Out of the Fire by Alex Dal Piaz

After fleeing the chaos of the city, a woman finds uneasy solitude in a remote forest cabin—until the night fire and something else descend.

Alex Dal Piaz is an author from New York with recent credits in Seaside Gothic, Bristol Noir, The Other Stories, Cast of Wonders, and Bunker Squirrel. He’s currently querying a first novel and can be found online at X/Twitter @smile_stilllife and at linktr.ee/alexdpz 

You can read "Out of the Fire" at https://www.kaidankaistories.com.

Website: kaidankaistories.com
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to the Card on Card podcast, where every story
takes you one step deeper into the world of the strange,
the eerie, and the unknown. I'm your host, Linda Gould,
and tonight I'm reading Out of the Fire by Alex
del Piaz. A young woman seeks isolation deep in the
Montana wilderness after being attacked in the city. But does

(00:32):
isolation offer protection from monsters or does it make you
more vulnerable. Alex del Piaz is an author from New
York with recent credits in Seaside, Gothic, Bristol Noir, The
Other Stories, and many other publications. He's currently querying a
first novel, and you can find all of his social

(00:54):
media connections in the episode description. So now, dimder lights,
settle in and prepare yourself for Out of the Fire
by Alex Talpiez and Enjoy. I'd long been scared of ghosts,
But when it's been even longer since you've never seen one,

(01:17):
there's not so much to them anymore. Like a face
you don't recall, just the shape of it, and shapes
ain't scary anyway. I'd been clocked in the face much
more recently than any ghost sighting guy said he didn't
like the look of mine. I'd been followed right up
to my car in the midnight parking lot at Kroger's.

(01:38):
What the fuck do you want? I'd growl, with a
flash of the sharp ends of my keys tight between
my fingers. WHOA whatever, bitch. They're never nice when they
leave you alone. And after I got robbed, I traded
one fear for others. After I got mugged and concussed,
I found myself in some strain world of a hospital

(02:01):
where no one knew my name, and neither did I.
And I stared long in that little hospital mirror at
the cracked tooth sharp with blood, which looked like I'd
been sucking on someone's neck. Had I I couldn't even remember.
That's how I came to move out west, for more

(02:23):
space around me and between me and all that cosmic else.
Was I scared? Lone woman in Montana woods, a hut
I could reach all the sides of if I really
starfished myself. Was I terrified? They'd always ask me in
the postcards, always ask me about my shed. No, not

(02:49):
scared anymore. There's no real monsters. Two years out here
says that says that if humans could see at night
like in the day, we'd be okay with all of it.
We scare ourselves. There's no real monsters. I write this

(03:10):
because I've been writing that all day. Those two lines,
we scare ourselves. There's no real monsters. Oh, I want
to believe it, because if someone finds this journal and
not me and sees all these lines. No, I'm not crazy,

(03:34):
and I'm no yellow flower. Know that I'm tough, hard,
but I've seen things, things I can only call monsters.
It had come out of the woods, evade come like
with fireflies. It's one that fixes your eyes and then

(03:54):
you see a whole bunch. They're everywhere all around you.
Come outside tonight, even as it was barely dusk, a
glow roped through beyond the stanchions of pines. The forests
were on fire over the ridge. It had happened before,
but this was bigger, longer. The horizon line through the

(04:16):
trees was the color of lava. This was real fire.
The creek must have been jumped. You could hear the
roaring crinkle of it coming, and it all smells like hell.
But this one was like it was going to grab
your breath where you could never get to it again.
I had come out trying to figure if I had

(04:38):
to get going too, on foot, coughing, covering my mouth,
eyes burning, And then I seen it them and it
weren't no firefly cattle, bodied, dripping, wet, tall as old
vans with two fingered hoofs, curved like rams, and huge

(05:02):
bass like mouths slidding across thick necks. Then I see
it on one. There's mouths on both sides, front and back,
both wheezing like a popped bellows. Then the mouths of
all those things, every mouth sprang wide open in the

(05:24):
same instance, like they were all the same thing, and
the tiny eyes of them rolled yellow, and a terrible
dive bombing noise wound up from them, which is when
I'd noticed the rest through the haze. They've filled grotesquely

(05:44):
like bags, sucking in the air, their mute, ugly faces
distorting under pressure waves of it, and as soon as
one was full, the blackest urin would explode from it.
Then they'd suck again, eating the smoke. They're fucking eating it.
I half marveled, while my other half was already crinkling

(06:07):
inside me like wet newspaper. For some reason, I imagined
headlines about my former life, my former experiences, about a
young lady beaten for the hell of it. They call
it a mugging if a nickel goes missing. But I
can't remember what I had. Did you have a purse,
they asked, I can't remember. What kind of young lady

