Gas Station Parables

By Maggie Dillow

i.

Julian ate fire every noon. It wasn’t what you think. It was pink, almost. It was pinker
than that, but even less blue. It was curtains caught by flame.
 
All of Julian’s limbs grew inside his mother before they grew outside her. They grew and they
grew. They grew warm. They grew into someone who ate fire every noon. And not even
the kind of fire you would otherwise think about eating. It wasn’t even pink.
 
It was even more than that. 
 
It made everyone weep, the way Julian’s mouth cupped the flame.
 
It turned everyone to rivers.
It turned rivers into rain.
It turned rain into commercialized irrigation systems.
 
No one asked how. They just watched the fire inside Julian’s mouth and cried about it.
 
Julian’s mother, on the other hand, was all water all the time.
In fact, Julian’s mother forgot about time sometimes.
Every day was Some Time and she couldn’t keep up. 
 
Back in the day, she was so busy growing limbs that she didn’t see him coming.
Julian slid out while she sipped on a Slurpee and this fact would later always seem perfectly reasonable to her: that Life might arrive as unexpectedly as Death, as casually as her blue mouth yelping in surprise as Julian fell to the floor, hot and unspoiled. 
 
She scooped him up in utter love and hemorrhaged there in front of a shelf lined with
motor oil, until someone believed her about both the baby and the blood. It took too long
to be believed and Death came for no one anyway so they called it a miracle and kissed
the tiles where she bled. 
 
She was a perfect mother. She was kind and cautious and in this way could never be a poet. She was curious about bathwater and drank it. She drank it most times with Julian inside her and figured this is why her oldest child, so bright and complicated, loved wrapping his lips around fire. Teenagers were always rebelling.
 
She knew it was her doing: both the fire and Julian’s eating it. Her throat swelled with a desert she could never tame. And his tongue, by extension, burned.
 
When they pulled into the gas station the sun sat high.
Julian had no shadow and everyone wept as he lit the match.

---

ii.
 
The apolitical boys gathered at the south entrance, near the white cages of the Amerigas Propane Exchange. The cages and explosives within remained untouched by the inferno beyond the roof, except for how they shimmered, now, along with everything else.

The apolitical boys were talking about how the vibes were off—which was obvious to everyone, considering the explosion that had happened and then never quite did and then hovered above them all, entirely buoyant.

When the gas station exploded, it was mid-day beautiful. All terrible, never-sorry light. It smoldered above until the bricks of the burning exterior gleamed that certain pink no one can describe.

It was that indelible misty green.

It was yellow, orphaned by light.

The flames had tongues that licked the blue air and thrashed against the unremarkable façade of the gas station: multi-colored bricks, previously drab, were still drab, but warm and other colors.

A woman stood inside staring at the silver rollers that never carried taquitos despite all promises that they existed. Instead the silver rollers were hot and empty and she stood there until no one noticed anything at all. Except the apolitical boys, who noticed everything—or at least, announced that they had—before declaring that none of it actually mattered. They spoke in growls from the back of their tiny throats where everyone else tried to shove things. They said, “Black out or back out!” and then got really, really drunk and fell asleep with their mouths open. The woman standing in front of the silver rollers knew this but no one knew how long the blaze would billow above, engulfing them all inside a searing bubble of steaming solitude.

It was quiet encased in the glowing inferno.

Vehicles outside the flaming hot forcefield—which drew an imperceptible boundary around the parking lot and the sky above it—repeatedly tried to enter the lot from the street and bounced off.

The heat made everything so soft.
​
The apolitical boys announced to everyone that they should just try and enjoy the fire, holding their smooth palms up to its light and complaining about the general lack of respect being given.

---

iii.

Adrian does her taxes by moonlight, which makes it holy. She has fins for hair and elusive gills at the base of her neck, which are good for counting air: in, out, in, out. Adrian exists now despite having been the only casualty when the gas station exploded.

Exploded is not a gentle enough word to describe how its cement walls warmed from the outside in, but it is the only word accurate enough to describe the sparks of boundlessness that gripped its corners, never shattering a single window.
​
Exploded is a word that is gentle enough if you do the right thing and consider its Merriam-Webster etymology: 

​Latin explodere to drive off the stage by clapping,
from ex-[out] + plaudere to clap. 

Everyone loved the fire so much they applauded its violence into being.

There is nothing so gentle or violent as love! said all the poets.

Adrian was not a poet. She was dead now and really good at math.

When she was alive, she saved herself hundreds of dollars a year doing the right thing on her IRS Form 1099-MISC. Her hands fit lovingly into the narrow pockets of her lover’s jeans. Her hands were fins, too. Her lover was human with immense feet.

Everything was immense now that she was dead.
​
Her lover cried into a pillow and slept with the pump attendant. 

---

​Maggie Dillow grew up writing an embarrassingly prolific amount of terrible teen poetry in Chicagoland, primarily inspired by the private perils of suburban girlhood. She now lives and teaches in Roanoke, Virginia, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She is the founding member of the Post-apocalyptic Poets for a Pre-apocalyptic World, a collective dedicated to community care, elevating the work of emerging artists, and performance-based poetics. She is also the co-host of Girlhood Movie Database, a podcast deconstructing depictions of girlhood in film. She has won prizes in flash fiction and poetry and her work can be found in Hot Pink Magazine, Blue Earth Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and elsewhere. When she's not writing or performing, you can find her in the woods.