First, it was he and his mom and dad together, and he was always with them, and every time he said, “I want,” the world burst into motion.

During the day, when he wasn’t at preschool, there was Mrs. Bolton, who let him watch TV as much as he liked. At night, there was music. And games and puzzles with a blaze dancing in the fireplace. Sometimes they went out to eat, but when they didn’t, he and his mom would often bake—it was their thing, she said.

His mother was small and pillowy, his father nervous like a bird.

Often, he and his dad would explore the wooded hillside behind the house, or they’d make stuff in the garage. His dad liked woodworking and would give the boy sandpaper and nails and let him do what he liked with the scraps. Sunday night was for grownup movies, which often bored him, so he’d play on his DS or watch the fire on the grate until he fell asleep.

He loved to watch his father prepare a fire—laying the logs crisscross or like a teepee or spread out in points like a star. He loved how the flames would slip between the logs or erupt through the hole in the top or crawl from one to another like climbers on a jungle gym, never once the same. “Fire is a living thing,” his father said. “It has to have space to breathe.”

When his mom was cooking, he’d watch the rings of blue flame on the stove, but they bored him, chained to their little holes. He liked better when steam rose from a pan and turned the wall into waves.

When his parents didn’t speak to each other and his mother drank most of the wine, the room would go cold, and he would shrink in its chill like a flower. Usually, they made up before he went to bed, and his mother would join their hands together and say, “All for one and one for all,” like the Musketeers.

In kindergarten, he learned words and numbers and, on his own, the names of so many dinosaurs his parents said he was going to be a scientist. They took him to zoos and parks and museums. From the stream that came down through the woods, he would gather rocks with interesting patterns, which he put into a box his father had made for him. His mom bought him a polisher, and they kept his favorites in a little bowl on the coffee table. Some he and his dad set into molds filled with mortar, which, dried and sealed, they lay in the garden as a path.

Then it all stopped.

His father stayed away on business and came home late—there were fights all the time about where he had been and what he’d been doing. Even when they weren’t fighting, his parents stayed apart, and he had the TV to himself.

By first grade, it was always his mom who took him to t-ball. Between t-ball and soccer, his dad moved out. They fought over him. Neither seemed to want him, or want the other to have him. On school days, he stayed in an after-care program and played on computers.

Without warning, they sold the house and moved into apartments, and there was no hill and no woods. So he broke things. A vase his mom liked, the cellphone his father kept answering. But nothing changed.

Mostly he was with his mom, and since the apartment noises frightened him, he slept in her bed. It took a while, but he got used to the bumps and cries from the other side of the wall and to the wash of cars outside. He’d wake to find himself in his own room, but that was okay. As he watched shadows play above the window curtains, he discovered that night too had its flames, and they comforted him.

His mom didn’t cook much, and since she was trying to lose weight, most of what she cooked he didn’t like. There was no garage to work in, no woods to walk in. Instead, they gave him toys and got mad when he didn’t like them. His father travelled all the time; his mother complained she couldn’t go anywhere because of him.  

That winter, when they were together, he asked his dad to build a fire, but the fireplace in that apartment was just show. “Look at it this way,” his dad said. “The sun is a fire, and there’s fire in lightbulbs and the engines of cars, and in your body, even in the rocks. It’s everywhere.” They made a game of looking for flames in odd places, like clouds and trees, but it wasn’t any fun.

Then there was a new man, on both sides, and the new men were nice the way babysitters are nice. His parents talked mostly with the new men, and if he wanted to say something, he had to wait his turn. So he stopped talking, and they said he was being rude.

More than ever, he got what he wanted, but he never liked what he wanted for long.

Kids at school made jokes about his father’s friend, so he stopped talking to them, too. When three boys wouldn’t let him alone, he fought them, and after that, Mrs. Bolton, who lived not far from the school, picked him up and took him home with her, and she read to him from old books with hard covers that smelled like the attic. Uncle Wiggly. Mother West Wind. They were kind of dumb, but as he listened, the woods behind the old house came alive again; he knew the animals, and the animals knew him.

After school let out for the summer, his parents sent him to camp, but it didn’t last. One of the counselors, a high school girl with braids, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said, “Dead.” They made his mom come from work, and she blew up, “What the hell can I do?” and he hid under a table.  Going home, she said, “I’m going to lose my job because of this shit.” She bought a bottle of wine, a big one, and wagged a finger at him, “Not one word.” Later, when she was drunk, they made mac and cheese and she apologized. “It’s not your fault.”

The rest of the summer, he stayed with Mrs. Bolton, and in addition to the soap operas and the books, she taught him to embroider, even after his mother told her to stop.

Sometimes, when Mrs. Bolton didn’t feel like reading, he read to himself making up most of it from the pictures in the book. So there were two sets of stories, his and Mrs. Bolton’s, and he loved them both.

Behind her house, was a small stream and, across the stream, railroad tracks on a low hill. He would count the cars of passing trains, how many of this kind, how many of that. She had a big barrel in which she burned trash, and she let him light the wooden match and throw it in. Only when there was lots of stuff could he see flames, but ashes would float out of the can and dance until they fell into the stream.

His mother got a job where she could work home some of the time, which gave them more time together, but now there were things he couldn’t touch and times when she could not talk to him.

