fiction by amy monaghan

They Came in the Night with Torches

They came in the night with torches. I answered the door, sleep in my eyes, my bare feet cold on the hard stone floor, and I smiled when I saw who stood before me. You never expect it from your friends. 

Then before I knew it, I was running. Tearing blindly through the fields, screaming into the wind, hoping I would wake at any second in my soft bed with the nightmare already fading. But I didn’t. Behind me in the distance, I could hear them shouting, laughing, and then, the sound of fire ripping through wood and metal. I paused knee-deep in the bluegrass and glanced back, unsure if they were chasing me. They weren’t, but the little house I’d built myself was engulfed in smoke and flames. 

My friends stood with their torches and laughed. 

*

Springtime in Wyoming brings its own betrayals. One minute the sky is soft and blue, the next it drops a violent hail. After they burned the house, I thought about moving somewhere gentler. Wasn’t there any place in this world where a person could find peace? But I had no map showing me where to find such a place and no means to travel there even if I did. And stubbornly, I refused to let myself be exiled. 

I took a room at the motel in town and locked myself away. I bought new clothes, books I knew I’d never read, and a rusty pistol from the pawn shop down the street. Sometimes, through the slats in the blinds on my window, I’d see my friends walking arm in arm down the dusty road outside. They were nearly unrecognizable to me without burning torches in their hands. Each night, I felt the yellowed motel walls pulsing with my rage, which was too toxic to contain and had leaked out into the world like poisonous gas. Worst of all, even through my hatred, even through my rage, I could still remember what it had been like to love them. 

I risked a trip to the local bar. Others who I’d known for years turned their gaze away as I settled in a corner booth. The fire that took my house was still burning, and those who used to love me stayed far back to avoid the jumping flames. I drank alone and cursed them all to hell. They were as bad as the ones who’d carried the torches. My anger kept the fear at bay, but my heartbreak rested just beneath it.  

*

With summer came the rodeo, and new faces filled the town. I found myself less fearful. Sitting in the stands while the saddle broncs clung to their reins and the crowd around me cheered, I could pretend I was someone untainted. In line at the market, waiting for the bathroom at the bar, on my walk home to the motel, I noticed strangers meeting my eye again. They even spoke to me sometimes, if only to make small talk about the weather or the rising price of cattle. These newcomers had no reason to avoid me. 

My rage dulled to a quiet, ever-present throb. 

I met a woman—a barrel racer from outside Jackson—who wore yellow feathers in the brim band of her pinch front. She knew nothing of my friends, nothing of the blackened patch of field where the little house used to stand. I wanted to be brand new with her, to leave behind the version of me that had burned alive last spring, but she had other plans. Against my better judgment, I walked her through the bluegrass outside town to the ruins of the house. It’s been long enough, I told myself, and I believed it. But once it was there in front of me, the rage that had faded into glowing embers sparked and caught fire once again. The faces of my friends blurred my eyes like cataracts until the world went white. The woman fled in terror before my anger could singe the feathers in her hat. 

Back in the dim, green-tinged light of the motel room, I looked down at my own hands and saw them shaking. It wasn’t right. The karmic arrow of the universe was spinning off its axis, and it was up to me to fix it. I knew where they ate dinner every Friday: a diner on the main drag called Ruthie’s. I used to be among them, tears of laughter in all our eyes as we sat at the table near the jukebox.

The night was hot and buzzing with static electricity. Lightning flashed on the plain in the distance. The storm hadn’t reached the town yet, but it was on its way. The pistol that had been hibernating in the top shelf of the motel nightstand felt weightless in my hand. As I floated down Main Street in a haze of vengeful fury, the memory of my friends and I in better times stalked behind me like a phantom. As the diner came into view, the pistol grew hot and heavy in my hand. I picked up the pace.

Enemies are difficult to outrun, but friends are even harder. 

Amy Monaghan is a queer Los Angeles-based novelist and screenwriter with an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA. Recent examples of her fiction writing include “The Narrow Path to Heaven,” a short story published in the April 2022 edition of The Write Launch literary magazine. Her work explores themes of identity, trauma, and the search for personal freedom.