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  Praise for Report from a Place of Burning

  “Report from a Place of Burning is utterly original, but it is also the work of a master of the traditions of storytelling. In language that is exquisite but also precise, George Looney unspools a host of secrets that culminate in a haunting and moving whole. With such vivid and earthly, but also dreamlike, imagery, he invites the reader to experience these accumulating revelations, casting a spell as much as offering a tale. But as lyrical as it is, make no mistake: this is a real story, one you won’t mistake for an experiment. Even as you’ll want to linger over the sentences, so musical and striking, and consider the brilliance of this careful and unusual construction of a novel, you’ll want to turn the page, breathless for what’s next. This is that rare, wonderful sort of fiction that casts a spell, fills the reader with admiration for the writer’s talent, but entertains you, too.”

  —Laura Kasischke, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

  “Looney’s novel introduces Rainier Maria Rilke to Sherwood Anderson, escorts them into our 21st century, and invites them to sing. And sing they do. A gyre of desire and devastation, vision and transfiguration, Report from a Place of Burning dazzles.”

  —Ann Pancake, author of Strange as This Weather Has Been

  Gorgeous. Haunting. Unforgettable. Like every real mystery, Report from a Place of Burning lives on, creating questions and leaving one hungry for answers. Looney’s novel smolders with captivating voices, shocking possibilities, and private histories of characters whose heartache, loss, and love are seared behind my eyes.”

  —Aimee Parkison, author of The Petals of Your Eyes

  “A fabulous mix of the arcane and ordinary. A familiar Rust Belt setting—a defunct Heinz factory with the acrid smell of vinegar lingering in the air—gives the story a desperation and Philip Dick-ish, dangerous, dystopian feel . . . the perfect surreal setting for this bleak (although at times, quite humorous) narrative and concoction of strange events. . . . In a profound way [the novel] speaks, metaphorically, to “the times.” Amidst all the preoccupation with apocalyptic/Armageddon books/television/movies, the sense of impending doom in every facet of the news, and the rough beast that has slouched his way into the White House, here’s a nod to something that passeth all understanding, with a Julian of Norwich ending of radical optimism, in spite of grim, horrific events.”

  —Sara Pritchard, author of Crackpots

  “These eighteen interlocking monologues have the mysterious weight and strength of a chorus, twining and buzzing with strange harmonies. Individually, there are stunning, unforgettable moments, which build on each other in a way that creates a novel, but a novel in five or six dimensions.”

  —Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

  “The towns in this world are losing their edges; there are deer in the Heinz plant and clues in the many voices. All manner of blessings and curses live in Report from a Place of Burning, a poet’s novel.”

  —Ron Carlson, author of The News of the World and Five Skies

  Report

  from a

  Place of

  Burning

  Also by the Author

  Fiction

  Hymn of Ash (2008)

  Poetry

  Hermits in Our Own Flesh:

  The Epistles of an Anonymous Monk (2016)

  Meditations Before the Windows Fail (2015)

  Structures the Wind Sings Through (2014)

  Monks Beginning to Waltz (2012)

  A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness (2011)

  Open Between Us (2010)

  The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005)

  Greatest Hits 1990-2000 (2001)

  Attendant Ghosts (2000)

  Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995)

  Report

  from a

  Place of

  Burning

  A Novel

  George Looney

  Leapfrog Press

  Fredonia, New York

  Report from a Place of Burning © 2018 by George Looney

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including

  mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without

  the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in 2018 in the United States by

  Leapfrog Press LLC

  PO Box 505

  Fredonia, NY 14063

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-948585-00-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Looney, George, 1959- author.

  Title: Report from a place of burning / George Looney.

  Description: First edition. | Fredonia, NY : Leapfrog Press LLC, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018020620 (print) | LCCN 2018022742 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781948585019 (e pub, kindle) | ISBN 9781948585002 (paperback : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.O597 (ebook) | LCC PS3562.O597 R47 2018 (print) |

  DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020620

  for Bowling Green, Ohio, all its ghosts and lost places

  Acknowledgements

  The following chapters of this novel appeared in the journals cited.

