A Forever Kind of PlaceSpring 2026 — A Keep The Fire Hot Story

Sparrows in the trees and at the river bed. Each with dark eyes wide and curious of the river’s subtle waves. The almost-summer blues and golds of late morning catch a foot path by the river’s edge. Already the new grass is flattened. It leads from a natural indentation in the shoreline all the way back to the cabin’s front porch. In that space a hand-made weir is waiting for fish. Nearby, three lines with bobbers in the water, weighted to the shore by rocks. Their bobbers sway in the ripples. Mallards keep to the other side of the water, having their own conversation.

Jim and Pam both have their eyes closed. “Jim”. Without raising his head Jim replies, “Yes, love?” “This place is perfect.” Pam said, smiling. “I think it just might be, sweet P. It just might be.” A pet name from their earliest days together. At a restaurant a waitress overheard him call Pam “sweet P” and told them it was cute. Before Pam could stop him Jim told the waitress “sweetpea” was from Craig T. Nelson in Poltergeist always calling Carol-Anne sweetpea. The waitress, unimpressed with their odd inside joke, shook her head as she walked away. They still laugh about it. When they laugh.

Today, they lay in the grass on a blanket her grandmother made. Carried all the way from Detroit to Windsor with stops in Delhi, Port Colborne, and then Toronto. The blanket would be with them as they escaped their burning neighbourhood. They ran as neighbors’ pets howling in pain, running on fire, until they fell quiet. A box of memories was dropped in the panic. The last photo of her and her deceased father left in the car they had to abandon.

Pam rests her head on Jim’s shoulder, her legs pointing away from him. His head is north, hers faces west to their girls playing along the river bank.

“I could stay here forever.” Pam exhaled. “Same. It’s a forever kind of place.” They didn’t spend much time thinking about who built it. Or who lived in it before they found it. They found a place to be safe, no matter how temporary. Life had been one tragedy after the next for so long they couldn’t believe any respite was possible. But here they are, in the fresh air with ripples of the river in their ears.

Jim thrust his entire body upright, throwing off Pam.

“What…?”

Jim’s attention is on his daughter and her best friend laughing at the river side. Their attention is on some caught creature trying to climb up a branch the girls are using as an exploratory tool.

Pam puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s ok, it’s ok. They’re right there and they’re fine. We’re all fine.”

“My heart is thundering in my chest”. Pam soothes him.“Easy, easy.” Both are intimately familiar with this experience. It gets no easier with frequency.

“Come on, let’s go in and get some food ready”. “Ok, yeah, let’s.”

They gather up their blankets and sweaters and assorted things. They call the girls to come back closer to the house.

“OW! Ooooh that hurts”. Kimmy recklessly swinging a stick hit Lyla, right in the face. “Lyla! I’m so sorry!” Pam and Jim watch,hop up and reach them in an almost sprint. “Are you ok, I'm sorry”.

“It's ok.” Lyla sighs from under one hand covering her eye, “I know you didn’t mean it.”

Pam helps Lyla inside. Jim comforts Kimmy who is weeping over hurting her best friend. At Kim’s 15 years to Lyla’s 17, Kim looks up to Lyla. Always joined at the hip and so often finding comfort in each other in a cold and inscrutable world.

Later, the meal prep is quick with few ingredients to work with but they get to do it together. Jim gets the filtered water. The hand-made filter is a canvas sack filled with a stacked order of rocks, sand, charcoal, more sand, and more rocks. The river water looks safe enough but after seeing more than a few bodies carried by the current, Jim takes no chances. Pam preps the fish, lights the wood stove, and dries some greens with a towel.

They sit at the table they found in the dining room the day they arrived. It's laid out neat and perfect. Faces and hands cleaned by river water and smiles all around that they have food in front of them. Kimmy feels the warmth, grateful with her best friend’s family. “It’s a beautiful day.” Pam answers Lyla with “It is a beautiful day, sweetheart.” They retire together, the girls all watching Jim check the locks and window covers as they move through the house and up the stairs to bed.

