A Ghost of Fire Read online

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  I sat in my car, keys dangling in the ignition. The rusted 1991 Honda Civic was a cocoon and inside I was forming into ... something. Not quite sure what I felt I was becoming, I looked down the street ahead of me. From where I sat I saw the building. It housed Spectra Data Processing, the company I’d just interviewed with.

  There was nothing flashy about the building. It was maybe twenty years old and had been home to other businesses before Spectra came along. There were four levels above ground and a basement. It stretched to the sides for several lots, about five house widths. I checked their website the day before. I had gotten the call that I landed the interview and discovered the company was fairly new, only five years old. But it was also doing exceptionally well. I promised myself that I would have to remember to look a bit more into the company if I got a call later that week telling me I had the job.

  I knew I would get it. I knew it almost as a certainty. It was a feeling, a pretty strong one and it came over me as my eyes traced the company logo on the side of the building. It was one of those feelings I got from time to time that almost always paid off in the end. I’d had them before but mostly on mundane little things.

  There were times when I would be driving somewhere with the radio on and just knew what the next song was going to be on the radio without the jockeys announcing it. Sometimes this happened three or four songs in a row.

  For a while I had not thought of it as anything unusual. As far as predictions go it was not the kind of thing which was particularly impressive. It finally occurred to me one day that nobody else was really doing it. But then I merely passed it off as a bit of odd but ultimately useless luck. It wasn’t something I could make happen, it just happened out of the blue. I was no superhero who predicted catastrophes, saving lives, nor was I a psychic hotline guru who could tell you someone tall, dark and handsome would walk into your life soon. I was just Steve, the unemployed master of nothing special.

  Later I thought of it more as a personality quirk. Something strange about myself I didn’t share with other people. Many of my former associates already thought I was scum. If I had replied, “Oh yeah, well at least I can predict the next song on the radio,” it would only add to the creepy factor people saw when they looked at me. I didn’t talk about it with anyone because it wasn’t useful. It was of no practical benefit to me and I could not foresee it becoming so. I ignored it when it happened.

  I turned the key in the ignition, starting up the car. I was about to put it into drive when something caught my attention up ahead.

  “Oh, you can’t be serious,” I said to whatever God might be listening. There was a small child in a white dress smudged with black streaks gliding slowly across the street. A little farther down the street a black sports car sped in the child’s direction. It made no indication of slowing, but the child was too far away for me to reach in time to do anything. I got out and started to run anyway, yelling and waving my arms.

  The car reached the child and narrowly missed as the kid walked just out of its path. As if in slow motion I saw the draft from the speeding car lift the edge of her dress. She didn’t even notice. The car kept coming.

  The driver hadn’t even seen her. But he saw me and slammed the brakes. The expected screech rang loudly in my ears. I took a few steps back so my legs wouldn’t be crushed by the howling thing bearing down on me. I leaned forward and planted my palms on the spotless black hood as it finally stopped. Then I raised my hands slightly and in an expression of frustration brought them back down as fists. The hood gave slightly where my fists landed but quickly reverted back to its original shape. Inside the driver laid down heavily on the horn for about five seconds.

  The driver’s door shot open and a well-dressed guy in his late twenties materialized, red faced. I could see where this was going before it started, not needing any psychic intuition or extra sensory perception to tell me about it. If I didn’t get control fast there was likely to be a fight right here in front of my potential future place of employment. I fought back the urge to scream at the guy, to rip him up one side and down the other. I fought the urge to rearrange his face for him. I also fought to regain calm control of myself. I was to speak and what came out was not a tirade, but a controlled explanation.

  “Man, listen, you almost hit a little kid.”

  The driver looked about to explode for a moment, then it sunk in. His faced drained of all its redness and became white as a sheet. He spun around searching behind him, maybe afraid I was partly wrong and he had hit a kid after all. We both peered to the street behind the car also but saw only an empty road. We both looked at each other for a moment and trotted back a few yards. There was a line of cars parked along the side of the street and the girl might have easily disappeared between any of them.

