Spring 2023 Online Contest Winner: Talking the Fire Out
By Lee Price
“Talk the fire out” is what they called it. In that small place of green crops and clapboard churches, it was a power kept among washed-in-The-Blood types. A kind of faith-healing passed down from one family member to another. I heard tell of a man who melted his hand with fireworks; it healed in a few days with no scar. A woman who spilled hot grease on her leg but the blisters faded without a lick of pain. I’d never seen it done, but we all knew about this power.
I was eighteen, sunburned, and desperate. In the high part of the afternoon the road ahead of me shimmered with heat. I’d just gotten off work. The grease from the cafeteria, where I slopped out food to summer campers at the local Bible college, sat heavy in my hair. My dry hands smelled like dishwater as I gripped the wheel. I tossed my cigarette butt out the window and rolled it up, so air conditioning would fill the cabin. The skin across my collar bone and around my knees screamed.
I was a moony, milk-colored girl with no business unsheathing all that white in the mean sun of the hot South. When I was a child, my parents were burdened by the vigilant ordeal of sheltering their firstborn in shade. But in my teen years I was remiss with my tameless body. During my break that day I’d gone to the pool and sprawled out. The fried food smell gave way to the chemical stink of chlorine. It was only half an hour outside but I may as well have walked on the sun. Back at work, I wasn’t halfway through heaping food onto campers’ plates when I felt the sting fester. That itchy prickle that ripened to pain.
I’d called my friend Connie to ask about her aunt. The churchy one they always said had The Gift. Now I sped down the highway, on my way to meet Connie and loiter in her aunt’s carport until she got home.
I pulled up to the small brick house to Connie smoking a cigarette. Her aunt wasn't home yet or she wouldn't dare. Connie passed me a Camel Lite and squinted. "Damn if you ain't pink already," she shook her head.
My family's Myrtle Beach vacation was due to start the next day. My still-divorced parents were back together again and ready to travel as a family for the first time in years. I knew they'd be upset to see me burnt like this. They'd lecture me about being irresponsible and not taking better care of myself. They'd treat me like their child. I couldn't stand the thought of it. Not after all their rupture had put me through. Who were they to protect me now?
In my younger, tender years my father had paid sweet attention to the delicate state of my flesh. He'd made me take breaks at the pool and wear awful hats and long-sleeved shirts at the beach, even as sunscreen stickied my flesh and stung my eyes. "You have to use sunscreen," he'd nag. I remember dressing for church once and being made to cover up by my mother - the blue strap of my dress too bright against the snow of my shoulders and clavicle. I flushed easy. I splotched when upset. I had the kind of skin that revealed the turbulence of my internal life. With skin like mine, I would always betray myself.
Dragging on my Camel Lite with Connie, I felt some anger stir, coiled and hot. I had a litany of things to be mad about, but for this, there was no one to blame but myself. I knew what could happen when I bared myself. All I'd wanted that day was to be a happy teenage girl splashing and basking on a lunch break. All I'd wanted was to feel like summer. But I'd forgot my sunscreen and convinced myself that I didn't need all that protection after all. I'd thought myself invulnerable and forgotten how bad it felt to go pink with hurt. So there I was, cooked and stupid-looking and trying to outrun the pain. I would have tried anything to undo it. I would invoke whatever spirit I needed. I would make myself unburnt.
***
The God of my girlhood knew no such miracles. As Southern Baptists, my family prayed to the dignified Lord of droning sermons and plodding hymns. Ours was a god of restraint. If the meek were to inherit the earth, our congregation was all set for the afterlife. Organ music rose in our church's sanctuary on Sundays, but the congregants' arms stayed stiff by their sides. None of that head back, arms swaying that the wilder churches deep in the country indulged. None of that healing and spirit. Leave the antics of the Holy Ghost to the untamed believers, no one here makes themselves a spectacle. We bowed our heads and went still to pray.
But there were little beats of transcendence. When the blonde lady in the choir hit the high note, my skin drew up into bumps. When the handbells blended their silver and gold tones and my heart rang with the colors of God's huge love. When we all touched candles in the dark sanctuary on Christmas Eve, singing softly, passing a gentle flame, and letting it spread. Those rare times when I felt into some old, great power, holding us, elemental and strong.
