We Make Mud

Burning Up: Revisited

This house, our house, it is a dark house when us brothers are not inside it. Our mother, she likes to keep this house this way, with the lights inside unlit around her. At night, when us brothers go outside to go down to the river fishing, we like to leave with the lights in our house left on burning. We like to picture this, our mother, pushing up from her bed to make the lights in the house go dark. But one night, when us brothers leave with the lights in our house still glowing, we see, three hours later, when we are making our way back home from the river, we see that the lights in our house, there is this other kind of a light burning out from inside of our house. Our house, as we make our way even closer to it, we see that our house, with our mother there inside it, it is burning up on fire. There is this other kind of light shining out from around our house. This light, it is the light of fire. Come on, us brothers, we say this to each other, and then we run in our boots back to our on-fire house. In our muddy brother hands, us brothers, we have our muddy buckets hanging and banging up against our boy hips. Our buckets are filled up the rims of them with fish. Us brothers, we run with these muddy buckets filled up with fish and we do not stop with this running until we are within a muddy bucket’s throw of our house. When we run ourselves out of breath running home like this, we give each other this look. There is this look that we have between us brothers. It is the kind of a look that actually hurts the eyes of the brother who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. This look, with this look, what it says to the brother who isn’t doing the looking is, What should we do now? Us brothers, we know what we should do now. We should run with our muddy buckets back down to the muddy river to bucket up into our buckets some muddy river water for us to throw onto our house. But us brothers, we can see the looks of our house, that it is too late for us to do this. This would do us, our house, with our mother there inside it, no good. So what we do do is, we do this: we take what is down inside our buckets — the fish that we have fished out of the dirty river that runs through this dirty river town — and we take these fish and we hold these fish by the heads of these fish up close to the fire. These fish, they are still alive and gilling at the sky for air. The fins of these fish, finning upwards in our hands, they are still kicking. But alive, these fish, alive these fish are not alive for long. Not if it is up to us. And it is up to us. It doesn’t take long for these fish to cook up good and smoky. Us brothers, we know that these fish are done being cooked when we hear our mother’s voice calling out from the inside of our house telling us brothers that something is on the stove burning. Boys, our mother says. What’s that smell? We got it, Mother, us brothers, we holler this out to our mother from this side of the fire. Don’t you worry, we say. Go back to sleep, we say. It’s just us cooking up our fish. Then us brothers, we say to our mother, that we’re going back down to the river, we say, to go fish us up some more fish, we say, but this time, we tell her, we’ll be sure to turn out all the lights.