i wanna fall through the stars

The next day I was back at work, and after the rest of the crew had gone to bed, I was still wide awake. By now, I had resigned myself to sleeplessness, and made use of the spare time it gave me to go over the case file.

As I finished my last note, the station’s alarm system broke apart the silence I’d been sitting in. Jumping up from my seat, I ducked out of my room to join the rest of the crew, who shambled with a sluggishness that proved I really was the only one still awake at this hour. We didn’t bother speaking amongst ourselves - there’d be plenty of time to talk when we were on our way to the scene.

Suited up and headed out, once we were in the apparatus, everyone was still yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes as Chief Cormorant got the low-down on the details of the call. From the sounds of it, it was almost certainly a drunk driving accident, given that it was a Saturday night.

“Ugh, what do you bet it’s some dumb kids?” Liam tilted his head back against his seat. “I swear, half the time if it’s a car crash past midnight, kids are involved. Doesn’t anybody try to actually raise their kids right anymore?”

“When I was younger, my mom would read me the riot act if I got home five minutes late! Past midnight, though?” Heather let out a disapproving hum. “Trust me, they’d have never found my body.”

The crew began to debate child-raising techniques, which was precisely the moment I checked out. I had nothing worthwhile to add, since I didn’t have any kids, and the last time I’d mentioned Cleo, they made it clear that she didn’t count. It was better just to keep to myself.

Somehow, Mother’s Day had rolled around without me even realizing it - if I hadn’t been trying to book my next visit with Dr. Oh, I wouldn’t have even noticed.

Aside from helping Cleo get things for Mercy, it wasn’t a holiday I paid much attention to; when it came to my own mother, an intense fight before Christmas meant I’d been dodging her attempts to reach out for the last six months. Though this was practically unheard of among Mexicans, our relationship had always seemed unusually tense.

It crossed my mind to pay her a visit, but just the idea of it filled me with dread. I didn’t drive out to see her often because she lived three hours west in Abilene, where she’d moved after I’d left Fort Worth and was shipped off overseas. Calling her was preferable, if just because they made the conversation easier to escape. The older I got, the more I understood why my father up and left her, even if it meant he left me behind, too.

As of today, ten years had now passed since Feliz died.

When I woke up that morning, I could’ve hardly even called it ‘waking up’; throughout the night, I simply dipped in and out of consciousness, barely keeping my eyes shut for longer than five minutes at a time.

Now that the sun was spilling into my room, I rose from the tangled mess of bed sheets like a mummy crawling out of a tomb. For hours, there’d been a persistent buzzing in my head, and not even a cup of coffee at its hottest could drown it out. Halfway through my cup, as I was staring out at the Dallas skyline in a daze, it occurred to me: I hadn’t seen Raja at all this morning.

Ever since that reporter had stopped by the station, work began to put me more on edge.

Though the number of fires continued to rise steadily, I wasn’t able to identify a link between them yet; all I had was a deep seated sense of wrongness about them, though I did consider that I was being swayed by the power of suggestion. Unfortunately, that level of self awareness couldn’t stop the fires from bleeding into my dreams, worsening the awful nightmares I already struggled with.

Another sleepless night had come and gone, so I gave up that morning and decided to wash up before Cliff’s cookout later that afternoon. According to the clock, it was 0700, which was around the time I should’ve been out of bed anyway.

APRIL

In my entire career, I had never seen so many fires in such a short amount of time.

It started off slow: first, a fire in a condemned trailer, then a blaze in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but that was nothing unusual given my line of work. On average, most of our calls involved traffic collisions, lift assists or even people stuck in malfunctioning elevators.

And yet just this week alone, we’d been getting fires larger than your typical kitchen accident nonstop - and they were getting progressively more intense. That morning, we were called to a fire in an office building, which was one of the bigger fires we’d dealt with since my accident. Unlike that one, nobody died or got seriously injured, and I was very thankful for this; we were used to seeing some pretty grisly things on calls, and I had to admit, the chemical fire had spooked me badly.

Of course, nobody had noticed my newfound caution except for Garrett. Since my return from the hospital, he’d been the only one checking in on me regularly, though I tried not to let my weakness show. It didn’t seem fair to burden him with my problems, especially when he was still struggling to accept his place in the food chain at the fire station.

But rather than talk to Garrett at length about the warehouse call, what ate up my attention instead was the impassioned debate the crew was having about this latest string of fires.

Now that I was cleared to return to work, I was at the station with the rest of the crew, back to business. While I tried to resume my normal routine, throughout my day I was repeatedly interrupted by everyone checking in on me.