  Permafrost: “The Prophet, the Gorge, and the Red Diver” (compilation of the chapters “The Prophet and the Signs,” “The Prophet and the Gorge,” and “The Prophet and the Red Diver” combined into one story)

  Contents

  Praise for Report from a Place of Burning

  Acknowledgements

  The Widow Considers Edges

  The Adulterer Is Trapped by Dreams

  The Mother Whose Son Wasn’t First

  The Detective Questions His Methods

  The Prophet and the Signs

  The Widower the Dead Visit

  The Widow as Ventriloquist for the Past

  The Adulterer Fails to Balance Desire and Decorum

  The Mother Gets Back Her Tragic Intuition

  The Detective Gives Up on Coincidence

  The Prophet and the Gorge

  The Widower and Dali’s Burning Giraffe

  The Widow and the Magician’s Ghost

  The Adulterer Curses the Static

  The Mother Paints Cathedrals of Fire

  The Detective Mute behind the Mirror

  The Prophet and the Red Diver

  The Widower Dances

  The Author

  Love needs to be set alight

  again and again, and in thanks

  for tending it, will do its very

  best not to consume us.

  —William Matthews

  The Widow Considers Edges
>
  There are things we see that have to shatter something. This I believe.

  The deer that wandered onto the old Heinz plant, for one. Used to be you had to live at an edge of town to have any expectation of deer, but this town is losing its edges. Developments, they call these havens of the same house over and over, labyrinths that would’ve lost the Minotaur itself. Before he passed, my husband drove us into one, just to see what was what. Not only the houses were the same but the roads too, and all the sad-looking saplings, the developer’s idea of replacements for what had been torn out of the earth to put up these ghosts of neighborhoods, these rumors of places where people might be said to live.

  • • •

  No one had moved in yet the day we drove around and around on perfectly smooth streets. Even the street names were no help. There’d be a Street and a Road and a Drive and a Circle, all with the same name. We started to pretend we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and entered, as Rod Serling used to say, The Twilight Zone.

  In that house, I said, there’s a man without a face. He’s lived forty years without a kiss.

  Not possible, Ray said, and leaned over to kiss me. Ray was like that, even after all our years together.

  Not in front of the poor, suffering, faceless man, I said.

  Not to mention his wife, Ray said and laughed, and kissed me.

  And in this house, I said—pointing at a house identical to the one in which the faceless man was feeling his way to the bedroom where his wife waited for the incredible pleasure of his hands, which were all he had to make up for his lack of a mouth, for the lack of a tongue or a way to tell her how beautiful she was, which of course only his hands told him anyway, as he had no eyes to see her with—consider the case of the man who lives, literally, day to day.

  Every morning he wakes a clean slate, I said. Ray was grinning. Through the course of each day he meets his wife, falls in love with her, courts her, wins her love and relishes it like a Labrador rolling in fresh-mown grass. Every night, I said, he falls asleep with his arms around this woman he loves with all his heart, and every morning he wakes up with a woman he doesn’t know but is drawn to. Maybe he believes they were lovers in an earlier incarnation. Maybe he tells her this, sometime around breakfast, every day.

  And what about her? Ray said. What does she believe?

  It’s not so much what she believes as what she fears, I said. She’s terrified of the day he’ll wake up with her name on his lips.

  Why is she afraid of that? Ray said, his grin getting ready to become a sound.

  Because, I said in my best Rod Serling, once he leaves The Twilight Zone, she’ll become familiar to him, and familiarity, after all, breeds contempt.

  Don’t I know it, Ray said, and laughed at my melodramatic hurt face.

  Still, we were lost in the sameness of what someone had named Sycamore Hills. We were no more than three miles from the house we’d lived in almost thirty years, we knew that. But it didn’t feel like we were that close to anything we knew or could call ours. And where we were there were no hills, and not a sycamore in sight. Just the same house and the same yard and the same sidewalks, over and over.

  Finally, for your edification, Ray said in a much better Rod Serling than I could muster, consider the case of the woman who believes the dead speak to her. Consider how, as a girl, no more than twelve years old, her heart stops in her chest. Watch her frantic mother and father work over her, crying, the father breathing into her little mouth, the mother pressing in rhythm against her thin chest. Now see her taking a breath on her own, her heart starting up again, and see how the mother and father hold her.

  Now look into her face, Ray intoned in a voice too deep for even Serling. See that something’s missing. I couldn’t help but shiver, knowing, I was sure, what was coming. This twelve-year-old girl is suddenly not twelve, Ray, as Rod, said. She knows something didn’t come back. And now see how she seems to be listening to something the mother and father cannot hear. Listen. Can you hear it? The voices of those on the other side, those who stand beside what didn’t come back. That which was in the heart of the twelve year old girl but is now with them.

  You are now leaving The Twilight Zone, I said, pointing to the turn which we’d taken into the labyrinth.

  Darn, Ray said. Now we’ll never know what happens to the woman who listens to the dead.