My father was a deacon. When I was baptized, the entire congregation had watched. Someone dipped me beneath the water in the little pool at the front of that church's blue-carpeted, stained-glass sanctuary. I was six years old and my mother cried as she toweled off my hair in the dressing room after. I was saved, washed in The Blood. My little sins dissolved in cool water, forgiven.
***
Me and Connie finished our cigarettes and went inside to sit in the living room with her cousin. The cold air inside the house hit my shoulders so I could feel how tight my skin had grown in the damp heat outside. The cool relief stirred me to panic, as I realized the burn was settling in.
"Mama should be home soon," the cousin said, offering us drinks. He was a gentle boy decked out in a Jesus shirt, one of those fish necklaces, and that thick rubber bracelet the church kids wear. He was younger than us and closer to God. "Mama hasn't done this in a while," he said to me about healing the burn. He turned the TV down low so he and Connie could gossip about their family.
The aunt came home bearing groceries. She looked me over while the cousin unpacked the car and Connie explained how she told me about The Gift. The aunt was a plain lady with short brown hair and a silver cross around her neck. I counted the freckles on her chest while she inspected my pink shoulders and my ears. The pointy parts that always got the worst of it.
"I ain't never done it for a sunburn," she said. "But I reckon the Lord works on those too. Go in the back and get your jeans off." She pointed down the hall. I thanked her and walked the carpeted hallway into the bedroom. As I peeled down my jeans, I felt heat rise from my thighs. I focused on feeling only the cool white flesh of my parts that were hidden. I had mostly laid out face-up on my back, so the front of me is what got it worse.
On the bed I watched the fan. I put my fingers to my face and pressed lightly, gauging the pain there. I lowered my hands to find the line slung low across my belly from my swimsuit bottoms, where the white meets the burn. I pushed on one side of it, then the other. There it felt fine; there the pain started. The difference in sensation startled me: what hurt and what didn't. I hoped the aunt's magic words would help me, pictured them silvery and soft, little angels of sound that would talk the fire out. I gripped a part of my hip that stayed hidden and closed my eyes.
***
I'd found the wild churches when I started highschool. Kids who'd sang in the school Show Choir also sang in The Gospel Club. My friends and I blew through backroads with fast boys alight in sunshine, shook by music. Therein was the verdant rush of girlhood. We resisted and caved to these rough young men who dropped us at church for night services. Intoxicated with this new attention we could command in the mad afternoons and renounce as the sun lowered. We could sing and pray in a dim sanctuary and shake until all was forgiven, sins fallen to ash in our disgraceful young mouths. I'd had my first bad sunburn during this feral time, when I'd drank at the beach with friends. After, my skin stung but the hangover pounding in my head and boiling my stomach was worse. My mother saw a therapist back then who said what people kept in shadow caused the most harm. She was always talking then of living in the light.
"You have to stay out of the sun," my father had said while I was peeling. He was a careful man, deliberate and measured in all things he did and said. And I was his wild, pale daughter, hell-bent on finding new ways to burn. The smoke from cigarettes I lit and sucked into my lungs. The hot gurgle in my belly as liquor scorched down my throat and the searing of vomit when I threw it back up. The flush that took me when boys and men stared. The flame that roared when they reached out to touch.
But there was a Pentecostal streak among my new friends that I hadn't encountered before. They spoke of hands being laid, sickness being made well. We sang call-and-response in church services that rocked for hours. People I saw walking around in their usual way just moments before flung back their heads and raised their arms to the sky. I watched them shake from tail to top and let bedlam fall from their tongues. Saw them in the Holy Ghost. Heard them confess to things that took my breath away. It was not, of course, all forgiveness and grace. The furious rebukes erupted. My friends renounced the things I'd done with them hours before—the smoking, the fondling, the cursing—just to take them up again that weekend. They smashed secular CDs, donned rings to indicate purity. Took them off again later. It made me feel unsteady—with them and with myself. I wondered if the fun we had was harmless or sinful. I could never quite tell if I was doomed to burn or saved. The people around me were always rededicating themselves to the Lord. When I saw the spirit take them, I felt something old and real. I felt the roar and the hush of divinity rippling deep from the cells of my heart. I felt something like a longing. But the God who speaks in tongues of fire never came for me, though I feared Her all the same.
***
My worst sunburn had happened two years earlier, on the Fourth of July.
