Bang Box
Cap, he said we got timber beams, which of course means there’s a few extra ticks before the floor lets loose. Being geared up heavy, you’re wishing for oak but would settle for pine, all things considered. Those hewn logs, big bastards that got drug out of the holler by a Belgian Draft a century back, they don’t burn quick as the new stuff. Laminated veneer, it’s killed a probie or two, but it’s not the wood at fault. Those gusset plates, the kind you see in most builds since the MTV days, they cause all the grief. Gets hot enough and those metal connectors, sometimes just a mesh rectangle but maybe your numbers hit and it’s galvanized, give up the ship in less than 10 minutes and next thing you know, bang, you got an LODD on your hands and Lieu is rounding up the honor guard. Line of Duty Death, that is. But it’s timber beam, so while Cap is on the tip, I’m probing corners and feeling for the floor to get soft.
30% oxygen left, IC crackles over the radio. Checking the meter, I tell him back it’s 33%.
Out the window, Burny yells Sir, it’s not safe, you can’t go back in there. He’s plugged into crowd control considering he ain’t much more than a Jake when you put a hose in his hands, but nobody better at stopping a civvy from needing skin grafts.
Cap, right now he’s losing the fight. Red and orange lick the rafters and we’re going on fully involved. The plywood is all Bell’s Palsy drooping under my heels like that, and the bedroom ceiling we’re standing on has a date with the bedroom floor, timber beams or not.
Ma’am, ma’am, no, you need to stay outside, Burny warns from two stories down.
The charlie side flares up and Cap radios to get the stick in the air because the stairs are a no-go. The ladder, he means. Me, I’m on the alpha side still poking through cardboard boxes. First three were jack squat.
25% remaining, IC buzzes, but he’s always undercutting it.
People ask about the smell and suspect I’m fooling when I say campfire. But it’s nothing special, unless of course a bunch of those totes are melting down to a puddle, in which case your nose says you might better get some fresh air, respirator or not.
Next box is just plates. Ceramic, maybe. Dinner and hors d’oeuvres size. So I shove it towards the opposite corner and it disappears in the smoke.
You ever stood in the middle of a trampoline, not as a kid but full-grown? The way it sags down towards the grass and you wait for the springs to pop? Then you can get your head around what the floor feels like right about this moment. As in, maybe you don’t want to be in my shoes.
20%, the IC who cried wolf announces on comms.
Burny, the uproar signals he’s wrestling Mr. Homeowner to the driveway so the guy doesn’t turn chargrilled trying to save the cat.
CHING…CHING CHING…CHING.
Sayonara to the dinner plates, burst into thousands of shards.
Back Cap’s way there’s a thump, low and dense, and the wall mushroom’s up. Time to go, the overreactor shouts over the radio. Stick’s ready at the bravo window, now! But there’s one box left, so I spin the volume down to zero and peel back the flaps.
Jackpot.
Stacks on stacks of big hair and expertly placed fishnet. Page after page of silicon and leopard print. Neon D-cups and “Girls of Hawaii,” raw and uncensored.
From behind me, CHING CHING. CHING.
The corner of the box lights up with a whoomp and I’m still foraging. “America’s Best ASSets!” Velvet and Gallery and High Society. “Raunchy Ladies of Reno” and Miss Melissa’s 56-inch jugs.
Buried beneath it all, under the moose knuckles and “Nympho Nurses,” I spot two smoldering issues of Bang Box and my belly flips. After eleven houses and dozens of boxes stuffed away in bedroom closets and mildewed basements and broiling attics, I’ve got it. Them, really. Sticky and dog-eared, the covers blare about the “Girl Next Door” contest winner. December 1988, erect nipples jut out from a denim vest while both legs are splayed open, revealing a thatch of pubic hair crawling down both thighs. Also, pink Chuck Taylor’s. December 1989, topless beneath a color block nylon ski jacket, with furry boots and crotchless panties.
On both covers, the same feathered dirty-blonde hair.
The same front teeth gap.
The same mismatched eyes, one hazel and one brown.
The same black cross inked in the slot between left thumb and index finger, situated so it’s rightways up when she looks at it and upside down for anyone else.
The only two-time winner of the contest.
Angela Aubrey.
Not her real name.
THUD THUD THUD from the respirator says oxygen is at zero, so I jam both copies under my jacket and turn for the window.
Before I get there, the floor lets loose and everything goes dark.