Once, before the divorce, friends of his parents came to visit, bringing a girl they’d adopted from overseas, who did not know the language. She went through his toys, one at a time, silently, playing with each and then setting it aside. He tried to talk to her, but she acted like he wasn’t in the room. His father was that way with men. Before the boy got used to one, there was another, friendly but distant, like they were waiting for him to disappear.

At summer’s end, his mother cleaned house, throwing away most of the garden mosaics—and most of the dinosaurs, too, since he seldom played with them. When he cried, she said, “We only have so much room.”

He began to hide things.

On the next visit to his father, he took the box of rocks and the remaining mosaics, and his mother said, “Good riddance.” His father hung one of the mosaics from suction cups on the window of the boy’s room. All the rest, he put in the closet. When they were alone, his father asked what he thought of the men in his life, and the boy pointed to the mosaic in the window. “It’s like that,” he said. “There’s Seth and there’s Jerry.” He couldn’t remember the others.

“Where’s Jack?”

Jack was the new one. The boy rummaged in his rock box and took out one with green and brown stripes. “This is Jack,” he said, and his father hugged him so tight he couldn’t breathe.

“God, I love you.”

In first grade, one of the assignments was to make a family book and talk about it. For once, his mom and dad sat at the same table. They helped him put the book together so he wouldn’t have to answer a lot of questions. But so much had been left out, he barely recognized himself.

His mother saved the school stuff she liked, even from pre-school—pictures and tests and awards. She kept them in plastic bins and occasionally went through them to show him how sweet he’d been. It made him madder about the dinosaurs, so one day, while she was working, he went through a box, taking out what he didn’t like, and burned those things on a picnic table behind the apartment building, using a lighter his mother’s new boyfriend had left behind. She didn’t notice. The house smelled like smoke, anyway.

It had been hard to do, but he liked the little black spot on his thumb and how the flames changed shape depending on how he held the paper. The next time he tried it, the boyfriend came early and caught him, and from then on, they watched him and his father watched him, too. A few weeks later, he stole another lighter and burned some junk mail, just to show he could.

It was strange how scared they got, going through the apartment on their hands and knees. They sat him down and told him what terrible things happened when kids played with fire. The boy told them he wasn’t playing. He just liked how fire made everything stupid disappear.

They took him to a doctor, who asked if anyone had touched his private parts, and the boy refused to talk. His father wanted to find another doctor, but his mother refused. Another session and another. Even when the boy talked, he didn’t say much, because the doctor asked about the divorce and his parents and his parents’ friends, and wrote everything down. Finally, when the doctor’s back was turned, he took a lighter he’d hidden a long time ago and set fire to papers on the doctor’s desk.

The doctor didn’t get mad. He picked up the papers and put them in the wastebasket and took the lighter away, and for a while, the two of them watched it all burn.

“Why did you do that?” the doctor asked.

“I wanted you to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop blaming people.”

The doctor shook his head. “I’m . . .” but then he stopped and held one of the boy’s hands in his. “That was a piss poor way of doing it.”

The boy laughed at the language. “Yeah, but it worked.”

After that, if he was mad, he just said so, and they’d talk about something else. But the doctor also prescribed pills, which made the boy feel dopey, so he made a deal with his mom: as long as he didn’t bug her, she wouldn’t make him take them.

At school, a girl tried to give him a lighter, but he told the teacher and she got put in “reflection.”

“Why did she do that?” he asked.

“Because it’s fun to get other people into trouble,” the teacher said, looking over the tops of her glasses.

His father now had bronze hair. Jack was still his boyfriend, and they stayed pretty much at home. Jack gave him an Xbox and often played with him.

His mother used her credit card to give her boyfriend money for the down payment on a car—$3,000—and after he got the new car, he got a new girlfriend and moved out. “We’ve got to scrimp,” his mom said, waving a handful of mail at him.

His father wouldn’t help. “It’s not my fault, your taste in men.”

Later, just before school let out, the boy came home to find the outside door part-way open and the mail on the kitchen table, along with a half-empty bottle of wine. And his mother on the couch, sleeping with the TV on.

He got a can of Coke from the fridge and sat at the kitchen table opening mail. Two he could tell were bills, and one of those had a red line across the top. By now, he knew all about bills, with or without red lines. There were more in the drawer next to the sink, what his mother called “the shit drawer.”

He hated the man who had taken his mother’s money, but he didn’t hate his father for not helping, because when his father gave him money, he had to hide it to keep her from borrowing.

He considered changing the channel, but then she’d wake up and start crying, and he hated when she cried. So he got the lighter from her purse.

It wouldn’t change anything, and it would piss her off, but at least he’d feel better for a while. He took the envelopes from the kitchen table and a handful from the shit drawer and went out to the picnic table.

One by one, he set the papers aflame and let each scuttle across the cement and onto the grass, where yellow butterflies went from clover to clover. Some he crushed into wads so that he could watch them writhe as the fire ate inward. Like the fires his father used to make, each burnt a little differently, opening like flowers as the flames took them.

Toward the end, a breeze came up, making it harder, but when they were lit, they would flutter out of his hand like birds and glide toward the parking lot till they blackened and fell to the ground, still burning.

Richard Spilman is the author of two books of short fiction, Hot Fudge and The Estate Sale. His most recently published story, "The Slugs Come Out When It Rains," appeared a couple of months ago in The Alaska Quarterly Review.