I was sixteen. My just-divorced mother had taken my brother, sister, and me to a dank Myrtle Beach condo with white tile and brown carpet. My mother's boyfriend was joining us later. He was a man I'd liked as a girl, but my heart had blackened against him. Since how he looked at me had ripened into watching. Since his hands started lingering after a hug and his jokes ventured into musky territory. The burn of his bright interest was so glaring it must have blinded my mother to the umbral truth.
At the beach that afternoon it had just been me, her, my siblings. We'd dragged a cooler of sticky juice drinks and fruit colored hard spritzers across the sand and staked our umbrella. My little brother and sister ran into the waves. Beach music—the awful plodding sound of the eastern Carolinas—blared through speakers nearby. Out on the strip lifted trucks shook with country songs, Confederate flags rippling behind them. The sun beat down, already mean in the bright morning, while the ocean crashed and foamed.
My mother had slicked herself with tanning oil and laid back in her chair. Her hair was blonde and her skin was bronzed, and she spent a fair amount of time these days in a cinderblock salon off the highway maintaining both of these things. On the beach that day she was golden in the light. A jolt ripped through each word she spoke, excited for her man to come later. I dreaded his arrival. Beneath the shade of the umbrella, the pallor of my own gooseflesh felt sickly and dull.
I hadn't used sunscreen, not a drop. I'd pushed my foot into the hot sand, feeling vulnerable. Knowing he was jouncing down the interstate in that red truck I hated. Knowing she would sneak off with him later, to get drunk on daiquiris and walk the beach at night. Leaving me to my siblings until they returned, him bleary-eyed and loose. Who knows if she even packed the high SPF stuff I needed in our bag—I wasn’t her priority that day. I hadn't felt like her priority in a while. I stretched on my towel and let the heat spread over me. Enjoying the wrap of sun around my shoulders and thighs. I turned my head and the rays hit my ear. The light sunk deep in my skin, making me glow. I flipped over to let the sun slap the white of my back. The hindsight of it is glaring. I wasn’t trying to tan. I knew I couldn't. But I could burn myself and dare her to look away.
How bad could it get? I'd thought. I'd stayed there all morning, rolling into the shade of the umbrella later in the afternoon. By the time we left the beach—ice from the cooler dumped into the sand—our mouths were sugared with drinks.
Back at the condo my color was angry and high. Impossible to miss. I'd rinsed off with cold water that stabbed me sharp as knives. In the mirror, my eyes and teeth shone too white. My skin was the hue of shrimp shells boiled hard around the meat. The vomiting started then and lava’d out of me while I shook.
Mama had looked at me hard, figuring. Quietly furious. "You couldn't be pregnant, could you?" she asked. Arriving at the wild conclusion that my vomit was due to promiscuity instead of sun poisoning.
“I didn't think so,” I said, “I always use condoms.” Which was not, I think, what she expected to hear. I felt a dark animal roaming around inside of her, caged by the circumstance of my being so sick. Pacing her heart while I heaved.
I laid down in her bed. The light touch of the soft sheet laying over my burns felt like sandpaper. The flesh drew tight around my eyes, my cheeks, my shoulders, and knees. I wondered if I would bubble, burst, and split. If steam would pour from me. Swells of nausea crashed inside me. My mother went to the store and came back with gels she rubbed all over while I whimpered and winced.
Finally I'd numbed enough to sleep. Then I woke to the door creaking and voices. My mother's words were lifted by a happy tone even as she whispered and I heard his voice. Her boyfriend was there and they moved closer to me in the dim light. I was on my back, too hurt to move. The smallest stirrings brought scorching pain. "She got so burnt," my mother said. I felt her grab the sheet. The lift of it off my seared skin hurt. I groaned, pinned down like a specimen. Her boyfriend stood over me, looking.
