Burn
Image: flamesKenneth squints at the serene evening horizon, watching the swathes of pink and lilac cloud drift and disperse like smoke. His chest is tight and his nerves are jangling, but he forces himself to slow his steps, to saunter rather than run. Anyone watching might wonder why he’s zigzagging across the field of waist-high summer grass gone to silver. Anyone far enough away not to notice the plastic container in his hand, the smell of petrol rising on the cool air.
He turns his back to the field, teasing himself as he drops the jerrycan and takes a step, two steps closer to the treeline. He pauses to hold up a finger, as if for silence, then he reaches into his pocket, his heart hammering and his breath hitching in his throat.
The match flares, spins in the air, then drops out of sight amongst the dried-out grass blades. Kenneth waits. The second is a hole in time, an exquisite torment of expectation.
Whoomph.
The wall of heat and sound hits him in the back like a truck, and his whole body goes limp with the joy of it, for an instant. Then he’s running, away from the hungry, licking tongues of fire and their cackling voices.
“Kenneth!” they call to him, “Kenneth! Come play with us!”
The same song, all through school. All through the last few months, working at the diner, frying up pre-cooked packets of potatoes, sweating like a pig. Listening to the little flames whisper under the grill while the sausages and burgers sizzled and spat their contempt.
“Play with us Kenneth. Set us free!”
He knows they don’t really talk. He’s not stupid. Not like that fat old pervert Mr Agnew tried to imply, all those Wednesday afternoons. Offering him cookies and colouring books like some kind of baby.
“I know school’s hard for you Kenneth. Some people just aren’t academically minded. That means good at Math and English. You’d need those to pass the exam to be a firefighter. Don’t you worry. We’ll find you a job that’s right for you.”
Shuffling his papers. Stuffing them back in that big, untidy pile on his desk that he never filed away. God how he’d wanted to set them all alight. Mr Agnew along with them. All that fat – he’d sizzle better than a quarter pounder with the cheese already on.
But he’s been good. So good nobody suspects a thing. Not his momma, who’s too short-sighted these days to ask about the burn holes in his carpet and curtains anymore, and too slow to belt him even if she did. Not stupid, ugly old Mr Agnew, too lazy even to wipe the fingermarks off the sign on his door. “School Counsellor,” so smudged over with chocolate and coffee smears you can barely read it. Not Mr. Cosmin, his boss at the diner, who slaps his back and tells him how nice he fries things; what a mercy it is to find a kid as smart as him to rely on at last. Yeah, he’s been good for a long while now.
“Come play with us, Kenneth!” the flames whisper every day, but he tells them, “No. Wait.” Got to find the right time, the right place. He’s careful. Not stupid at all.
It’s not until he crashes, panting, into the dark cool of the trees that he lets himself turn around and look at what he’s done. It’s beautiful. The whole field’s a sea of flickering yellow and orange, haze wavering above it like a sneak peek through some portal to a different world. The air’s alive with sound; crackling, snapping, hissing. A skitter of small feet. The cawing of rooks that have flown up into the air in alarm, circling the field like they can’t believe what it’s become.
It's become a living creature. And he gave it birth.
He stands, gloating over his creation like some primitive god. The smell of smoke hits his nostrils and he thinks of the incense in church on Sundays. He knows why they burn that. It’s to cover up all their sins, so the stink of them doesn’t make God sick. He thinks of his mother sitting there, her face pious as a saint with her hands clasped in front of her like she never uses them for anything but praying. For a moment, he wonders if God even likes the smell of incense, or if he loves this better, like Kenneth does. If the censers swinging out their pittance of thin vapour are a mockery, a teasing taste of the real thing that never delivers. If he was God, he thinks, he’d burn the world.
But he isn’t. And he’s not stupid. Before he lit the match, he’d licked his finger and held it up, checked which way the wind was blowing, how hard. Figured out how much time he’d need to outrun the flames, how quick they’d be to reach the trees. How long it would take the firetrucks to arrive.
And now here he is, safe out of reach, the flames eating up the ground toward the treeline and the firetrucks still just tiny red specks on the highway. He hears the roar of the fire rush over the field like a victory cry and he wills it forward, faster, faster, wants the whole, massive forest to burn. He’ll stand and watch, and he’ll think to himself, “I did that,” and nobody will be able to take it away from him. Even though they’ll never know, because he was smart enough to figure it all out perfectly.
He watches them playing, his flames, while the sirens wail closer and then the firemen jump out of their shiny red engines, unrolling the long white hoses to spoil all the fun. The fire stretches out grasping fingers toward the trees, but it’s too late. In no time at all, damp smoke chokes up the air like a sigh.
Like it always does, though, the fire’s done its job and burned away his jangling nerves, the hissing voices in his mind, and that tight, hot feeling in his chest. He remembers the pure glory of the instant when the flames leapt into life, like some terrible wild beast released from its cage. And he did it. He set it free. This is the biggest one he’s ever done. The most beautiful. He’s awestruck at how easy it was.
Now the fun’s over, he feels wrung out like a greasy old dishcloth. He slips deeper into the trees and skirts around to where he parked his car, nice and safe, out of the track of the flames.
Next time, he’ll choose some place that will burn longer, hotter. Somewhere harder to put out. A building, maybe. His heart quickens at the thought of flames licking through floorboards, staircases collapsing. What would it be like to stand outside and watch the windows turn orange then shatter, the smoke roll out thick as tar, the roof creak and collapse in on itself? He imagines people pouring out onto the street to stand there watching his handiwork with him. Their faces, he knows, would show that mixture of horror and excitement that people always get when they see a fire.
Half hoping it won’t destroy everything. Half hoping it will.
That’s what he’ll do, he decides, as he gets in his car and drives down the highway, watching the cloud of smoke hovering over the field in his rear-view mirror. Choose a building next time. Somewhere busy, so other people find out what he can do when he sets his mind to it.
Just got to pick the right time and place. He’s not stupid. Not stupid at all.
And it’s only the beginning of fire season.
