Featured Fiction: Joe Wilkins
Joe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana and now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. He is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which have garnered wide critical acclaim. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of a GLCA New Writers Award, and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. You can find him online at his website and his Substack.
An Introduction from John Fulton
In “Bible Creek Fire,” Joe Wilkins offers up a darkly lyrical portrait of a man and father out of control. This is a short, brutal, and beautiful piece. We’re in the woods and our narrator is about to start a fire. But this is no pastoral retreat. Instead, we’re at a “wet-ass, toilet-smelling county campground” and, like all the campers who look on, we’re at the mercy of this narrator. We don’t know what he’s capable of. Nor, it seems, does he. But one of the pleasures of this brief, explosive piece is finding out. Enjoy!
Bible Creek Fire
Wipers fucked, my heart skidding miles ahead, I fishtailed into the turn, then whipped the wheel. The backseat was a mouth and all the kids loose teeth. One of them squeaked. Shithead, my girlfriend yelled, slow down!
Remember how soft the rain? How warm? We piled out, and it touched our faces. All of us. No matter what we’d done or were about to do.
I hefted the gas can. I heard the wet whistle and gurgling suck of Tup’s breath. He always breathes like that, like he’s huffing on a soaked rag, like his nose is full of dirty water, like he’s every minute about to drown. Tup had a load of wooden blocks in his arms, too big to be blocks for kids, and no circus animals or colors or ABCs, but still shaped like blocks, squares and triangles and rectangles and even round-cornered columns, like here in the nail-dark woods at this wet-ass, toilet-smelling county campground we might begin to build. I laughed at those fucking blocks until beer burned my nose, until my eyes leaked and ached.
Kids slipped in and out of shadows. A baby plopped diaper-down. I glugged and glugged the gas can. When you saw me circling the fire pit, rusty can held high, dark rainbow of gasoline shattering and splashing, my father and maybe seventeen other bastard facts and dumbass yesses were what you saw, what everyone always sees—that deep, empty ditch opening like a throat behind me, swallowing every ordinary and dumbfuck thing I think to do. Sometimes, I spin on my heel fast and try to catch a glimpse of it, the throat closing, the black constriction. If I could only turn fast enough. Faster.
Have you ever spun around like that? Tried to fix your eye on what’s about to eat you What’s every goddamn day after you? What I’m asking, is there even one way we—two guys in the same dumpy campground on a Saturday night—might be alike?
I saw you framed in your camper door, your astonished face and plastic flashlight.
Shining behind you, somehow in you and streaming out of you, was every good thing you stood to lose. You had a couple kids in there, didn’t you? A wife.
Tup had this bullshit Bic that wouldn’t catch. I struck one gas-station match, then lit the whole book. Held it in my hand bright and flapping, a burning wing.
Toss the fucker in, someone said. Tup and the girlfriends watched me. You and probably half a dozen other scared shitless campers. All these kids (in the dark I didn’t know which ones were mine).
I wanted to roll the blackness back, I wanted every child named and counted. I wanted to forgive you your fear. I thought for a moment you might want to know my name. I even took a step toward you. I stood an eager, believing child, stood up straight for once and first in line. I had the dumbass thought we were in this together. I thought it even as the sirens sounded. Even as you slid your phone into your pocket, stepped back in your camper.
Even in the rain, a forest set on burning—it’ll burn.
The river argued with the trees. In the branches the stars were fishes. The wing became a bird. And the bird opened its bright, fiery, irrevocable mouth.