  Don’t worry, I said. I’ll tell you later.

  I never did tell him. I couldn’t bear to, knowing that, alive, he could never have borne it.

  • • •

  All the edges of town are being lost. The deer’s woods are being torn up and hauled away, so they’re venturing further into town. What’s left of the Heinz plant is just across the street. Thirty years ago or so, when the plant was built, it was the edge of town. The town grew right around the plant and kept going. The house Ray and I lived in for most of our married life, the house I’ve stayed in, was one of the few built here before the plant opened. The porch I sit out on and knit on good days used to face woods. Now there are just these old maples, in rows, lining the streets, and every year crews from the city go up and down the street and trim back branches from the power lines. This can’t be good for the trees, I’ve always thought.

  When we first moved in, the plant was operating at full capacity, three shifts day and night. We had to get used to the smell. The constant odor of vinegar wasn’t the worst. The worst was a smell we could never name.

  Ray once said it was the smell of a magician who died in the midst of one of his tricks. This magician, Ray said, was such a great magician and people so believed in him that they were sure they saw him emerge from the trunk that had been submerged in the tank of water. The people applauded, gave him a standing ovation, in fact, and went home, all of them talking about that last trick, how amazing it was, asking one another, How did he get out of that trunk?

  How did he do it? people asked one another for weeks afterwards. Even his assistant couldn’t believe it, though she believed he did and saw him taking his bows before the crowd of standing people, applauding him. She even felt his strong hand take hers and raise it up and swing it down for the final bow. But no one took down the last trick. The crew had all been so impressed they went and got drunk and stumbled through town singing dirty songs and chasing women and little girls until the sheriff forced them to leave town.

  The tank stood there, Ray said, in the middle of the town’s park, and the body of the magician rotted inside the trunk submerged in the water that itself grew rancid with algae and clotted by mosquitoes and so was avoided by everyone but a few boys who wrote things on it with magic markers, names and hearts and words they weren’t supposed to know, Ray said.

  Another time, it was the smell of a barge of garbage no city anywhere in the world would accept. Ray said the town council had taken a bribe to allow it to be dumped under the town, in the sewers. He’d heard it killed the rats and the baby gators that had lived down there, and all the rotting vermin added their own putrid stench to the odor of the garbage itself. This was a particularly bad day, long before the fire. No one sat on their porches that day.

  Most days weren’t that bad, and by the time of the fire, we hardly noticed the smells from the plant.

  • • •

  Some days I could swear there’s vinegar in the air. Is there such a thing as ghost odors? They say that people who lose limbs can sometimes still feel a pain where there’s nothing at all. Phantom pain they call it. Can a place be haunted by a phantom odor? Is that what lured the deer?

  It had wandered into what used to be a walkway between buildings. It was one of those walkways with a sidewalk that crossed through it. The deer had gotten in following the crossing sidewalk and panicked, the way I’ve seen birds do. They fly into the walkway and seem to forget how they got in and start flying against the windows that line the brick structure. At least a dozen times
over the years Ray and I crossed the street in the evening to help a bird get out before it bashed its little head against the glass one too many times. More than once, I held some sparrow or wren or finch in my hands and carried it out of the walkway and let it go. Times we didn’t see them, the birds would be swept out and thrown away, having martyred themselves against the glass.

  There was no way I was going to lead that deer out. I knew it. I could hear its hooves on the glass of the windows and the concrete and the brick. It was leaping and pawing the walls and windows in fits. It would lie down for minutes and I’d almost get to thinking about something else, and then it was up again and leaping from one wall to the other, bumping up against the glass and scraping it with its hooves until it wore itself out and laid back down.

  This must have gone on for nearly half an hour before some boys I think lived on the next street saw it. They were throwing a baseball among the three of them and moving down the street, heading for the park a few blocks away no doubt. One of them saw the deer and shouted to the other two. The three of them walked up the sidewalk from the street that led through the walkway. They were laughing, but I had no idea what they were going to do. I was watching from the porch and could have yelled to stop them had I known.

  The one with the baseball, laughing, threw the ball at the poor deer. It must have hit the deer, because it went wild, leaping against those walls and windows and not stopping. The boys backed off, and when I yelled at them they started to run. The damage was done, though. The deer was absolutely frantic, smashing itself against the windows. Several started to crack and then the deer leaped again and went right through one of the windows. There was a sparkling around it as it came through, glass shards reflecting the sun. It was almost magical, and I try not to think of what must have been left in the flesh of that deer, which took off down the road and was soon gone.