Chuchi marvels at the sparks brightening this darkest night, and I guess they are kind of pretty. You look up, let your eyes water against the cold, and can’t tell the embers from the stars. We don’t have a tree this year, so maybe smoldering flakes of the Brownsburg Public Library are as close to Christmas lights as we’re gonna get. Chuchi tilts his head all the way back, mouth open, and the orangey glow illuminates his features. Little swirls of dark hair cling to his neck. He needs a shower.
It started small, the little free libraries in people’s front yards disappearing a couple at a time. Then one day they razed the art gallery and put in a Starbucks. They leveled the museum too, not that it was anything great. But every time we pass the muddy cavity where it stood, I feel kind of empty. Chuchi’s no good at expressing his feelings, but I can tell it also bothers him. “Mad world, mad kings,” he said the first time he saw it. I wrote that one down. My brother’s kind of a genius—the school explained this to our mother early on—but he’d forget to eat or brush his teeth if I didn’t remind him. Though he’s older than me by two years, he’ll forever be my plus one. Even if I get married and have children, Chuchi’s with me for life. I’ve accepted that.
A few weeks ago it was the Santa Maria Art Academy. The Academy occupied a tiny house the parish had no use for. Sister Esperanza painted it herself every few summers, so it was always bright white but leaned gently to the west. Chuchi said the parish only let her have it that long because it was in our neighborhood. Sister had been running that thing since Chuchi and I were kids. Ma even enrolled us one summer. Pick up some culture, she said. I don’t know about culture, but we learned how to tie-dye T-shirts on which Sister had written the name of the school in fabric marker. Twelve years later, it fits him like a sausage casing, but Chuchi still wears his to bed. Sister had us painting trees and bowls of fruit and signing our names like we were real artists. We loved that part, would practice our signatures for ages before committing them to thick and curling watercolor paper. Sometimes she’d tell us to close our eyes and sense the beauty all around us. Those were her exact words. I know because I wrote them down. Chuchi said she must have been a hippie in another life.
Sister Esperanza loved to have the kids make—from thousands of popsicle-sticks— decorations for Día de los Tres Reyes: the manger, the camels, the kings, a bunch of palm trees. Then she’d display them from just before Christmas through Epiphany. Mostly the kids who made them would drag their papás down there to have a look, but Chuchi and I always stopped in too.
On the Santa Maria’s last day, a few of us gathered to watch the smoke billow. Neighbors mostly. Lorencito who lives next door to Chuchi and me wept to his mamá about a popsicle-stick donkey he’d been working on and knew full well the flames had gobbled up. In its final moments, the Academy hissed and groaned until nothing but a heap of coals remained. The mayor said go to the city website. There’s an enhanced Q&A page that addresses potential questions and concerns. I pulled out my phone. The city council’s contact information was deleted last year, the phone number to the mayor’s office too. But the Q&A seemed pretty thorough. Then the mayor said some stuff about progress and the technological age. Anthropocene, she called it. Chuchi said she used the word wrong, but I wouldn’t know, so I wrote it down to look up later.
When it was time to go, Chuchi wiped his nose on his sleeve and said, “All ashes, but blow on a dead man’s embers and a live flame will start.” I still don’t know what he meant by that.
—
So tonight, December 21, the longest night of the year, they’re burning the library, and that should be the last of it. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing left in Brownsburg for them to burn or raze, no more dead weight to jettison on our race to the electric future—Chuchi’s words, not mine. But he said them sarcastically because he knows he’s smart and assumes he’s got one up on everyone. Which I kind of think he does.
Mrs. Norris—she’s the librarian—hustled out clutching Mr. Whiskers right before they lit it up. She was breathing hard and crying, and Mr. Whiskers put all his claws out in that panicky way cats have. You could even see where Mrs. Norris was bleeding in places from Mr. Whiskers digging in.
Flames quivering behind her and firemen at the ready, the mayor repeated the words progress and digital literacy, or sometimes she said digital readiness.
“We may be a small town,” she said, “but we don’t have small ideas.” Then she mentioned Amazon and Google and Space X and nanotechnology, and everyone nodded: neighbors, cousins, Mrs. Delgado our old history teacher. Even our dentist was there. He waved and smiled when our eyes met.
I read over the Q&A again. It struck me, this time, as a little less thorough.
When the burning is finished, all that remains of the library is a glowing pile that sometimes pops and sprays the air with bright flecks. The crowd begins to thin, so I turn to Chuchi, who is still watching the sky, and ask if he’s ready to go home.
“O joy,” he says, not even looking at me, “that in our embers is something that doth live.” At this moment, this very moment, a vast V of geese honking praise for the moon and stars sails overhead. Chuchi says, “See? See how the birds fly unaware in the hurt of the night?” And I don’t know what he means, but I write down his words.
Pascha Sotolongo is a fiction writer, editorial assistant at Prairie Schooner, and English Lecturer writing largely in a speculative style. She has published or has fiction forthcoming in Pleiades, The Chattahoochee Review, Ninth Letter, The Pinch Journal, The Normal School, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in 1966, Saw Palm, Women’s Studies, Frontiers, and the Journal of Florida Literature, among others. Her writing has won or been a finalist for numerous prizes. Currently, Pascha is hard at work on a novel about a couple of Cuban girls whose Florida town is visited by strange lights during the winter of 1983.