The Arsonist's Song Has Nothing to Do With Fire - Allison Titus

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      ALSO BY ALLISON TITUS

       Sum of Every Lost Ship

       Instructions from the Narwhal

      © 2014 by Allison Titus

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:

      Etruscan Press

      Wilkes University

      84 West South Street

      Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766

      (570) 408-4546

       www.etruscanpress.org

      Published 2014 by Etruscan Press

      Cover and interior design and typesetting by Julianne Popovec

      The text of this book is set in Goudy Old Style.

       First Edition

      14 15 16 17 18 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Titus, Allison, 1976-

       The arsonist’s song has nothing to do with fire : a novel by / Allison Titus.

      pages cm.

       Summary: “The Doctor was looking for the blueprint. Drawer after drawer he lumbered his way around the office, a map of the ribcage in his head. Last night he’d dreamed the wings again and the dream gave him an idea. More of the rib, dismantled, would make the wing frame more flexible. In The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire, Vivian Foster connects with an arsonist and a radical plastic surgeon whose mission is to build human wings. Allison Titus lives in Virginia with poet, Joshua Poteat, and their four dogs. She has also written a book of poetry”-- Provided by publisher.

       ISBN 978-0-9886922-7-5

       1. Loneliness--Fiction. 2. Arsonists--Fiction. 3. Plastic surgeons--Fiction. 4. Friendship--Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

       PS3620.I87A89 2014

       813’.6--dc23

      2013046182

      Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.

      The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

      To my family.

      & to JP.

       Sometimes people die trying to do things.

       That’s OK.

       There are things more important

       than life or death.

       —Mary Ruefle, “Elegy for a Game”

      Contents

       October 11, 1989

       November 16, 1989

       November 30, 1989

       December 7, 1989

       December 23, 1989

       January 5, 1990

       February 12, 1990

       March 18, 1990

       June 2, 1990

       March 28, 1990

       June 29, 1990

       About Allison Titus

      With infinite gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for a literature fellowship and the time it provided.

      Thank you: to the editors of Ninth Letter and Verse magazine for publishing early excerpts from this manuscript. To my friends, some of whom were early readers, some of whom read multiple drafts, all of whom were endlessly supportive: Marie Potoczny, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Meg Rains, Rob Schlegel, Barbara Yien, Brian Henry, Josh Harmon, Katy Resch, Kelly Kerney, Ann Marshall, Alanna Ramirez, Jenny Koster, Tom de Haven.

      Thank you to the mongrels of my heart who kept me company for the many years that I wrote this: Ruben, Piper, Elly, Daisy.

      And most of all, to JP: for every single thing.

      On the morning of the day she died, Vivian Foster woke earlier than usual, woke to dim half-light, slung down clouds fat with impending rain, the shrieking pushcart sounds of the limping bottle collector, the pigeons’ scuffed purrs rummaged up from the alley. She is survived by was where she faltered, no heir, no indebted, no lover to claim—but she thought her obituary through every night anyway. Worried over all the mechanics of the evered this and evered that. A bad habit. The bargain for a last resort: If all else failed/If it couldn’t get any worse. Sometimes the death she imagined was uneventful: she grew old and died in her sleep. More often, though, an elevator collapsed on its cable at the fifty-third floor; or the train derailed; or the gas pump, struck by lightning, went up in flames. Vivian was convinced a freak accident would befall her eventually, some pathetic and arbitrary devastation. So she resigned. She waited for the appropriate disaster.

      In the meantime, she practiced dying, submitting to the idea of death in all its terrible versions. Car accident, factory fire, heart attack; hypothermia, avalanche, homicide; tuberculosis, malaria, syphilis: steady and progressive illness was, by far, the worst. The body wasted to its husk of bone; the drafty sick room with its thin-sheeted bed; limp wrist pale and buckled on the fleece. Guessing at every potential cruelty or misfortune was tedious, for sure, was oppressive, but she couldn’t quit. She had to practice dying, and practice dying, and remain vigilant by practice-dying. And so on.

      The wafers were arranged like pocketknives on the heirloom doily and delivered, as was customary, at tea. Little did Viv know the cakes were laced with arsenic. That one mouthful would loiter, hot, at her throat. By the time the fever tucked into her lungs, a small fire, it was too late to remedy the oversight. The assistant would be stripped of his badge and escorted from the building, but not before Vivian died. The doily was woven from horsehair and patches of Spanish moss tugged from oaks shading the town’s cul-de-sacs and cemeteries and parks. When the assistant used the doily to mop urgent and rough at Vivian’s face, small scratch marks hatched pink across her pale skin, there and there and there.

      The cab was gone by the time Viv reached the front door; she should’ve asked the driver to wait—who knew how this would go, she

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