You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause

a step on the porch. The boy felt a swift clutch of fear—the windows were no good, the bed too low. Now that he was inside, in a strange room, he felt trapped and confused—outside, with space and movement, he could think and act, but here, here he did not know where to turn. He pulled the closet curtain back and stepped inside, burrowing beneath some coats hung on the bar above his head. The curtain trembled after his movement and he tried tostill it, but there was the faint vibration as he heard Stark come slowly from the kitchen into the room. The boy held his breath; he dared not breathe, for he could hear every breath, every movement of Stark. Now that he needed to hold his breath, every second demanded a new one. The blood flooded his temples, there was a filled choking feeling in his throat, he had to breathe but Stark was still there, and he did not breathe. He saw the silhouette of Stark against the curtain, saw Stark move across the room, and then slowly turn and go away again, and still the boy did not breathe, even with the blood pounding in his temples and his hands like ice. He heard the footsteps move away, heard the creaking of the floor in the other room and then the half-musical sprongging sound of the screen door opening and closing, and yet the boy waited, breath drawn in, until the stillness settled again, dropped with that heavy silence that could be only the silence of one alone. He moved then, looking carefully past the edge of the curtain into the lamp-lit yellow room, and then he crossed the room to the dresser. He shielded his eyes against the lamp and looked out into the late half light, half darkness, and then he turned the lock on the window and opened it. The window was very dusty and had not been cleaned for a long time. There was no screen and he shoved the window up and prepared to go out when his arm touched the lamp and jarred it and he had a quick breathless moment catching it, keeping it from falling, and then suddenly, quickly, quite deliberately, he flung the lamp on the floor, smashing it, sending kerosene and the flame eating after the kerosene across the floor and beneath the bed. It was a small blue-yellow flame at first as he watched it, growing yellowly, with a faint fuzzy orange color as the flames caught at the blankets overhanging the bed. The boy slid out the window and moved in a crouched half-run across the yard. He did not look back until he reached the hilltop in the cornfield and then the whole housewas a rich cherry glow in the valley, the flames licking the roof and the sides of the house like cherry drippings on chocolate, and the boy watched, feeling the tightness in his chest from running or from fear, he did not know which.
    He walked now, carefully, mocking the sounds of the late-evening doves from the trees in the pasture. He thought someday he would go hunting them. There was no one around the place when he got there; even the mother was gone. The boy slipped up to the porch, drifting in perfectly soundlessly, so that even the sleeping dog did not awaken until the boy was already in the kitchen door. The boy went into the living room and sat down in the straight chair by the lamp and opened his catechism and waited. He heard the cars go by the place, all going down towards Ezra Stark’s place, and much later even a fire truck from town, and then the cars began coming back, and the mother came in the house, and looked at him, with some excitement and some surprise, and she asked where he had been; there was a fire at that old bachelor’s, Stark’s place, and the boy said he wondered why all the cars went by, down there.
    A long while later the father and the brothers came back, and the father took off his soot-covered cap and sat down.
    “It was awful,” he said. “I never seen anything so awful.”
    “What?” the boy said.
    “Wasn’t you there too, boy?”
    “I was studying my catechism.”
    The father nodded. “The fire at Stark’s—it was