Here, After [Part One]

In 2023, half of my town died.

I don’t lead with that to be dramatic; I lead with it because everything else I’m about to tell you lives in the shadow of it, and if I don’t say it first, you’ll spend the whole time waiting for me to.

So.

Half my town died, and the half that didn’t probably wish that they had.

I moved to Briarwood with my little brother and my grandmother and tried to become someone who used past tense when talking about Joséke Grove.

I wasn’t very good at it.

None of us were.

There were six of us, once.

That’s the way I keep starting this in my head, and I keep stopping because once implies something that’s been finished, and I’m not sure any of it is finished. But six is the right number. Six is the number that mattered.

Morgan and Bellamy—that’s my brother and me. I’m nineteen. Morgan is seventeen and thinks he’s older.

Our parents are gone.

That’s a sentence I’ve said enough times now that it’s started to sound like someone else’s sentence, borrowed from a story that happened to a different family. Our grandmother, Nana Dot, has a house in Briarwood with a porch she sits on every evening and a garden she talks to as if it can hear her. It probably can, to be honest. She’s from Joséke—things grew differently for her.

Annabella—Anna—is eighteen and has been eating dinner at our grandmother’s table every Sunday since she moved to Briarwood after the fire. She lost her house and most of her neighborhood in 2023. She didn’t lose family, which she says with so much guilt; no matter how many times we said it was okay, it was like surviving intact was something she did wrong. She laughs too loudly at things that aren’t that funny, and she cries in her car so nobody sees her, and she has never once in the two years I’ve known her let anyone pay for her meal. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever met.

Drew is the only one who stayed.

I think about that more than I probably should. After the fire, when everyone who could leave did—when the county was recommending evacuation, when the Red Cross was setting up in Briarwood and Claremore and Tulsa, when my grandmother was loading Morgan and me into her car, and Morgan was screaming that we had to go back—Drew stayed. She lives with her aunt three blocks from where the church used to be. She drives a truck that is held together by rust and goddamn stubbornness and some “mechanical principle” I don’t understand.

She sends voice memos instead of texts because she says typing is for people who have time. She has never (in the entire time that I’ve known her) admitted to being scared of anything, and I’ve watched her be scared. She’s just decided it doesn’t count unless she says it out loud.

Ronnie moved to Tulsa after the fire and started building a life out there like someone trying to outrun something. He has an apartment now, and he has a good-paying job. He has a gym membership, a five-year plan, and he likes changing the subject when Joséke comes up, which he thinks is subtle but really, really isn’t. He’s the most rational person among us.

And then there’s Page.

Page Daniels is—was—is twelve years old. That sentence doesn’t make sense, and it never will. She was twelve in 2019, which was the last year any of us saw her, and she should be nineteen now, same as me, and I have spent seven years doing the math on what nineteen-year-old Page would look like, what she’d be studying, whether she’d still laugh the way she did—I imagine this enormous surprised laugh, like joy caught her off guard every single time.

She had a backpack covered in iron-on patches that were mostly planets. She was going through a space phase that summer, and she’d tell you more about Jupiter’s moons than you ever wanted to know and somehow make you want to know more. She walked home from school the same route every day, past Elizabeth Park, past Quapaw, past the Spraggins’ house with the mean dog that she had somehow made friends with.

She made friends with everything, Page did. That was her specific genius. She paid attention to things until they trusted her.

On March 22nd, 2019, she didn’t come home.

Her backpack was found at the Elizabeth Park tree line. No shoes. No sign of a struggle. No Page.

I was twelve too, that year. Morgan was ten.

We grew up, and Page didn’t.

The town had a vigil and the county searched the woods and her parents put up flyers that the rain took down and put up more flyers and we all kept the porch lights on for a while, the whole neighborhood—and then the fires started, and everything became about the fires, and Page became a little grief we folded into a larger grief, and I hate that. I hate that her disappearance got swallowed by something bigger. She deserved to be the biggest thing.

She deserved so much more than what Joséke Grove gave her.

But I guess I should tell you about the fires.

The first one was 1933—Wilbur First Pentecostal Church, January, four days of burning, 122 confirmed dead and 233 missing with no remains recovered and no explanation for why no one tried to leave. Doors and windows intact, and no escape attempts. Just people inside and then, eventually, no people.

The second one was in 2003. Five days this time. 233 dead, 333 missing. Someone’s security camera picked up audio from inside—laughter, through the fire, clear, until it wasn’t.

I grew up knowing these stories because it’s local history— something historical, something that happened to other people in another time. The church reopened in 2018. My parents went twice. They said the sermons were intense but moving nonetheless. They couldn’t describe what was moving about them.

The recordings from those sermons, when you play them back, contain something underneath the pastor’s voice, like a scream. A sustained scream that the people in the room didn’t consciously hear. I guess it was something that made them want to come back. Something that made them want to stand outside the building on their off days, just to be near it.

From 2018 to 2021, people started gathering. Not in any cult-like way, or any way that looked wrong from the outside. They’d just end up near the church. Standing in the parking lot, the surrounding streets, and the park across the road. For hours, sometimes overnight. Conscious, responsive, not distressed, just present; sometimes even listening to music and speaking amongst each other.

My parents stood there twice that I know of.

They said they weren’t sure why they’d gone. They said it felt like remembering something important, and I remember they said it wasn’t unpleasant.

In 2023, the third fire started.

It burned for eleven days.

My parents were inside.

I’m not going to describe what the aftermath looked like. I’ve tried, in other versions of this, and I can’t get it right, and getting it wrong feels worse than not saying it at all. Half the town was either gone or missing. The ones who survived moved out mostly, or stayed in a radius around the rubble that got a little smaller and smaller every month.

Morgan didn’t speak to me for three weeks. Then he started speaking and hasn’t really stopped since. Nana Dot held us together through a combination of kind-heartedness and cooking and the specific unflappable quality of someone who has already outlived everything she was afraid of losing.

We moved to Briarwood.

We tried to become people who used past tense.

It was a Friday in October, two in the morning, when the group chat went off.

It had been quiet for weeks. It goes quiet sometimes, when Ronnie is working, or Drew is not texting, I mean, Anna and I seeing each other in person enough that the chat feels redundant. Morgan is in the chat but rarely posts. He’s mainly a lurker.

The notification was from Morgan.

No message, just a photo.

A girl standing at the edge of the light outside the 7-Eleven on County Road 6. The one on the Joséke side of the county line. Standing very still, facing the camera—or facing whatever took the photo, not knowing it was being taken.

She was wearing a backpack covered in iron-on patches… mostly planets.

And then, fifteen seconds after the photo, a second message.

guys she’s at the 7/11 on county road 6. she’s wearing the same backpack.

I read it four times.

By morning, all five of us were driving back into Joséke Grove for the first time since 2023.