Too Bad Shawn’s Not a Painter by William Stobb
Associate editor Julia Kooi Talen on today’s bonus essay: With sharp brevity, Stobb’s nonfiction cinematically explores a moment so surreal it feels like a dream. Comprised of pointed sentences and junctures that move like match cuts, flashbacks, and cutaways, this filmic piece takes us in, out, and right to the edges of a fire.
CW: injury
Too Bad Shawn’s Not a Painter
As Shawn was dumping gasoline on the brushfire his son actually said, “Dad, maybe you shouldn’t…” right as the whoosh of fume ignition combusted into the giant fireball. Later they’d notice how wide an arc was scorched way beyond the pile of trimmed shrubbery, fallen limbs, leaves and grass clippings—a fifty-foot diameter of char. Luckily the boy wasn’t seriously injured—only singed his eyebrows. And the dog had the good sense to scamper. The dog was fine.
But inside the explosion stood Shawn.
He remembers slapping flames out around his forehead and trying to pat down his arm but it was fully on fire. It’s wrong to run when you’re on fire but he ran because the neighbor’s pool was only fifty yards away. He remembers running, hearing and seeing and smelling himself burning, thinking of stopping but continuing to run, wondering if he would die. He made it to the pool, jumped into it and submerged himself. No longer on fire, he crawled to the pool deck and there lost consciousness until the ambulance arrived.
Though he was pretty hideous, and an idiot, and she’d only been seeing him a few weeks, his new girlfriend didn’t dump him. The grafts took and the scars evaporated and Shawn is still alive right now as I write this. He looks okay, and I think he’s happy. Maybe even happier, for having once been on fire.
What I get stuck on is the split second of whoosh before the pain and panic. What did that look like / sound like / feel like? What was that knowledge: your life now exists inside a conflagration of your own making. Your loved ones—everything you’ve ever loved—is on the outside of a large fire you’ve made of yourself. I wish there was an artist who could capture that. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve dreamed about it.
William Stobb is the author of six poetry collections, including the National Poetry Series selection, Nervous Systems and Absentia, both from Penguin Books. Stobb teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and works as part of the editorial staff at Conduit and Conduit Books.