#
7:49am, March 15th, 2026. Newsome VFD responded to reports of heavy smoke at 109 Jurgen Street. Upon arriving on scene, firefighters encountered flames engulfing the rear of the home. All members of the family were evacuated safely, though a cat remains unaccounted for. The fire spread to the second floor and attic where firefighters were battling the blaze, until rapid intensification forced the call to evacuate. Partial collapse of the attic temporarily trapped 35-year-old firefighter Amber Raisor. A two-man crew extricated her from a window via ladder truck, and she was transported to Block Memorial Hospital for treatment of severe burns and smoke inhalation. An investigation into the cause of the fire is continuing.
#
Did you know there are darn near 350,000 residential fires per year in the United States? It’s cooking that’s to blame for more than half. Propane tank is fresh out but those ribeyes are still dinner so you fry them in a pan on the gas stove. Then the grease lights up and in a tizzy you throw water on it, and we know how that goes. Or maybe Pops says let’s deep-fry the turkey this year, but the garage was the wrong place for that, so it’s a three alarm before the green bean casserole is even out of the oven. Not always a bonehead thing though. Could be you used a hand towel to move a hot pan and dangled it over the flame on accident. But knowing this, that cooking fires are the main culprit, someone who’s liable to start a fire on purpose will basically always aim for the kitchen.
The nurse, she just nods through all of this and layers more cinchocaine on my hands. Jacey, in her scrubs the color of Hi-C, she mmhmms and hangs another bag of oxandrolone.
“Get some rest, Amber,” she goes, snapping her gloves off into the trash, and leaves the room.
#
Jurgen Street, the one with the missing cat, like I said it was the eleventh house. Didn’t bank on it taking that many. Each one though, I could tell it back like a golfer replaying every shot from their last round.
19 Muirfield Road, October 9th. We had a full squad, so Cap and the boys worked the kitchen and laundry room while I ducked into the basement to creep. Some boxes, sure – there are always boxes – but only hand towels and seasonal knickknacks. Hand-painted rabbits holding a banner that said “Hoppy Easter.” Two pawprint ornament kits, unopened. Wooden sign announcing everyone should gobble till they wobble. But no smut, so I rucked back upstairs after pocketing a Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia from the Lego display because the kid will never miss them.
95 Chris Street, October 30th. Kitchen wasn’t the source this time around, but a coal furnace in the garage that sat under the living room. Pulling up I knew right off it wasn’t the place, not with them hanging ferns and oversized rockers on the porch, but we’ve all been surprised before. Me, I worked the tip seeing that Cap was out of town and Burny was shoved off to traffic control, but having the lead wasn’t all bad. The pipeman was outside, which left me free to mine for filth in every toolbox and tote down there, all while keeping the nozzle focused on that furnace. Didn’t have what I was looking for, this place. Impact wrenches and socket sets, sure. Brad nails and spiral saws, you bet. Two woks and an electric griddle, because why not, but no Swank. No Hustler. No Club. No Angela Aubrey.
81 Highland Lane, November 16th. Kitchen fires, they pretty much don’t run themselves into attic or basement fires, unless when nobody is around to call it in. And Highland, we got there in under five, so it didn’t land in the “saved the foundation” category. Lieu dug for hot spots on the delta side while Cap had the nozzle to knock down flare-ups, so I made like the storage closet around the corner was a worry. Sliding open the doors, there was cereal to feed a penal colony. Rows of canned peas and corn and fruit in heavy syrup. Stacks of frying pans, more than one blender, and cleaning supplies like if you needed to swab down the hospital. As in, all of it. But just a single box loaded with shoes, kid size. I slid the flaps back together, migrated to the kitchen, and signaled the all clear.
You don’t need to hear about the other seven. All that matters was the eleventh.
#
2:49pm, March 17th, 2026. Newsome police conducted a welfare check at 42 Riverside Parkway, issued by a concerned landlord. After the inhabitant of the home failed to answer the door following numerous attempts, police forcibly entered the residence and found Angela Raisor, 56, unresponsive in the kitchen. She was turned over to the Newsome VFD and transported to Block Memorial Hospital.
#
It’s that bad pee color this time, Jacey’s scrubs that is, maybe like you took too much vitamin B. Or Mountain Dew, the original color. She rolls me to face the window, which just sees out to the brick wall of the neighboring wing, and spreads more silver sulfadiazine over my right shoulder blade. We do this twice per day, me and Jacey, with her slathering a creamy whatever on my skin or tapping another clear bag of something or other as I talk.
Monologuing the bricks out the window, I point out that a fire-related death happens roughly every 140 minutes in the US, and an mmhmm rumbles from behind my back. The silver sulfadiazine, it stings like sunburn going on, which the doctor told me is better than dying from a bacterial infection and who am I to argue. Do you know which state has the most fatal house fires, I ask the bricks, and then say it’s Texas before Jacey can answer. Hmm, she says, which feels like a breakthrough, and wraps a layer of gauze around the fresh slick of antibiotic.
