text: When I was two, there was a fire at 731 Bevis Road. The pictures are on my bookshelf. A blonde bowl-cut in jean shorts watches in the white heat of the summer sun as a firefighter hoses down a cloud of grey smoke from his crow’s nest. There is no chimney on the Bevis house for the smoke to come out of. Plus, Daniel told me there was a fire here when I moved in 20 years later. The bowl cut is not my brother but I like to imagine he is. That’s what he was like in pictures from back then-- blonde with a Doctor Octopus haircut. Nick and I share the same body but 8 years apart. And if there’s a question of who’s who in a family picture and there’s no alarm clock orange time stamp, you can look at the eyes to tell the difference. My brother’s eyes were mischievous, a little evil, thinking, scheming, and mine were, well, not. Nick was a troublemaker and a rough houser. I was rough, but like, on accident. Mad scientist that I was, I once broke my Nick’s Playstation because I thought that, if I put multiple discs in at once, I would be able to play one game with another game’s characters. After all, you could do this with *Sonic and Knuckles* and *Sonic 3*. But it wasn’t so much the multiple discs that broke the Playstation as it was me jumping on the console because the lid wouldn’t shut. I can’t remember if he was mad, but I know we didn’t have a Playstation again until our twenty-something cousin got a new one or went on active duty in Iraq or something. Plus, it was an honest-to-God accident. My sister broke his face on purpose once. They were playing badminton under the watch of my grandmother when she hit him with her racket. He had been taunting her, or so the story goes. She had had enough and clobbered the little man. “That’s what you get,” my mom said Nick would say when he was an even younger boy and he had enacted revenge, as I’m told he often did. My mother would revel, I could tell even when I was 10, in the apparent irony when she told me the tale years later. My mother and brother-- that’s something. The year he spent at his *other* friend Jason’s house was the year she called him “The Brat”. She missed him, I think, and she called him “The Brat”. “Comatose” was her favorite word in 2006, the summer after The Brat’s freshman year in college. I think he was depressed. Lazy, I think she thought. They found an empty bottle of Cobra malt liquor in his room that summer. I heard my mom say some stuff about porn. I didn’t really want to listen; it wasn’t my business, you know? But I couldn’t just not be in the family van at the same time as my parents, and she couldn’t just not somehow be angry at my dad for what they’d found in my brother’s room. A house divided, I could not stand. But it did indeed. I hear George Costanza say, “I’m the result of my parents having stayed together,” and Tom Delong sing the lyrics to “Stay Together for The Kids” at the same time. But I think my parents love each other, I really do. And I know they love me and my siblings too-- me and Whitney and Nick and Drew. And they definitely love the grandkids. I know that for sure. What was happening in the Bevis house when the fire happened? Your guess is as good as mine. All I have is the picture, and I’m not even sure I have that. Memory is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photo of a photo. My imagination is almost as good. And I imagine they were just like us with a smaller house. I imagine they felt embarrassed, too, when their dad thought simply pointing at green paper plates and saying, “Shrek plates” was a cam-corder-worthy event. I imagine they weren’t sure whether their mom was whispering or whether she had stopped talking mid-prayer when it was bedtime. I imagine the cognitive dissonance they witnessed in every adult they knew was confusing and infuriating. I imagine they loved when their mother read *The Chronicles of Narnia* to them, but they were too cool to admit it. But where would they go when it was all too much? Was I just a thousand square feet away from arson? What would I have done without the coat rack in the unfinished side of the basement? Where would I have said my curses? Where would I have prayed for the death of certain family members with little conviction and less remorse? I think the backyard apocalypse dream would have been the same. Before Daniel moved out, he yoinked the benches from the newly foreclosed Applebees down the street. I think the dream would have been the same-- flaming Star-Wars-styled credits emblazoned in the sky and all-- but the Applebees benches would have been in it. And the fire pit that I bought from Home Depot would be there, too. Before I let it sit in the rain and it rusted and sprouted foliage, of course. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photo of a photo. What was it like in the happy times? The times when they’d wake up to the sound of butter popping on the stove instead of a blender or a vacuum cleaner or deafening marital strife. When it was the day after Thanksgiving and they had a whole day of flat Sprite and Halo 2 and Christmas tree decorating ahead of them. Did the close quarters make it better? Where there times when they all wanted to watch the same thing on TV? Did the smell of popcorn fill the whole house instead of just the kitchen? Johnny tells me the neighbor said it was a curling iron left on too long in the upstairs bathroom that caused the fire, but I choose not to believe him. What does the neighbor know? Memory is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photo of a photo. My imagination is better.