Embers & Echoes by Karsten Knight

The fire ignites the straw within, and the slow burn transforms quickly into a blaze, no longer your careful creation but a savage and uncontrollable beast.
    “We deliver you unto the all-consuming fires of hell,” Violet shouts over the blaze. The scarecrow’s once-proud face wilts and turns its attention to the ground as it passes into the great beyond. “May God Almighty have mercy on your soul.”
    Then something happens that has never occurred during any of your previous executions: The fire has grown so hot that it has somehow devoured the middle of the scarecrow’s post. The post cracks in half loud enough to send birds soaring off from a nearby tree in an explosion of black wings. Your victim crashes headfirst to the ground, and the grass around him ignites, tinder for the burning.
    “Violet!” you shriek. “Put it out!”
    Violet reaches for the sky and bunches up her face.
    “Hurry up, Violet!”
    “I—I can’t,” she stutters. “It’s too dry! The rains won’t come! Can’t you control what you’ve made?”
    You stagger back. The fire continues to creep out through the grass, an ever-widening bull’s-eye with the blazing effigy at its center. “Maybe if it were a candle flame on a wick,” you snap. “I can’t contain this !”
    “Then it’s time to go,” Violet says quietly. She tugs at your dress.
    You point to the old stone well on the other side ofthe blaze, and the metal bucket propped against it. “We can still douse it with well water before it hits the fields!” You start to skirt your way around the blaze.
    Violet catches you by the elbow, her grip so fierce that you’re sure it will leave a handprint on your skin. “We both know that it’s too late.” She stares deep into your eyes the way only Violet can. “Think about it. This never happened in any of the other executions. Maybe we should take this as a sign that God wants to punish McGrath for what he’s done.”
    For what he’s done.
    Violet must be referring to your family tragedy last summer, but of course you have no proof that McGrath wronged your family. What you do have is suspicion. Memories. Dark possibilities. You picture the festival last year in the town center. You picture the hazy, distant but ill-intentioned sheen over McGrath’s eyes after all that whiskey.
    Mama’s strange silence and insistence that you all leave.
    Finding her crying in the barn later that night.
    Finding her hanging in the barn a month later.
    Violet’s grip on your arm retracts. Her hold on you does not.
    You don’t look down, but you can feel the heat of the flames that are almost upon you. You nod at her. “Then let God’s will be done.”
    The two of you scurry up the hill and past the imposingMcGrath estate. It’s only when you’re beyond the back of the house that one of the curtains parts and you see Melinda’s sallow, sickly face watching you through the glass.
    The dinner table is oddly silent tonight at the Whitney farm. Not that it’s been all that chatty since Mama exited this world with the creak of a rope. Grace sits silently in the high stool Papa built for her. Papa moves the corn around on his plate. Even Violet seems to have retracted into grim silence—Violet, who normally laughs in the face of the law.
    You always knew that Papa was the one who loved you more. The adoption had been his idea, when after five years of marriage he and Mama had remained childless. As the only surviving children from each of their families, they’d all but accepted that the Whitney and Carlson family trees had reached a mutual end.
    Then a lobsterman, a family friend, was out setting traps just off Bar Harbor when he heard the crying. As his small boat approached a buoy, he found a wooden washtub snagged in the seaweed . . . and, inside it, two children who were clearly not Maine natives. One was nearly a year old and remained strangely silent even as the men pulled her up onto the boat. But you couldn’t have been more