The Turning

Bonfires feature in several stories; in “Big World,” Boner McPharlin’s bonfire is “the beginning of that short period of grace when my very limbs tingled with relief and the dread of failure had yet to set in” (12). In “Damaged Goods,” the same bonfire is attended by Vic Lang, where he shares a moment with Alison right before her death, and Boner himself has a moment of triumph in “Boner McPharlin’s Moll.” In each instance, the bonfire represents the promise and potential for the lives of the attendants, a brief respite from the trauma they are dealing with, but characters experience tragedy soon after—the narrator of “Big World” loses his friend within a year, Alison dies in a car crash, and Boner is harassed and eventually institutionalized by the local police. The bonfire is beautiful, but destined to end.

Fire more generally also figures prominently as a destructive force or a symbol of doom. Strawberry Alison in “Damaged Goods” writes a poem featuring two girls in flames, prefiguring her own death by fire. In “Cockleshell,” Agnes Larwood’s house burns with her father inside. Most poetically, the narrator of “Big World” sees “a kite in the air and its tail was on fire, looping and spiraling orange and pink against the night sky” (12).