“Back for more around 6 o’clock,” Jacey goes, as she tugs another pair of gloves into the garbage and hangs a left down the hall.
#
Knuckles rap on the door, not soft and low the way most hospital knocks are but the same THUD THUD THUD as the respirator that ran out of oxygen, and it’s Lieutenant Knee Pads.
Not his real name.
Dangling from his left arm like a ball sack is a plastic grocery bag and he stands there waiting for an invite, so I say to come in. He plops into the chair in the corner, hissing air out of the seams, and sets the bag between his booted feet.
“When you getting out?” he asks, skipping the niceties.
My head bobbles side to side, the way your grandparents bobbled when they heard a good song on the car radio (always side to side, not front to back like the youngins’).
“Depends,” I tell him, looking down at the mummified wrap of my shoulder and chest.
“Be good to have you back,” he nods, the whole time staring at my bricks out the window, never looking at me. “Burny ain’t shit on the tip.”
A pair of heels click past the door, trailed by the splat of max-cushioned running shoes, nursing clogs being dinosaurs these days. Beyond that, it’s silent for a ten count until he breaks the deadlock.
“Brought you this,” he says, and Frankenstein’s his way to me, leaving the cuck chair inhaling behind him. The bag, reeking of campfire, lands heavy on the bedside table. Through the milkiness of the thin plastic, I see the screaming pink of canvas high tops. Pressed against the side of the bag are two legs topped with panties, sans crotch. Bang Box, it says through a hole in the corner of the bag.
Lieutenant Knee Pads, he’s standing by the bed, looking at me now. Not saying, just looking. Watching as I pull the side of the bag down to get a cleaner peek at the green and yellow and black squares of a nylon ski jacket. An unobstructed view of the hedgehog of hair parked at the intersection of two spread legs.
“You could of got to the stick with Cap,” Knee Pads stage whispers to me. “And then ain’t none of this,” he says, gesturing to my body, “none of this ever happens.”
More running shoes muffle down the hallway as I pick at the edge of the bag. Everywhere is the smell of woodsmoke. Knee Pads, he’s spitting distance away as I slide my left hand inside and pull out the December 1989 issue.
The feathered dirty-blonde hair.
The gap in the front teeth.
The hazel and brown eyes, one of each.
Gazing at her, at Angela Aubrey, everything goes fuzzy even though I know Knee Pads isn’t one to deal with crying.
“Why’d you hang back? For those?” he says, flicking a hand towards the bag and making like tears aren’t leaking down my cheeks.
The black cross, the one between Angela’s left thumb and index finger, I look at it, then look to the notch on my left hand. There, on that flap of skin between thumb and pointer, is the dusky, blown out image of a cross.
The same tattoo, me and Angela Aubrey.
“Why?” Knee Pads repeats.
#
Me telling you it was just bricks outside the window, that wasn’t right. It’s bricks, but with my face splatted against the glass it’s also how to see into the window for the first room in the adjacent wing. Shoving my ear hard into the corner, so hard the metal frame leaves railroad tracks from temple to jaw, I can tell you the room is occupied now. Standing here with the window frame pressed into my face, Jacey and her Mountain Dew scrubs not due back yet, there’s a person in that room with an oxygen mask over her mouth. At least I think it’s a her. The fluorescent light over the bed flicked on and I saw long hair. Blonde, but maybe darker.
#
“Diluted chlorhexidine,” Jacey tells me through her mask as she irrigates the skin on my shoulder, then scrubs softly with a square of gauze. It’s debridement that she’s doing, taking off some dead layers that I don’t need.
Not wanting to watch, I stare at our reflection in the blank TV mounted on the wall and tell Jacey that, even though the number of house fires has declined since the 80s, the rate of deaths is up. Almost nine deaths per thousand fires, I say to her, and it used to be closer to seven.
“You’re kind of a pyro,” Jacey goes, and in the TV screen I watch her drag a peel of skin off with her fingers and wipe it on a pantleg.
“57% of deaths are men,” I say, “mainly because they’re most likely to run back inside trying to play hero.”
“Or because they do dumb shit,” Jacey adds, squirting another round of chlorhexidine.
“Like trying to play hero,” I add, then look to the bricks.
#
“I’m seven years old and home alone,” I tell Jacey, who’s right now smearing my shoulder and chest with fresh silver sulfadiazine. “And Mom, she said not to touch the stove and she’d be back in a wink, but that was hours before and all I had was fruit snacks.”
