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flame reaches out of Frankie’s bedroom for a moment. At the top of the stairs, through the curling fog he can see the figure of a child watching him grimly, hunched there, its face lit and flickering. Gene cries out, lunging into the heat, crawling his way up the stairs, to where the bedrooms are. He tries to call to them again, but instead, he vomits.
    There is another burst that covers the image that he thinks is a child. He can feel his hair and eyebrows shrinking and sizzling against his skin as the upstairs breathes out a concussion of sparks. He is aware that there are hot, floating bits of substance in the air, glowing orange and then winking out, turning to ash. For some reason he thinks of bees. The air thick with angry buzzing,and that is all he can hear as he slips, turning end over end down the stairs, the humming and his own voice, a long vowel wheeling and echoing as the house spins into a blur.
    And then he is lying on the grass. Red lights tick across his opened eyes in a steady, circling rhythm, and a woman, a paramedic, lifts her lips up from his. He draws in a long, desperate breath.
    “Shhh,” she says softly, and passes her hand along his eyes. “Don’t look,” she says.
    But he does. He sees, off to the side, the long black plastic sleeping bag, with a strand of Karen’s blond hair hanging out from the top. He sees the blackened, shriveled body of a child, curled into a fetal position. They place the corpse into the spread, zippered plastic opening of the body bag, and he can see the mouth, frozen, calcified, into an oval. A scream.

Patrick Lane,
Flabbergasted
    There had been several funerals of his old high school friends and Brandon hadn’t gone to any of them. He was aware that this was a problem, a problematic decision, and sure enough, afterward one of the girlfriends of the dead called him up and told him how rude she thought he was. “It really shocked me,” Rachel said. “Zachary was always a good friend to you and this just says something about you as a person that I wouldn’t have expected. I lost a lot of respect for you today,” she said.
    He didn’t know what to say. The truth was, he didn’t have any excuse. He hadn’t wanted to get dressed up, and he didn’t likegoing into churches and being preached at. He had never really liked rituals, period. But he couldn’t say this, and so instead he tried to tell her that he couldn’t get out of work.
    “Oh, come off it, Brandon,” Rachel said. They had dated briefly in ninth grade and ever after she had had little use for him. “Everybody can get out of work for a funeral,” she said. “Why don’t you just admit that you have turned into a complete shitheel? That would be the decent thing to do right now.”
    “Okay,” Brandon said. “I turned into a shitheel.”
    “Yes you did,” Rachel said. “What happened?” And then she hung up.
    Brandon probably could have argued with her, but he realized that it was not the kind of argument that you could win.
    What could he say? He had known a lot of dead people recently. But was that a legitimate complaint? Was it enough of an excuse to say that he simply felt worn out?
    To be honest, there were simply fewer and fewer things he felt like doing. That he could even
bring himself
to do. He’d stay up late playing video games on an aging PlayStation system he had hooked up to the television in the living room. He’d go to work at the grocery store. Sometimes he’d look at porn or read various message boards on the Internet. That was about the extent of it.
    It seemed like he hardly ever talked to anyone anymore. At the grocery store he was working in the produce department stacking pumpkins when a beaming older woman came up to him holding some Seckel pears in her cupped palms as if they were delicate eggs.
    “These are so adorable!” she exclaimed at him. “They are tiny little pears!”
    “Yes,” he said. “They are Seckel pears.”
    “Oh,” she said