“Gotta say, Herrera, you’re made of tougher stuff than I thought,” said Liam as I was inspecting the apparatus. “Me and the guys were taking bets to see if you’d croak— now guess who’s out twenty bucks?”

On the way to a call, Rob later clarified that this never happened. “Liam’s just being an asshole. He’s only saying that to sound like he wasn’t worried. We’re all glad to see you back, ese.”

“That really was some scary shit back there,” DeShawn mentioned when we were in the gym. “Try and take it easy, man. Not too easy, though— you know Chief hates slackers!”

When I was in the middle of mopping the hallway, Heather came up from behind and ruffled my hair. “You’re finally back! Thank God— now the collective IQ of the station can be higher than room temperature again.”

Even Chief Cormorant appreciated my return, flashing a rare smile when he’d caught me passing by. “Good to see you back, Herrera. But you’ll be more careful next time, won’t you?”

In reply, all I did was smile, simply grateful that my absence was missed more than it was enjoyed. I might not have been close to anyone in particular, but I appreciated that they cared at all.

MARCH

By now, we all welcomed Garrett’s presence at the station with open arms. He fell solidly into his place among the crew, though not in the way he’d likely hoped for: as a probie, he was the bottom rung of the ladder and thus was responsible for the most menial, and sometimes disgusting, tasks. If there was a job none of us wanted to do, he was first to be volunteered - whether he was willing or not.

“How’s the spelunking going over there?” I asked, as I leaned on the doorway to watch.

Garrett was elbow deep - thankfully, not literally - in the process of unclogging a toilet, surrounded by puddles on the floor. He turned to me, sweaty from exertion, and half-smiled. There wasn’t an ounce of amusement in it.

“Next time we do those presentations for kids, I think we outta mention fishing shit out of toilets.” As he turned back to continue, the smile fell off of his face. “Just to be more realistic about the job, you know? Don’t think it’s very nice to lie to children.”

On that chilly morning, the fire was already well underway by the time we rolled up to the scene.

Right before breakfast, we’d gotten a call that a fire was tearing through a nearby homeless encampment. These types of fires were always brutal; the flammability of their tents and the clustering of them made short work for a persistent blaze to power through, and left only devastation in its wake.

The second the apparatus was parked, we all exploded into action. As a probie, Garrett had adapted well to the process, though he still took direction from me more than anyone - a fact which clearly chafed against Liam, as one of the more senior firemen on the crew. But there wasn’t any time to fight about it, as the plumes of smoke and violent crackling of the fire meant there wasn’t time for anything except water, and lots of it.

FEBRUARY

With a wobbling clunk, I set the water bucket onto the concrete floor of the bay and started scrubbing down the rig. The bright overhead lights of the bay made it obvious just how badly the truck was due for a deep clean, even moreso when contrasted against the darkness of the oncoming nighttime outside.

Out of everyone on my crew, I was the only one that cared much to clean the apparatus properly to keep the paint free of scuffs and chips: as far as Heather was concerned, hosing it off was enough of a job well done, and the guys, of course, were more than happy to let me take on dirty work if it meant they didn’t have to do it. Cormorant, however, was simply considered far too above such a task.

Just as I’d wrung out the water from my towel, the sound of boots came stampeding into the bay. When I turned to see who it was, Garrett stood before me, looking both lost and flustered with wide eyes and pink cheeks.

“Yo,” I said, craning my neck towards him. “You okay? Need something?”

“Manny, I’m telling you, we gotta get together sometime. Drink some beers, shoot the shit— it’s been too long,” said Cliff, his voice made fuzzy from the phone’s speakers. “And I could really use some time away from Niecey— love her to death, but these pregnancy hormones got her actin’ up something fierce!”

“I hear you, man. Sometime soon, for sure.” I flipped the turn signal on as I made a right at the intersection. “Hey, it’s been great catching up, but I gotta go. Cleo’s making me take her to some dumb fuckin’ art museum for one of her school projects. Tried to get out of it, but no one else will take her, so obviously, it falls on me, right?”

Cliff let out a sympathetic ‘woof’. “I’ll keep you in my prayers, buddy. Oh— you outta take her to that, er, that sculpture center— Nasher? I wanna say it’s the Nasher Center. We took Savannah there a while back on a free day, and honest to God, Manny, I never laughed so hard in my life! The things people get paid to make! Makes me wonder why I ever joined the force.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” I tapped the screen of my phone and pulled up the GPS, typing until something that sounded like it came up. “Who knows, maybe she’ll find something worth writing about there.”

“Here’s hoping,” he said. “Y’all have fun, now.”

“Thanks, man. See ya.” I tapped the End Call button and swiveled back to the GPS before sliding my truck up to the sidewalk beside Mercy’s house.