Frankie sat in the minivan's middle seat, close to the sliding door. Mom was driving, and as she slowed down next to the curb on the street in front of Gran's house, she turned and spoke to Dad. "Don't you worry about her, all alone in that place?"
"She won't give up the house, dear. It means too much to her."
Frankie pressed his face to the window and looked apprehensively at Gran's house. He had not wanted to come along on today's visit, but Mom had put her foot down and said, "I am not letting an eleven-year-old boy stay at home all alone. Go and put on your good suit."
Gran's front lawn was big, with little round flower beds and young spruce trees. Far from the road, tilted at a crazy angle, was the house itself, a white three-bedroom bungalow with green shutters. In the front window he could see Gran waving. She wore a blue flowered dress and a white apron. The house shook and she staggered away from the window and was lost from view for a second. But then she was back, smiling and laughing and waving some more. Frankie waved back, his face grim.
"But an old woman isn't safe in a place like that. She could fall and break her hip or something, and with nobody there to help her..."
"I refuse to be the kind of son who nags at his mother to move into a retirement home. I don't want Frankie to treat me that way when I'm old. We're setting an example here. And I don't suppose you want her to live with us, do you?"
Frankie looked at the sky behind Gran's house. It was glowing orange, with rising black clouds that were swept away by the wind. The house teetered again, the weather vane on the roof spun around and there was a loud, ominous creaking.
Gran's house sat on a sloping hillside, on the edge of a pit that seemed to go down without end, deep into the bowels of the earth. The ground beneath the house was slowly tilting toward the pit, and the house would teeter and shift, sometimes moving a couple of inches closer to the glowing orange hole. Frankie was sure it was only a matter of time before the house fell into the pit, where it would burn and fall, forever.
Frankie didn't like visiting Gran's house.
But his parents climbed out of the van and his mother slid open the side door, and there was nothing he could do but get out and walk up the drive to the front step, where Gran stood clutching the door for balance. Frankie looked at his shoes as she kissed them all in turn and ushered them inside, where they walked carefully along the sloping hallway and into the kitchen. Gran, Mom and Dad lit cigarettes and began to talk about grownup things, their words punctuated by puffs of smoke, and Frankie sat politely, sucking on one of Gran's candies that tasted like medecine, leaning away from the table and the smoke, his feet braced against the floor to prevent the chair from sliding across the slanted linoleum. He tried not to look out the window, into what used to be the back yard.
But he could not help himself. The flickering orange glow teased at the corner of his eye, the smell of sulfur grew stronger in his nostrils, and every few minutes the house groaned and the floor trembled. He clutched at the edge of the table for support, and his knuckles turned white with the pressure. He turned toward the glass doors that led out onto the back steps, and saw what he feared most.
The back yard fell at an increasing slope to the edge of the pit. Here and there great cracks had opened up, and were slowly widening. He could see the dark earth within them, like black lightning bolts against the green grass. The edge of the pit was a sharp outline, uneven, with the grass looking black against the intense orange glow that emerged, humming, from the depths beyond. Here and there a piece of the yard would give way and a conical chunk of black earth, topped with a thin layer of sod, would hang in the air for a moment before toppling down into the burning canyon below. There would come a flash as it was incinerated in molten, heaving swells of liquid fire.
Petrified, Frankie stood and walked to the glass door. He leaned against the glass and stared down into the flaming crater. The burning ocean swelled and sloshed, and he thought he could see faces inside of it. Creased, collapsed faces with soft mushy holes for mouths, deep lines stretching every which way, bright, piercing eyes with empty black pupils, wild hair the colour of cigarette ash, and sad shapeless noses. The faces seemed to call out to him, in everlasting despair. A warning, desperate longing, pain-filled regret, terror. Hands lunged at him from within the flames, reaching, snatching orange hands with long, cracked yellow nails, the fingers spread, the knuckles swelling and cracking open, and then the fingers dissolved into evaporating streams of liquid red, and just the knuckles remained as spinning, burning rocks that fell back into the fire with a splash. Hands groped and strained, hands losing their last grip, hands with no hope. No hope at all.
Frankie turned from the window and ran from the room. Ran to the front of the house, to the living room where knick-knacks lay toppled on the shelves, where doilies and magazines slid from the table and tumbled onto the floor, where a bookcase had fallen over, where the picture window showed blue sky, green lawns, white picket fences, paperboys on bicycles and satellite dishes, large and small, planted on rooftop after rooftop, making a patchwork quilt of coloured shingled hopscotch squares, leading to ice cream parlors, video arcades and movie houses that were anywhere; anywhere but here.
"Mom, can I go out and play in the front yard?"
"No, Frankie. Not in your good suit. Stay indoors."
He stood at the front door and leaned his creased forehead against the cool of the glass, his eyes closed, watching the suburbs jammed together, tumbling onto one another until they faded into the city. He waited and then, late afternoon, his parents came and joined him at the door and he looked at his shoes while Gran kissed him goodbye, her wrinkled cheek feeling cold against his nose even while her sharp, beak-like lips burned his chin.
On the way back to the city, everything he saw was bathed in an orange glow that came from behind him, flickering, and at one straight stretch of highway a crow flew straight at the windshield, shrieking at them, and hit the glass with a thump. Mom stifled a short scream and Frankie turned to look at the bird's twisted sprawling form as it landed and bounced once on the road behind them. He kneeled on his seat and watched the black lump on the pavement grow smaller, as other crows appeared from the orange sky beyond, landed and walked in a circle around the still tangle of feathers on the ground. They cast sidelong glances at one another and waited until nobody else could see. But it was too far now, and Frankie couldn't see. The deep orange of the sky turned red and faded to purple, and Frankie felt secure as the buildings surrounding the car grew taller.
That night, hearing noises, he climbed out of bed and walked, blinking, into the kitchen where Dad sat hunched over, crying into the phone, and Mom came and wrapped her arms around Frankie and said, very softly, "It's Gran. She's...gone."
Frankie tried to picture what it had been like, when Gran's house finally gave up the uneven struggle and tilted over the edge of the pit, past the point of no return and then toppled down into the ocean of fire, where it would burn and sink and fall and crumble into ash. And Gran, had she screamed in angry horror as she fell, bouncing off the walls inside the house, maybe thrown through the glass of a window, to fall seperately? Or had she just smiled and laughed, waving goodbye, as she tumbled with her house into the abyss? Frankie had always loved his Gran, but he was afraid of her, or maybe he was afraid of the things that came with her. But he was not happy that she was gone, just relieved about not having to visit her anymore.
And after a few weeks, when Dad was almost back to his old self, moving boxes began to appear around the apartment. Mom was packing all of their stuff, and she told Frankie to pack up his books and toys. And Frankie asked, "Where are we going?"
"We're going to Gran's house, of course."
"But Gran's house...isn't it gone?"
"I thought it went...you know...with Gran."
"You're being weird, Frankie. No, Gran left her house to your Dad, in her will."
"But why do we have to go there?"
"We're moving there, silly. We own our own house now, it's all paid for. We're going to live there from now on."
There was nothing Frankie could do, except go into his room and pack his books and toys.