early readers, some of whom read multiple drafts, all of whom were endlessly supportive: Marie Potoczny, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Meg Rains, Rob Schlegel, Barbara Yien, Brian Henry, Josh Harmon, Katy Resch, Kelly Kerney, Ann Marshall, Alanna Ramirez, Jenny Koster, Tom de Haven.
Thank you to the mongrels of my heart who kept me company for the many years that I wrote this: Ruben, Piper, Elly, Daisy.
And most of all, to JP: for every single thing.
On the morning of the day she died, Vivian Foster woke earlier than usual, woke to dim half-light, slung down clouds fat with impending rain, the shrieking pushcart sounds of the limping bottle collector, the pigeons’ scuffed purrs rummaged up from the alley. She is survived by was where she faltered, no heir, no indebted, no lover to claim—but she thought her obituary through every night anyway. Worried over all the mechanics of the evered this and evered that. A bad habit. The bargain for a last resort: If all else failed/If it couldn’t get any worse. Sometimes the death she imagined was uneventful: she grew old and died in her sleep. More often, though, an elevator collapsed on its cable at the fifty-third floor; or the train derailed; or the gas pump, struck by lightning, went up in flames. Vivian was convinced a freak accident would befall her eventually, some pathetic and arbitrary devastation. So she resigned. She waited for the appropriate disaster.
In the meantime, she practiced dying, submitting to the idea of death in all its terrible versions. Car accident, factory fire, heart attack; hypothermia, avalanche, homicide; tuberculosis, malaria, syphilis: steady and progressive illness was, by far, the worst. The body wasted to its husk of bone; the drafty sick room with its thin-sheeted bed; limp wrist pale and buckled on the fleece. Guessing at every potential cruelty