"Shhh, I just wanna show him," she'd said, exposing me. I closed my eyes because I couldn't look at him while I was splayed out in pain. I trembled, half naked in a flimsy tank top and panties with faded purple flowers. They were from a children's clothing store. I had gotten them with her at the mall when I was twelve years old. I kept meaning to throw them away, but I hadn't, and now they were loose and soft even as they sat against the red edges of my worst burn. I thought of all my short life's changes in the years I'd been wearing them. My period, my parents, the smoking, the sex, the partying. My mother's boyfriend—this man looming above me now—had crawled his hand up my calf and stroked my leg when we stayed up late one night, watching TV. He made me sit on his lap when he took me deep into the country to learn how to drive stick. His fingers kneaded my hips while I bounced, stomping at the clutch, while his red truck rattled. He lied to my mother, baited her into being angry with me, when I glared and resisted him. Now he clucked his tongue and asked about sunscreen and why I wasn't wearing any and inside I went as red as my outsides. I wanted to kill him and turn him to ash. Let me shed and be new and cool and dazzling again in my whiteness, and let him be nothing.
When my mother had dropped the sheet it came down on me like a blanket of glass. Each point of contact a shard to my flesh and I jerked a little, cried out. As they left, he made a joke and she laughed while I smoldered.
***
It was the low part of the afternoon now, when the light slid in sideways to fall across my hips. The churchy aunt came in and stood at the side of the quilt-topped bed. She stared at me and shook her head. My heart quickened, ready for the ritual. I had been fascinated by this magic for years. How to draw fire from a body, send the flames back to hell. The aunt hovered her small hands above my skin and moved them slowly, closed her eyes and prayed. In the softest voice she spilled honeyed words, low and murmured. I gleaned a few. Father, heavenly grace, mercy, child, your light, your grace. I thought of my white parts, where my melony flesh met rind. I thought of the pink ebbing out like a tide. In my mind, I saw a flame roar and then die. The aunt blew on my skin, cool across my knees and shins and feet. She spoke quietly in tongues; the growly words beyond language rushing out. It's what people did when the Holy Ghost caught them.
"In His name. Amen," she said, and it was over. I sat up and sipped the ice water she brought me. A heavy peace hung in the room, which had gone still as winter. She asked how I felt and I told her, better.
"Let's put some cream on it anyway," she said, winking. She patted lidocaine gel on my thighs and knees. She looked me over and it felt good to be seen in the truth of my pain. Someone to help me heal. I thought of how I squirmed when, as a child, my parents would call me back from playing in gritty beach sand to apply more sunscreen. The aunt and I tested out her work and touched the burnt parts. When I hovered my hand above my skin no heat rose. The tightness eased. As if the flame down beneath was gone.
***
The sun slipped down, fire in the sky, as the earth lit up. My car windows were open while I took a long way home. The tip of my cigarette glowed orange as the hour. My skin was still pink but I thought it had faded. I thought that the sting of it might be gone. I prayed the stories I'd heard about faith and these healings were true, and would be true for me too. I remembered the aunt's low voice. The simple words she'd uttered and the conjured ones that spilled. I wondered if the real miracle was in the mystery of all our tongues, whether moved by profanity or something divine. These sounds that roll from our spirit and move us to part our lips. Mere vibrations that betray us, bringing reckonings and change.
The next year, I finally told my mother how her boyfriend burned for me. I remember the brutal incandescence of my words and how dark my shame felt when I told her. How they burned like a wish that I had told this story earlier. If there was a way that my talking could have kept this fire out. My father moved back in with us after that. My mother bought me self-tanners and urged me to rub them into my legs, at least. Anything to darken me just a bit, make the white of me a little less naked. Because that was the problem.
The fact of my mother’s boyfriend's hands and gaze and mind crawling all over my fair flesh was glaring and bright. My family's blindness to it—both as it was unfolding and then the harm that it did me—was a pale blue sin that kept me hot for years, reckoning with my faith in the decades ahead.
But that evening jasmine was heavy on the vine and thick in the air and the lightning bugs had come out to strobe as I pulled into my driveway. My family would go to Myrtle Beach tomorrow and I would stay safe in the shade and let my father anoint me, grease my forehead with all the sunscreen he wants. I'd been burned. There was no undoing that. But the aunt had said something holy, moved from her into me and smothered the hellfire inside. I see now that I was already trying to reforge myself, to create armor that I would need for the rest of my life. It was a desperate thing I did that day, but you can’t ignore a girl on fire.
About the Author:
Lee Price’s writing has recently appeared in HuffPost, Slate, The Rumpus, and twice in Pigeon Pages. One of Lee’s Pigeon Pages essays was nominated for Best of the Net 2021, and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. Lee is also an attorney by profession, and spent most of their career representing domestic violence survivors in NYC.
