Burning Down the House (Writing Exercise from Fiction Class)

(This was a writing exercise for my Fiction Workshop class last month, we had to pick three things from a list. One was a character type, the next was a setting, and the third was an object. I picked a deaf arsonist, a certain Clemson landmark on fire, and an ice swan wedding sculpture. And I was listening to Talking Heads a lot around that time, so..."Burning Down the House")

   I could see Tillman Hall burning from the highway, and I parked right outside the building because I had a sinking feeling that I knew who was behind it. Sure enough, Helen Keller was running around in the inside, lit match in hand, setting fire to the curtains in the windows as I entered. Helen, blind, deaf, and supposedly dead for at least sixty years, was very much alive and quite the firebug now. She was high on my list of suspects to bring in, along with Nazi war criminals in Argentina and citizens of Atlantis who roamed the world looking for something decent to eat. Keller had been my collar for at least two suspicious arsons, though her case was always thrown out whenever her attorney pulled up Keller’s page on Wikipedia and showed the jury that, technically, her client was dead and thus couldn’t have been “the Firestarter of Des Moines,” among other aliases.

  Keller, sensing my presence, tackled me and threw me to the floor. She moved her fingers over my mouth, indicating that I should talk. “We need to get out of here, Helen,” I said. She nodded, and let me off the floor. She was built like an NFL linebacker in her extreme old age.

 “Water!” she cried out, and at first I thought she meant to fetch a water hose, to put out the fire she’d started. But I followed her outstretched arm with my eyes until I hit upon an ice sculpture, of a swan. I didn’t have time to figure out what an ice swan was doing in Tillman, much less why Helen had brought it in here (or if she’d come across it while setting the hall on fire). I grabbed her hand to my mouth, said “Ok,” and went to pick up the swan, which looked pretty translucent at this point. It had been sweating, however, and somehow it was heavier than it might have been before the flames licked at it. It slipped from my grasp and crashed to the floor.

 Helen may have been deaf and blind, but she was no fool. Her dead eyes turned on me with a fierceness I’d only beholden once before, when I collared Martin Bormann in Buenos Aires with a briefcase full of bratwurst, bound for Berlin by way of Burbank, Boston, and Barcelona. I went to Helen, nudging her to follow me out of the now engulfed building. But she was having none of it; she had sensed that my butterfingers rendered the ice swan kaput, and she was pissed.

 “Helen,” I yelled, though of course she was deaf, “we need to leave now. I’m sorry about the swan, but we don’t leave now, we will die.”

 She finally nodded, eyes losing their fierceness as a tear trickled down from her eye. I threw the matchbox into the flames, Helen was in enough trouble without this arson added to her litany. Like I said, she was supposed to have died decades earlier; historians the world over had an axe to grind about her supposed immortality and what it meant in the existential crisis that was modern life. Besides, she had known “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman personally, and he was a jackass. So we exited through the front, Helen convincing as an ancient secretary with smoke-filled lungs, and I escorted her to my Dodge Dart. We drove off before the campus police could question us. I drove to the airport, figuring that if Buenos Aires had been good enough for Martin Bormann, it was good enough for Helen Keller. Some sunshine and salsa dancing would do her a world of good.