Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard

that of tried patience, as if enduring some classroom humiliation. My heart went out of shopping.
    As I walked back across the parking lot next to her, she stared into the distance, searching for something, an answer from her own invisible friends, a way to bridge the annoying, relentless minutes in which nothing at all happened, so that she could connect two pieces of her own story. I knew she’d need my money to do this, and that I’d give it to her.
    When we got home, my father’s new cargo minivan was in the driveway, and he was back on the farm preparing a burn pile. He’d been busy closing his lots and wasn’t around more than a few hours on Christmas.
He began walking toward the house. I went to my room and lay on the bed with my new book.
    The fighting began just outside, and I rolled off the bed and went to the window. I wondered what they’d said to start the argument, but I was getting angry, too, and yelling might have felt good.
    â€œI’m sick of this nonsense,” he tried to bellow, but to my surprise, the dark fields and night silence didn’t seem to care, and a wind blew through his voice, hollowing it.
    â€œIt’s none of your business,” she shouted back, drowning his words. This startled me. She spoke with such force, his force, as if she’d put on his boots and jacket and glared at him with his dark eyes, and he stood naked in the field, wanting his things back but too tired to take them.
    â€œI can’t believe it,” he said. “You talk to . . . to some psychic and now you think Vancouver is going to be destroyed by an earthquake.”
    â€œI’m sick of explaining myself!” she told him. The clouds cleared the moon, and the dark thinned so that the stars pulsed once, all together, and withdrew like barnacles.
    She said a few more things, about him not respecting her wishes or giving her space to grow, and her voice remained loud, something exploratory in the way she raised it to new heights, as if only now discovering this could be done.
    Her van started up, and its taillights flared and scorched off along the driveway.
    The night lulled, and a fire began on the back of the property. He was burning hundreds of leftover Christmas trees, the light blurring in the frosted window glass. Ever since I could remember, he’d loved building fires: garbage on the property, tires and old appliances, wood from rotting sheds, and once a camper that fit on the back of a truck. He’d piled branches and dead pine and spruce on top, then doused it all with so much gasoline that he’d had to pour a long thin trail of it far away just to light it safely. We’d crouched together, and he’d dropped the match. The flame zipped like a shark’s fin across the grass and the heap burst skyward, the air sucked in and up, sudden heat against my face. It got so hot that Christmas trees turned to ash before our eyes, and the metal
of the camper sagged and collapsed. He’d stood with his hands on his hips and laughed, and I had no idea why burning things felt so good, like yawning or stretching in the middle of class. Maybe he was trying to feel that way now, all alone burning trees.
    I went to the mudroom and put on my boots and pulled the door from its warped frame. Frozen air spilled over me, and I followed the hard earth of the driveway back.
    Halfway there, I came to a ditch, the spine of the buried culvert visible where big trucks carrying trees had passed. Beyond that was the tossing light of the fire. The cold stung my face, the night silent but for cars on the road. I hadn’t had time to get used to this farm, the sheds and barn unexplored, the forest scant and far away, beyond a frostbitten field.
    I glanced back. My heart clenched and thudded as the world came unstrung. The lights of the house drifted out toward the road. The rising moon slipped a little higher in the sky, bumping over the stars.
    I took a few more steps