Must Finish. Must Finish. Must Finish.

I saw the first fire of the year before he painted my walls red. It was the only one that had already been attended. Just past the curve of the Embarras River, Brandon spoke for the second time on our drive back north. The brush must have caught fire, he said, look at the smoke rising. Usually no one has to point out these things, but I was replaying my high school civics teacher: Remember to say Embarras, or you’ll be embarrassed. The river was pronounced em-bur-ah or slurred em-bra. A fireman was watering a pile of smoking wood. A neighbor was stalled outside his pickup. Isn’t that the abandoned house we stopped at a few weeks ago? Brandon asked.

* * *

When we met, Brandon called his photography expressionist. I asked if he was helping to break the black hand. He laughed, his hand bumping a full pint. He didn’t catch my reference. Beer gutted onto the table. Kandinsky, a German expressionist painter, warned against the black hand – the blindness that slows evolution, the focus on the shell and not the kernel. Brandon said, I mean I capture the outside world when it best reflects my insides. You’re overflowing, I said.

His portfolio was littered with remnants of collapse. Rusted iron bed frames, ashes, piles of broken glass huddled under rotten windowsills. There’s no Phoenix there, I thought. He’ll have to begin again. When I went home early that morning, the pipes had leaked through my ceiling and onto my bed again.