  There was a line of homes on one side of the street standing in opposition to the businesses and industrial parks on the other side. The kid could have belonged to any one of them or none of them. In a residential vs. industrial area like this there was no telling where she had come from or where she went if she had kept going. But she had seemed so small and slow on unsure footing. Could she have gotten very far? I didn’t think so.

  We searched and called out in the immediate area but got no response.

  “Man, I didn’t see any little kid. What if I hit her and didn’t know it. She could have been knocked all the way to...”

  “Trust me,” I interrupted, “If you’d hit her you’d know. I hit a woodchuck once and I’ll never forget it.” I got down with my chest on the ground and looked under the cars to see if she was hiding beneath any of them. It was all wheels, undercarriage, street and space.

  “Are you sure you saw a kid, man? I mean, are you really sure? I didn’t see anyone, just you man.” He had gone from explosively angry to worried in under five seconds. Let’s see your fancy car make that kind of record, I thought.

  “Yeah, I’m positive. It was a little girl in a dirty white dress. She started over there where that data processing building is and walked over to about here.” I finished searching under the cars and stood up to face the driver. “How fast were you going, anyway? The speed on this street is thirty-five. You must have been going at least fifty.” I could see the fight coming back in the other guy. I’d pushed him, and rightly so, but a push was a push nonetheless and guys like self-entitled drivers of black sports cars always rose to a challenge.

  “Hey, I...What are you, a traffic cop?”

  “No, but I know how to read two black numbers on a white sign. You should try it some time.” I was starting to lose my own cool again, starting to feel my blood boil. Part of me wanted the other guy to get angry enough to make a move so I could lay him flat. In most guys there dwells a sense of right which, when violated, itches to throw a punch in the direction of the perceived wrong. At that moment mine screamed at me to give in whether the guy made a move or not. I stood still and contained instead.

  “Hey, pal, you better watch it.” Now the driver was really pissed off. I could tell the guy was used to people treating him politely. I also didn’t care. I rolled my eyes, turned my back on him and walked back to my idling Honda. The driver stood stunned for a moment and then elected to continue his complaint.

  “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

  “Yeah, well, I’m done talking to you,” I replied and kept walking.

  About three seconds later I heard the door of the other car slam behind me. The engine revved loudly and tires began to squeal on pavement as the car lurched forward. The horn was soon added, lending further dissonance to the annoying symphony. I kept walking forward without stepping to the side.

  I turned my head slightly to my right to see the black blur of a mustang pass me with the window rolled down. I could barely make out the scowling face of the driver and an arm extended out the window straight up terminating in a single finger extended from a tightly closed fist above the roof of the car, the one gun salute.

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sp; “Yeah, give my best to your husband,” I remarked to the retreating tail lights. I stopped abruptly and turned to look back at the street, not believing we hadn’t found the girl. Just then I thought for a brief moment I might have seen the edge of a smudged white dress disappear behind the far corner of the Spectra building. I rubbed my eyes, not sure whether I should trust them or not. Then I saw something else.

  On the closest end of the building, a few windows down, I saw the tall dark feminine figure of Jan Fenstra watching me. I was startled and almost took an involuntary step backwards, then struggled against the urge to run. She just watched me. Then she gave me a small nod. Before I could return it she was gone, the window shade sliding down.

  How much of the exchange had she seen? How much could she have seen? She probably had not seen the part where I’d almost been run over and certainly not the part where I’d had the terse verbal exchange with Mustang Man. But she could easily have seen the part at the end where the car had sped past me honking and saluting. At least I hadn’t chased after the car in a futile attempt to catch up with it.

  Yes, I decided, Ms. Jan Fenstra, Director, had probably seen this much of it. But what of it? What did it matter? I did not think it would bear on my getting a job with Spectra as one of its broom and mop guys. I’d already had that sureness, that certain feeling which never seemed to lie.

  I made it back to my car. I closed the door and heard the Rolling Stones finishing their last few lines of “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction).”

  “U2,” I said abruptly. “‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.’ That’s what’s coming on next, I think. No, I’m sure of it.”

  The Stones finished not getting any satisfaction and the DJ came on saying, “That’s the Rolling Stones. Coming up next we’ve got some of your favorite Irish rock stars, U2, for you with ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.’”

  “No sir,” I said to myself, “Sometimes you just can’t.”