Fall 2016 Prose Staff Favorite
Wells of Fire By Jakob Cordes
I
n San Carino the wells burned for five days, then fell dark, and then, hit by some stray tracer round or artillery shell, reignited and burned for another ten hours. On the sixth day, as night fell, Manuel knew he wouldn't be able to sleep without the dancing flames and dense smoke from the fields. He tried to sleep anyway, lighting first one lamp, then two, then every lamp in the house, but to no avail, because outside the same darkness, silent, crouching, waited. Manuel snuffed them all, except for the one by his bedside. It was, he decided, not the light that he missed so dearly, nor the choking smoke, but the sound. For weeks there had been guerillas in the forest around the village, maneuvering to seize the sizable oil deposits, and with them was a constant patter of gunfire and shouting. Then, when the well lit up like God's own roman candle and the guerillas fled, it was the roar of the flames that filled every hour. Manuel lay for several minutes, listening to the soft hiss of the
propane lantern hanging above his bed, but behind it the silence of the still night lay unchanged. Manuel thought back to the time before the guerillas, and he remembered the nights filled with the hammering and gruff shouts of industry, the rhythmic clanging of the iron wells, pumping up the bones of great lizards. He thought to before that even, to his childhood in the village, before the prospectors arrived in their loud jeeps, and there he found the memory of soft sounds, not silence, but a close cousin – a symphony of insects and birds and rustling leaves. Manuel listened, breathless, but with a start realized that the forest was gone – it had caught, during the dry season, a spark from a shell, and like a pile of dry tinder had been consumed for miles around. The leaves were gone, and the birds and the insects too, and now that the guerillas were gone the silence rushed back in to fill the void. Manuel rose and made his way to the entrance of his home, throwing it open and spilling a little light on the dusty ground. The small, squat structure
“ ” ...the rhythmic clanging of the iron wells, pumping up the bones of great lizards.
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