Eloise Writes as the World Burns

by Erin Bondo

As rockets fall like rain on the southern counties – it is safe, for now, in the North – she drops a bomb on the fictional McElroy farmhouse. A necessary evil, they said. She strikes necessary from the page. It is too early for line edits, but evil is evil, she thinks, as the timbers crack and give.

When she wants to scream, she puts them on the lips of Mae MacEwan, who screamed as the soldiers ripped her son from her arms. But she must give these screams to the present, for this is where her own grief keens, day after night after day. Mae MacEwan is screaming as her world rends in two.

The radio sputters with news of renewed ground activity and she tears down the walls of Avignon, as if she can force the onslaught away, rake the invading troops eastward across the war room table with her words. She wonders if they are using paper maps now that the grid is compromised, because then they are not so different: both playing God on paper.

At the Episcopal church two streets over, the congregation is mid-recitation when an unnamed antagonist firebombs the nave. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. As the flames consume the altar, she plucks the Browns’ youngest from her pew – she cannot bear the girl's burning flesh on the page. She sends more ambulances, more fire brigades, more volunteers, but the city still burns and burns.

Each night, she gathers them – the Browns, the MacEwans, the McElroys – hides them in cramped cellars and heaving underground stations, hopes her family will benefit somehow from this authorial benevolence. If they make it through the night, so do we. She repeats it like a mantra until she is written in past tense.

About the Author

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