Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World. Joseph Keckler

      INTRODUCTION

      MY LIFE IS A HOUSE ON FIRE

      When I was three, I watched my house burn down. It was the middle of Michigan winter, after a blizzard. The lights had just come back on after a week-long power outage, and we were all in the kitchen, my mother, father, brother, and I. “I want my dinner,” I announced from the high chair. Speaking was not easy yet—words were slippery, swimming in the air like invisible fish, and I had to trap them with my mouth.

      “It’s coming right up,” said my mother melodically. But then there was commotion, and all three of them went tearing up the stairs, leaving me alone for some moments. Next thing I knew, my mother and I were outside. I could see her boots crunching into the deep snow. I was being jostled in her arms and she was carrying me, running speechlessly across a field to the nearest house.

      My brother and I watched through the window as flames enveloped our home, while my parents and firefighters ran desperately back and forth across the blaze like tiny ants. “Are Mommy and Daddy going to die?” I asked, though it now baffles me that I’d already acquired a concept of death, or had learned the word “die.” My brother was fourteen years older than I was, practically an adult. He was a smart contrarian and I viewed him as he wished to be viewed—as an authority on all matters.

      “Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied, at once dismissing and assuring me. The blaze became bigger, brighter, wilder. And our home, which I’d always taken for granted, never fully seen before, looked suddenly alive, newly illuminated by the very force that devoured it. Now the fire and the house were one thing.

      I remember every detail of that evening—dialogue, images, and sensations. Last Christmas, nearly three decades later, I was even able to draw a floor plan of the house on the underside of a piece of wrapping paper. “Yes, that’s right,” my father confirmed.

      My family believes the fire may have been sparked by a surge, after mice gnawed through electrical wires during the power outage. Or perhaps it started when my father left a space heater too close to a wall insulated by newspapers, though I only heard mention of this scenario once, many years later on a night when my mother was very angry. In either case, the fire spread through the upstairs so fast it hid its own origin. It proceeded to engulf heirlooms, photos, my father’s poems, my mother’s films. And though my brother had already emerged on the other side of the eternity known as childhood, he was left suddenly with no record of having had one. Nothing of the house was left standing once the fire finished, no objects were rescued, and some jerk even came and stole our birdfeeder in the aftermath, a detail my mother still shakes her head over. I’m not sure what my possessions meant to me at that age, but now they were gone—a blue-feathered cross-eyed doll called Gooney Bird, for example, and all my little clothes, and the old crib I’d managed to break out of every night. (My first sentence was reportedly “Boy go bed now,” but that must have been the first and only time I’ve actually had the impulse to go to bed—usually I just collapse at dawn like some unholy figure, defeated at long last.)

      In the period after the fire, we first stayed with my grandparents, then moved into a rented house with yellow aluminum siding, situated next to the local dump, in a small town nearby. My mother recalls with an amused pity that during this time I began to refer to our life in the house that burned down as “the old days.” Though still unable to pronounce my Rs, at four and five I spoke as if I were an elderly man recalling his prime

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