She’s stopped mid-smear, Jacey has, and is just looking at me now.
“There was mac n’ cheese, so I tried to remember what Mom did, the way she pushed the dial on the stove and it click click clicked before the blue flame lit up. And it did, after some click clicking, the flame lit up, but my blanket was there on the stove, so it lit up too. Just the edge at first, but then all of it, and I ran upstairs, chased by the beep…beep…beep of the smoke alarm.
This whole time, Jacey is staring at me while I sermon the bricks. In the hall, a horde of thick-soled running shoes plops past the nurse’s station.
“They found me in a closet, the firefighters did, hugging my mom’s shirt and crying. After taking me down the ladder, they gave me to a lady with a quiet voice who wore brown pants and a sweater soft like kitten fur. She asked where my parents were and I told her mom would be back in a wink, that’s what she told me, in a wink.”
“Jesus,” Jacey murmurs, as she strips off both gloves and lays a hand on mine, her thumb worrying over the cross tattoo.
“That fire took everything,” I say to this nurse who, after days of mmhmms, feels like the only one who listens. “The ratty chair we used to snuggle in to watch movies. The table where we did puzzles. My stuffed animals and books. Mom’s fancy clothes that she would put on when we played dress-up. The boxes of pictures, every single one.”
Her scrubs are orange today, Jacey’s are. Carrot, maybe. Or pumpkin.
“It even took my Mom,” I tell her, like we’re in some kind of confessional, “because the quiet lady said it wasn’t safe with her.”
#
Back at the window, the cool of the metal frame pressed against my cheek, I know it’s a woman in that room. She’s sitting up in bed now, talking to someone. A nurse, maybe. But the woman, she has so much hair the color of wet sand, and she’s gesturing with her hands as she speaks. On the left hand there’s a dark smudge, two black lines intersecting, and my mouth falls open.
It’s her. In the adjoining wing of Block Memorial Hospital, it’s her.
I pull back from the window, leaving a greasy face print like a cave painting, and shuffle to the hallway. My gown is flapping open behind me, bare ass there for anyone who cares to look, but it doesn’t matter. One turn, then one more, and I’m frozen outside room 213. Standing there, listening, it’s quiet inside. A pair of heels clacks down the hallway behind me. I nudge the door and it swings open.
Her head spins in my direction and even now, years after Bang Box, she’s still gorgeous.
She starts to speak, but the words are cut short when it clicks. Angela Aubrey, she’s speechless when she sees this woman, me, standing in the doorway with feathered dirty-blonde hair, just like hers when she was young. This total stranger, the one who crept unannounced into room 213 wearing an untied hospital gown and layers of gauze around her shoulder and chest, has mismatched hazel and brown eyes, one of each. She has a gap in her front teeth, wide and proud, and Angela Aubrey, looking at me, could be looking back in time.
It’s a staring contest, until finally she breaks.
“Baby?” she breathes, “Is that you?”
“Oh my god,” I sigh. “You look so beautiful,” I tell her, and surge to the bed.
“Oh, sugar,” Angela says, holding me against her chest as I weep. “Baby, I look like a busted can of biscuits under this sheet.”
It’s really her. The only two-time winner of the Bang Box “Girl Next Door” contest.
Angela Aubrey Raisor.
My mom.
#
You can strut into pretty near anywhere, provided you do it confident. Not looking for permission, everyone supposes you got business to attend to and lets it ride. Looks the other direction. The thing about being in a hospital is, people have their own mess to handle. The nurse on hour nine of another double in a row, she’s dwelling on the guy in 1102 with the burst hemorrhoid who keeps calling her toots, so another rando sliding by in the hallway doesn’t register. Visitors, they don’t give a hoot about someone in a gown rallying past unless it’s Grandpa Don because he shouldn’t be up, not with the fall risk and all.
So me, I’m prancing like Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven, each step signaling I’ve got somewhere to be and no patience for chit-chat. And the hand clasped around mine, imagine it’s attached to Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, except that in this movie Meryl has a cross tattooed between her thumb and index finger and a gap in her teeth.
“Is this really gonna work?” Angela asks, to which I say just keep walking.
We bail on the elevator and skip down two flights of stairs, popping out into the lobby with our hands still latched tight. Angela, her gown is falling open in the back and even at 56 she’s still got that donk. Hanging a left at the registration desk, Clooney and Streep with business on their mind, we swagger through the sliding doors and into the pull-up zone outside the ER.
