Burning

“Child,” Aunt Wilhelmina told 12-year old Aaron at the church, “I have a very unhappy duty to perform. Your parents are dead.”

“But what happened?”

His aunt hesitated before answering, as if trying to find the right words. “They say your father swerved to avoid a dog and went off the clif of the Pacific Coast Highway, just north of Half Moon Bay. There was a fire …”

Aaron’s brain folded in two and closed in on itself. Inside that pressure cooker the thoughts careened from one side to the other and he retreated into the shell within his skull.

“Aaron, you will live with me now. Won’t that be nice? You’ll have servants and a pony, a governess and ten acres of land for running around.”

He wondered what a governess was.