Pam and Jim have loved Kimmy as much as their own daughter these past years. They were all together when Kim’s parents were killed. In the exodus from southern Ontario to the north when the war was first escalating from awful to horrific.

Jim’s family is from Rochester, New York. Both sides. His own flesh and blood fought in the invasion. They actually crossed the border, burned homes, and businesses. Entire blocks. Took aim at elderly civilians who couldn’t get out of their way fast enough. Even in a world where Russia erased Ukrainian villages and two thousand year old Lebanese villages were flattened by Israelis, no one could believe the Americans would do the same to their neighbours.

The shock didn’t last. And the world, for everyone, got a little darker.

In this cabin, that darkness is split by moonlight through the window of the bedroom where the girls share a bed. The bottom pane of glass has a bullseye rippling out from the centre. An artifact of the manufacturing process producing what looks like liquid waves of glass. It bends moonlight mixed with the special twitchy glow of distant firelight.

The flicker grows wilder and brightens as it approaches. In the kitchen, vibrations move the stems of Pam’s garden-cut greens, shuffling them around their glass container.

Under closed eyelids Jim’s eyes slide east to west and back again. Sweat beads and rolls at his hairline. Pam faces a windowless wall with a pillow over her head. Silent vibrations can be seen in the fabric of her shirt.

The dream for Jim is full of panic. He runs between houses. He jumps fences. Stumbling, looking behind him. A darker darkness is chasing him. Residential backyards become a mall he went to when he was thirteen. He runs through empty familiar somehow unfamiliar hallways. Lights behind him shut one by one. Tall windows show no stars outside.

Back on neighbourhood streets. He cannot see exactly what they are but they are everywhere. Dry leaves under foot. Homes he runs past ignite. One closest to him explodes. Debris cuts him as it bursts across the street. The concussion knocks him off balance. He only stumbles. In front of the burning houses he can see dark figures. In front of each of the burning houses. Twitching, swaying, leering and swinging their arms like trees with branches made of machetes.

They want him.

In the darkness between burning houses, he sees the eyes. The many demon eyes. And they too, want him. Screaming, a single screaming voice carries from over the far trees, the house-sized bonfires, past the debris on the street and right into Jim’s ear.

Jim’s eyes are wide and the scream is in the room now with him. It is Pam, facing the window looking out over the backyard.

Launched from the bed, Jim grabs Pam by the shoulders and looks past her into the yard. The fires are furious, unnatural in their percussion, like they have their own special windstorms pushing and pulling them with some mysteriously earned violence.

The girls he is responsible for protecting are surrounded by filthy, murderous cretins. Each looks wilder than the last. Machetes. Axes. Fire.

“Come on down!” said one. “It’s molting time!” The entire group of them laughed. Each one laughing the exact same laugh, an effect Jim thought from the sound bouncing back to his ears in this space between the house and the trees. It couldn’t be perfectly synchronized. It couldn’t be.

Shivers spike the hairs on the back of Jim’s neck. He runs to the bed, between the mattress and the boxspring he slides his hand to find the handgun. Pam is already on the stairs. “Pam! Goddammit DO NOT GO OUT THERE.” His voice cracks, slicing the words on the way out.

Hand on the gun, he slides out the clip – seven bullets. Just seven. There are at least six cunts to shoot. “Don’t fucking miss”. Jim runs down the stairs, through the kitchen to the door that leads to the backyard. Pam watches from the window over the sink. “Stay here. Run if I go down.”. “Oh god Jim”

Jim kicks the door open, gun raised and pointing wildly. All eyes are on him. No one raises a weapon to match his. The girls are on their knees surrounded by these assholes while fire burns from torches and trees and bushes and in strips and spots along the grass and even deep within the trees. Swirling in a storm around them are the floating embers from burnt trees and grass and forest.

