The world was fire.
It happened in an instant. He was sitting at the table beside Mark, remnants of dinner on chipped white and blue plates between them. The only sound was the quiet hum of the refrigerator, and the occasional cough from the furnace below the worn wooden floorboards. He was trying to think of how to phrase the question, turning it over and over in his mind. No, that’s not true – in the exact moment that the fire whispered into being, he was deliberately not thinking of the question. Instead, he was staring at the bare electric bulb and trying to decide whether their already stretched budget would allow for some kind of lamp shade – maybe something he made himself. It would make a good birthday present, he thought, if he painted miniature horses on the rim. They would look like dogs, he knew, or strange blotchy cows, but Mark would praise them and love them all the same.
He was thinking of that, of the horses, so he would not think of the question, which hovered and wended through the silence.
And then there was fire.
It wasn’t like he thought it would be, like the movies. It wasn’t quick. Everything slowed, absolutely everything, and he became aware of things that he had never noticed before. The sound of his blood in the vein of his neck. A fluttering light from the porch, where moths danced and shimmered around the mesh light-cage. It didn’t look much like a flower, though people say that ‘flame bloomed’ – it was a star. That was it. A tiny perfect point of intense light, just there at the edge of the room, in the crack between the wall and the floorboards. He wouldn’t even have seen it if he hadn’t been glancing that way, avoiding catching Mark’s eyes for fear that he would see the question hiding there, and the surprise would be ruined.
The star blossomed, then, yes, like a flower now, petals of flame and light and then there was a bang and time began again, rushed in like burning air and in his lungs and all around, and Mark was there, so close, but only a shape now, only a shadow in the light.
The world was fire, and it hurt.
Image by Kieran Macanulty