Being on the other end of this enough, you know that stealing an ambulance is duck soup. Open and shut, I mean. The thing is, when those popo-medics come in hot to the ER entrance, all’s that’s on their mind is getting the patient out of the box and into a room, so the two-stroke is left running. Sometimes, if maybe it was a big wreck or a shootout, you’ll have three or four meat wagons loitering there, belching exhaust with no crew in earshot.
That’s what we happen across, Angela and me. A trio of ambulances lined up neat like the front row of the Indy 500. All of them running, unlocked, waiting for green.
“We’re really doing this, baby?” Angela says, but I’m already buckled into the driver’s seat signaling her to take shotgun. Climbing up, her gown snags on the door and a thigh beard announces that, almost four decades after Bang Box, Angela hasn’t changed her grooming habits.
Both doors thunk shut and I hammer the gas, chirping the rears as we burst from under the breezeway and into the sun, angling for open space. The E-Series doesn’t handle like the ProMaster and we swing wide at the first stop sign, kissing the front end of a Honda and sending a shower of plastic into the intersection.
“Let me get this, darlin,” Angela tells me, paying no mind to the Honda driver disappearing in our sideview mirror as she strips a ribbon of dead skin from my shoulder and flicks it on the floor.
The speedometer touches fifty as we splinter the arm barrier and launch into the empty overflow lot. In the back of the box, the ambulance I mean, it’s a chorus of glass and metal as we land, everything slamming into everything else. Needles and catheters, jump bags and oxygen tanks, a portable defibrillator and EKG unit. Next to me, Angela has both hands pressed on the dashboard, a mane of hair sucked across her face and out the open window, and she’s laughing. That wheezing kind of laugh, the one where you almost can’t hear it but your eyes know what’s happening, that’s Angela’s laugh.
Letting the rig coast down to about twenty, I tell Angela to hang on and jack the wheel to the left, tromping on the gas at the same time. And the E-Series, it doesn’t handle like some of the others, but the V-8 has enough horses to pull killer donuts. The rear end whips around, tires screaming, and I keep on the throttle as the centripetal force kicks in. Faster and faster we spin, each rotation flooding the cabin with tangy rubber smoke as the tires overheat.
“When’s the last time you whipped shitties?” I yell to Angela over the squealing, but all she can do is hang on and it’s just those gapped front teeth braying at the windshield, tears streaming down both cheeks, she’s so happy. And me, that’s all I ever wanted, to make her happy, so I give it more gas and twist the wheel all the way to 90, the whole time watching her hoot.
Ambulances, though, they sit high, and sometimes that center of gravity has plans that don’t line up with yours.
We’re spinning through so much smoke you can’t tell sky from blacktop and I feel it go, the driver’s side wheels lifting off the ground and hovering for a breath before the entire wagon, all 14,000 pounds of it, keels over dead like roadkill. Me, I’m spit out of the seatbelt at impact and thud onto Angela while around us the windows, all of them, explode and we’re peppered with glass. In a milky fog of burned tires, I feel Angela shuddering beneath me. I clear the dirty blonde hair from her face, frantic that she’s hurt or worse, but that’s not it. Panting and alive, she’s laughing, laughing so hard she can’t breathe, her giant open mouth topped by gapped teeth.
A black tattoo of a cross comes into view and Angela’s left hand tugs a translucent filet from my collarbone, revealing the fresh pink skin underneath. It sticks to her fingers and she tries to snap it off the way you do after a wet sneeze, but my skin dangles there, not wanting to leave. So Angela, she wraps both arms around me and pulls me close to her chest, and we both of us start to cry. Not because we’re sad, but because we’re not.
Out the window, past the lingering cloud of fumes and stink, I hear sirens.
#
4:02pm, March 20th, 2026. Newsome Police were called to Block Memorial Hospital to investigate complaints of a stolen ambulance. Arriving on scene, officers reported the ambulance had rolled over after the driver, 35-year-old Amber Raisor, had initiated a series of donuts in an empty parking lot. The passenger, 56-year-old Angela Raisor, sustained minor injuries. The driver was arrested and charged with multiple felony counts, including possession of a stolen motor vehicle, aggravated reckless driving causing bodily harm, and vehicular hijacking. While in Newsome County Jail awaiting arraignment, Am. Raisor provided information pertaining to a nearly three-month investigation into a series of recent house fires. Chief Investigator Hank Drummond announced that Raisor, a longstanding member of the Newsome Volunteer Fire Department, was charged with eleven counts of arson in the first degree for deliberately starting fires at eleven different homes between September 2024 and March 2026. Prosecutors anticipate a plea deal, as Raisor reportedly confessed to all counts.
Great piece of work bryan!
That is a mighty strong piece of writing my friend.