“Lyla, get up. Kimmy, let’s move. Back to the house, now.” Jim speaks to the girls but he looks each of these cretins in the face. In their unnatural pure black eyes. They are dressed like gutter punks who have been sleeping outside for years. “Back up. Back up.” They don’t move. The girls aren’t moving either. Jim struggles to understand.

The faces of the cretins, all at once, all at the exact same time, are pulled into shapes. like each facial muscle was carved in clay. Horrific expressions of dark mania. Mocking joy. Counterfeit happiness.

“You can have this one. This one is for us.” It could have been any one of them that said it without their mouths moving but it was all of them that said “This one is for us.” Kimmy, still kneeling, floats until her legs dangle beneath her. Her eyes are open but she is expressionless.

“Run along.” One of them said, and Lyla unlocked, pushed herself to her feet and ran to Jim’s open arm to hide her face in his chest. The two of them walk backwards towards the house, Jim still randomly pointing his gun at each of the unmoving figures. Lyla looks back to see her friend defying gravity. “We can’t…” Jim pulls her, “Back in the house or we’re all dead.”

The distance they travel stretches out a normal day’s ten or twelve steps into what feels like thousands. Wrapped in each other, they both trip over the wood steps leading up to the door. Pam holds it open with her left arm and in her right hand holding a butter knife. “Getinhere!” The family lock on to each other and shuffle-rush to the window over the sink. Each cretin face focuses directly on floating Kimmy like massive satellite antennas all moving in unison. Her skin, from the top of her head is pulled down, by invisible hands, all the way down until it hangs off her feet. Her exposed corpse does not shudder.

Lyla screams and keeps screaming. They hold each other close. Pam’s knife clatters to the floor under the ridge of the cupboards. “oh god, oh my god” she exhales over and over again. Jim is still staring in the yard at the child he thought he could protect. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up, a chill from some other time and place hits the end of every nerve in his body.

Pam is tugging on his arm. He can’t swing around fast enough to point the gun at the dark figure behind them. Lyla is latched onto him. He tries to spin free from the left, Pam still has his other arm and Lyla his torso, they fall into the counter. And with the looseness that comes from that percussion, Jim spins and aims the handgun at the twisted face of the black eyed cretin standing just feet away from them.

His hair flattens when his head slides by the top of the door frame. He looms. His right arm sways from behind his back to his side, once, twice, and on the third return it holds a rusted machete. “Oh shit, Jim. Fucking shoot him.” “Dad?”. Jim slides himself slowly in-between the threat and his family. A mere foot separates the nose of the gun at the end of Jim’s outstretched arm from the chest of the cretin.

Jim breathes in to say something. Before a sound escapes, the cretin’s left hand grabs the wrist of Jim’s gun hand and buries the point of his machete into Jim’s throat with his right. Jim’s knees slowly bend until he falls completely. The cretin pulls out the blade and throws Jim’s gun hand away. No one has screamed. Pam and Lyla are sobbing. Sobbing over the body of their dead man.

Pam steps herself in front of her cowering child. “You’re only dreaming. And now the dream must end.” The cretin whispered it with an unnatural compassion fit for holding the hand of an aging parent on a midnight deathbed. It registers on Pam’s face. “Leave us alone.”

“I have a box to put you in. We will spend forever there. In our tiny box. And even if you leave, you can never really leave. It will be with you until you are no more. I have a box to put you in.”

“Mom?” Lyla is crying into her mother’s back. Pam holds her hand out in a weak way to keep the monster at bay. Her knees slightly bent. She wants the gun that sits in a pool of Jim’s blood. She wants that gun and is moving so slowly towards it.

“That gun will not help you. The knife will not help you. Nothing will help you. Now that you’re mine. I’ll tattoo your soul.”

Pam’s tears blur her vision. If she drops to get the gun she exposes Lyla behind her. She is trying to pull them both so slowly towards it. The cretin matches her pace advancing toward them. He tells her, “Mom, don’t”. Pam snaps down to grab the gun and the machete splits her head in two. Her body crumples to the floor and Lyla shakes her head, hugs herself, and weeps.

