Prologue to the Fire Stories
Written by Mike Lomas

By 2029, the year I was born, the ranch had become a collection center for the original owner’s adult children and cousins who hadn’t found their places in the world.  They brought large families, their friends, and lots of children.  A few of the new residents considered themselves to be artists, back-to-nature people, or somehow countercultural. 

My father said the ranch attracted weird people - or people who decided they were weird once they got there.  My parents considered themselves to be normal - neither creative writers or yoga masters.  They inherited the house from my grandparents.  They had no other property so they stayed.

Out of this community of artists and pretending-to-be-artists came a kind of wonderful thing that my parents enjoyed very much.  Once a year, in the early summer, we had the fire stories.  We met in the evening in a small field near the river with willows on one side and pines rising up a gentle hill on the other.  People brought blankets or chairs to sit on. 

Whoever was telling a story would face the fire pit with the audience spread in a semi-circle around the other side.  The idea was that mankind had been telling stories this way for as long as language existed.  We were in tune with our ancient ancestors.  Some people worked on their stories all year and some just picked an anecdote from their past when they got there.  They would extemporize or read a story they had written.  The rule was the story had to be original with the speaker.  They couldn’t repeat a story they had read or heard elsewhere.  Recording devices were forbidden.   

There was a teepee behind the speaker where the young children were put to bed as the evening went on.  I slept through many stories.  Once when I was ten, I wormed my way out under the back of the tent and snuck off, battling my way through the willows to the river.  There was a three-quarter moon that night, casting the land in a light I had never seen before.  I thought I’d found a world the grown-ups didn’t know about.  Or hadn’t the wits to pay attention to it. 

There were low puffy clouds in the sky, just sitting there, going nowhere.  Their bottoms were dark, like rain clouds, and their edges were light grey, lit by the moon.  Where the moonlight hit the trees the details looked as plain as day.  There was so much to explore in this world that I decided in that moment to dedicate my life to understanding it.  I would find out why the world looked the way it did in the moonlight.  I would explain it to everyone.  It would be the truth. I wouldn't make stuff up.. 

Newly resolved, I picked my way back through the willows and into the back of a tent.  I collapsed on top of my sleeping bag and went to sleep.  The other kids and I slept there all night because my older sister, Melissa, was there to be responsible for us. 

Melissa started telling stories when she was fifteen.  I never told a story myself.  I was more interested in science, facts you could learn, problems you could solve.  I listened to the stories but made no effort to remember them.  I only recorded them because I wasn’t supposed to.  With my thumb-sized recorder under my shirt I captured the exact words of every story told from 2040 to 2047. 

In 2086, when I was fifty-seven, I saw the recorder while looking through a box for things to throw out.  I started transcribing the stories myself.  They brought back memories of my teenage self, sitting by the fire, hearing it crackle from time to time, and listening to the adults.  They brought back memories of people I had completely forgotten.  In some cases the people were completely different in their telling of their stories than from the way I remembered them.