Christmas Eve in Vacherie, Louisiana, finds the banks of the Mississippi alive with fire. Walter is consumed with planning the perfect bonfire-the one that will finally beat his brother's blaze and extinguish the lingering melancholy from his father's death. As Walter obsesses over wood, kindling, and structure, his family life teeters on the brink of collapse. Elizabeth Sanders' fiction has appeared in the Arkansas Review, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and the anthology Something in the Water. She is from New Orleans and lives in New York with her husband and daughter. This is her first novel.