(06:29):
doesn't have a purse, they had asked. Those memories flooded
down into me, feet, weighed me into place, like metal
castings around my ankles. There was no moving, so I
stood dead still, trying to appear nothing other than that,

(06:50):
and feeling again that gangreen terror of having something not
all alive within you. What a state to arrive in,
and in this way. It was at this moment that
Bill Johnson showed up, likely coming to get me. I'd
seen his white hair through the trees, his flannel, but

(07:11):
so had these things which I'd been stuck on the
wonder of. But there was nothing like that back from them,
not towards Bill Johnson. No. As he came into view,
it was two of these beasts that turned and which
pulled the air so hard that Bill was stumbling over

(07:33):
as soon as he cleared the trees, like an old
man used to tumbling. He figured he missed a step
and came up just happy, go lucky and calling my name,
peering into the smoke. But then these beasts sucked again,
more of them, tracking onto him like radar dishes, and

(07:57):
he saw them too. I'm pretty sure, because he cried out.
They never even touched him. They just pointed in towards
him from every direction, sucking the air, surging it into themselves,
and he was caught there between ends of magnets. First

(08:17):
Bill's cap went, and there was a moment I thought,
stupidly that that would be the end of it. No
beast eats caps. But then he bent. Bill himself did,
bent easy in the middle, like creased pants, hung up
for a long time, his back going one way, his

(08:38):
legs twisting around the other. His clothes were coming off,
ripping his body ragdaling and shuddering, and then his flesh
was coming off too, sliding down off boones like overnight barbecue.
The beasts were already pissing, beat red, exploding it high

(08:59):
into the sky around me, onto me, until there was
nothing left to shuck, and his skeined skeleton tumbled alone
into a pile. I screamed, stupid, yeah, but I couldn't,
not a scream of anger and fear and might that

(09:21):
I might scare these beasts away. Oh I knew it
wouldn't work the moment I did it, and these creatures,
these beasts everywhere I saw them through the woods. Their
bodies shuddered and vibrated like freight cars, and I thought
they would explode and wipe this shit away like a nuke.
I wanted them to, but they didn't. They dug their

(09:44):
hoofs forward into the liquefying ground, trembling under them, and
then they ducked like porpoises. They dived. They disappeared into
the pissed up dirt beneath them, with the ease of
a swimmer into a And I stood dumb there, feeling
the fate of their tembler vanish into the ground, hearing

(10:06):
the crack of fire resume within the distant woods. Monsters everywhere,
and I was crying, covered in piss. The fire that
would have killed me. It passed now, but my thoughts
from the night they haven't. They won't. They won't let

(10:29):
me be. I can't go back to the city, I
can't go back east. And I see the little green
shoots that come up after a fire, the tiny delicate flowers,
these symbols of renewal, whether not what I think of
now when I stepped carefully on the ground outside, past

(10:51):
the unmarked spot where what was left of Bill Johnson
had to go along with the journal that told of
it all. When I tread silent as a deer now
and stand stark on a beautiful day, trying to keep
under the noise of the branches, it's not simple happiness.
I came to the woods hopeful, with no I don't

(11:12):
think of that anymore. I think about fear and revulsion, reverence,
even wondering if any of it is worth a damn
to keep us safe. I'm still scared of ghosts, scared
or now of becoming one. And I walk carefully, and
I bar my door at night and day, and I

(11:36):
bring my fire in. What I found interesting about this
story is the way again trauma transforms our sense of safety,
how the familiar becomes the trigger for memory and dread.
Those little green shoots after the fire, what should have

(11:59):
been symbols of life and renewal and hope, actually ended
up reminding the woman of life's fragility, adding to her
fear and in a sense, shutting her down. It's a
great story for showing how everyday events and fears reshape
our boundaries and beliefs. No, there may be no real

(12:20):
monsters that she tells herself over and over, but trauma,
like a forest fire, can obliterate us and destroy those
around us. It can be projected outward and passed down
through generations. Last week's story was about a nightclub bombing
and how the helplessness that comes with traumatic events shapes

(12:41):
our lives, and this story encapsulates that same theme, proving
once again that we write and read these stories of horror, ghosts,
and the supernatural to cope with our fears and trauma,
sometimes real, oftentimes imagined. The Kai on Kai has so
many stories like this from every genre, so please subscribe

(13:05):
to the podcast and check out the substack to see
comments by authors about their inspiration. I also post art.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
That I like any kind of art sometimes on the
various social media, so pick your poison and follow me
on Instagram, Facebook, Blue Sky, or substack.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
It's all in the episode description. So thank you, thank
you so much for listening today, and I'll see you
next week.