In his demon whisper, dripping with anxiousness and lilting concern the cretin slithers out a command “Step towards me.”

Lyla cannot speak or move; she can only tremble and weep. “I’ve got a box to keep you in, it’s close. and you and your mommy and your daddy will be with us forever.” The cretin looms over her, she falls to her knees. Her legs brush up against her mother’s body and she reaches out to touch her. The rip in Lyla’s heart splits deeper and she sobs and in terror retreats into herself.

Back to the summer she turned 11. A difficult one, for her and her parents. Jim made some mistake at work. Some oversight for a major client. Instead of a quick firing, his bosses were making it impossible for him to get any of his responsibilities done. Burdening his workload with absurd and wasteful tasks and being hostile. General childishness to drive him to quit. Pam wasn’t making enough freelancing for him to not have an income. The pressure to tough it out was high. Before long the only way he could sleep was if he was three bourbons deep.

And then the shouting. The throwing things. The tears. Lyla had so many nights crying in her mother’s arms. With her golden heart she never let Lyla forget “This is your father and this darkness will pass. We’ll get through this and he’ll remember his strength.” “You don’t hate him?” “No, never. I hate the way he’s dealing with this mess right now but I forgive him. I forgive him for thinking this is how he has to be right now. Thinking of it this way is helping me stay sane. Sometimes we have to forgive other people for our own peace as much as for them.”

And things did get better. And he did make it up to them. And they did heal and Lyla felt the lightness in her heart when she finally forgave him. That forgiveness meant everything to him. It helped them both. She thought of this now. Somewhere at sometime, this thing standing in front of her was once a person.

“I forgive you.”

The cretin’s machete is raised to Lyla’s eye. A slow raise of the blade above his head, his eyes on hers watching him wind up and bring the blade down with all his weight to split her skull in two. The sound like a torn watermelon and the clink of blade hitting her spine. Removing it throws a geyser of blood. One more person once in the light is in forever darkness.

“What did she mean?” The lumbering demon sways in confusion. “I have done well? I have done what you asked?” From whatever subatomic telepathy beasts use to commune with personified hatred, the cretin interrogates in his sing-song whisper. His ridiculous lilting sympathy and simmering contempt, “I forgive you?”

Neither moonlight nor firelight through the kitchen window. A crackle of blue white electricity arcs and spreads out from his eyes across the cretins body. The room snaps from bright to dark. In this time, this tiny measure of moment his brain echoes Lyla’s voice “I forgive you.” from corner to corner and back again.

Long enough for the remnants of the person he once was to remember his daughter’s smile. To remember what he once was. To breathe the same air as his family and to feel the connection with them and warmth of their safety. The cells in his body pass ownership to their new handlers. The ache of loss feels like a fall into a black abyss so empty his fear makes him scream. His screaming makes him mad. And in his madness he tears out his eyes one and then the other. His final burst “I forgive you.” Not in a whisper. No simmering anger. A boiled-over vomit of acidic truth.

His knees hit the corpses beneath him muffling the percussion of his bulk dropping. An anvil on a bloody pile of rotten laundry. Blue-white sparks one by one pop and light the cretin’s eye sockets and the surrounding folds of clothes and bent limbs. A crackling ball of lightning, rolls out of his head and sits in the center of these bloody dead people. Cool blue white light bouncing on their still corpses. Reflecting in their blood. The ground rumbles. The cabin and its contents vibrate. The vibrations ramp to a shifting of the Earth. The bodies dance upon the floor. The lightning brightens. Outside the house, trees and shrubs and long grass shake until every window and door in the house are blown outward. The crackle of electricity, wild and invisible and the smell of burnt flesh fill the air.

Some miles away, drones weave in and out of the tree line like false sparrows watching for movement with cold, black, curious eyes.