I would’ve laughed if you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be sitting on ideas for two weeks, two months, two years, two decades, before writing them. Used to be that my modus operandi was to come up with an idea at breakfast and start writing the novel by dinner. If for any reason I got interrupted before I finished writing the novel, it was curtains for the nag. These frantic ideas were as fragile as newborn pandas—wow, that is two animal metaphors in one paragraph. If the ideas were left untended for a moment, they perished. It was impossible for me to imagine ever returning to one of these abandoned novels or ideas. And yet I find myself now sitting on story ideas for months at a time or returning to novel ideas that I first kicked around when I was sixteen or seventeen. Really, I think it’s because my writing has become deeper now. The plot and world and characters are just clever covers for things I want to think about and questions I want to ask myself and others.
So this story is one that I sat on for a long time. Like a lot of my Merry Sisters of Fate stories, it sprang into my head in a very uncomplicated way: “What if fires stopped going out?” But that was where it ended, because while it was a cool idea, I didn’t know what I was trying to say. I had to let it (bad pun alert!) smolder awhile. It wasn’t until I came up with this concept of making a pyromaniac tell the story for us that it fell into place. I’m very interested in the idea of desire and guilt, and how a slight shift in perspective can make us doubt the things we love or hate.
And of course, I rather like burning things myself... —Maggie
“Are you a first-song or middle-song sort of person?” [1]Anna-Sophia asked.
They stood in front of a wall of fire held at bay only by fifty feet of concrete parking lot. The air between them and the fire was greasy with the heat, shimmering and moving like an infestation of ghosts. Above, the sky that held them all in was a desiccated blue.
“I don’t follow,” Dutch replied.
“On an album. Do you like first songs best? Or are you a trackseven person? My sister was a track-seven person. She always said the best tracks on any album were four and seven.” The fire had pinched her cheeks to red. When she stepped toward the fire, Dutch automatically threw out an arm to stop her progress.
Anna-Sophia said, “I appreciate a man with a sense of fear.” She said it in a sharp, incendiary way that made it impossible to tell whether she was being sarcastic. Dutch didn’t care if she meant it. Keeping Anna-Sophia alive had become a reflex by then, and one didn’t apologize for breathing. She said, “Also, you didn’t answer the question.”
Dutch tried to remember the last time he’d listened to an album in its entirety. He could only remember one that he’d bought when his forehead was still populated by whiteheads and buying things was exciting. “I guess there’s Travesty’s album. Track—eight?”
Anna-Sophia smiled widely, throwing her head back, sweat glistening on her collarbone. “Oh, yes. ‘Hot as the Sun.’”
Once, Dutch had told his father, who was also an amiable pyromaniac, that the night was as hot as the sun. Staring at the inferno of the barn, his father had replied that that was impossible, since the surface of the sun was eleven thousand degrees and the night couldn’t be any hotter than two hundred or so there by the smoldering beams.
That was back when fires went out.
Anna-Sophia still basked in the heat of the fire. It was hot enough that Dutch felt drops of perspiration trickling from his temples to his jawbone, a disconcerting tickle. He suspected the perspiration looked better on the euphoric girl beside him, and he was glad, for a moment, that none of the rest of the pack—Joshua, Luis, and Alyssa—was there to witness her. There was something magnificent about Anna-Sophia in these moments, something that would be diluted by more observers.
Anna-Sophia whirled to face Dutch. She said, [2]“I’m a last-track kind of person.”
Dutch replied, “I thought you were going to say something surprising.”
. . .
Dutch wished he remembered the precise details of the last fire he set, but he couldn’t. The pleasures of a fire illicitly started were many, but so were those of good vanilla ice cream. After a while, the memory of each bowl of ice cream blended into the others until it was only a collection of common sensations. In effect, every bowl of ice cream became the same bowl of ice cream, as if you’d only ever had one, the best bowl ever. Dutch had set dozens of fires, but in his mind there was only one fire, the fire he’d started with five gallons of [3]diesel fuel and a roll of Bounty paper towels and the sky black as a yawn above him.
So he didn’t remember the location of the fire he set on that night that fires stopped going out; he only remembered that there was one. The truth was that on that night, all over the world, there had been hundreds of fires cooking food, crackling fiercely under chimneys, smoking across fields of unwanted heather, simmering in oil barrels, exploding quietly in thousands of pistons, glowing at the end of a million cigarettes. Doing the daily work of sparks and heat and fire.
But still, Dutch was certain that his fire was the one to blame for the same reason the rest of his pack assumed the same of theirs. A fire set only to burn was a guiltier suspect than a fire put usefully to work. Intention crashed inside his ribcage.
. . .
There was a fine line between pyromaniac and arsonist, and usually it looked like the cage in the back of a police car. From his father Dutch had inherited the affection for a struck match. The thrill of the first flame biting on the edge of a slab of plywood. A love of watching things crumble and sink into glowing embers. He remembered, still, his father telling him that a box of matches was no more dangerous than a parking garage filled to capacity; you had to know how to drive and trust others to as well. Then his father had struck a match and set fire to a pile of empty cereal boxes while Dutch clutched small fists to his chin. It was his favorite show, and never in reruns.
Dutch met Anna-Sophia because a local arsonist had been making law enforcement edgy. Combustible purchases were tracked and reported, and patrol cars arrived promptly at the first blush of sparks in the night sky.
Dutch was spending his summer incinerating lawn chairs and outbuildings. Barely illegal. He resented the intrusion of sudden, too-interested officers of the law. Dutch was patience, and so, at first, he waited for the police to find their arsonist and abandon the area. When the search stretched from smoldering summer to crackling autumn, he took matters into his own hands.
He was slightly more qualified than the police to find an arsonist, and so it took him only a few weeks to find Anna-Sophia. When he did, she was standing in the middle of a suburban kitchen with a burning rag and the serene smile of an avenging angel.
From her father, Anna-Sophia had inherited a love of burning down houses.
Dutch remembered exactly the first words he’d said to her. “This is somebody’s home.”
Anna-Sophia’s face had been puzzled. “Of course it is.” And then she dropped the burning rag onto the couch.
. . .
Dutch had never been a fine student, but he still remembered learning in school that a forest fire was a powerful creative force, wiping out one generation of vegetation and fertilizing the soil for the next in one fell swoop. But that was back when forest fires went out. Now the bodies of trees burned to a crisp, and then the crisp kept burning, and when there was no more crisp left, the dirt burned, and when there was no more dirt, the rock melted, and the center of the earth glowered at whoever was still there to watch. This new, fiery world, where a cornfield could become an inferno in a moment, was a hungry one.
And the pack—Dutch, Anna-Sophia, Luis, Joshua, Alyssa—was as hungry as everyone else. There were on an almost continuous hunt for food. Food was not unattainable, but it was expensive, and money was hard to come by when you were feral and young. Dutch was generally the most presentable member, and so he found himself manning empty desks when the secretary had caught alight on the way to work. He herded kindergarteners away from burning playgrounds. He laid cinderblock foundations when other arms got tired. He’d leave with a pocket full of coins—flammable bills were out of fashion—and return to the pack with canned goods and biscuits.
The bottoms of the cans were stamped with expiration dates that were now as relevant as the Late Night Show. Sometimes the cans were dented, which Dutch had heard was supposed to be bad, but he’d yet to find out why. Often the labels were missing. Theoretically, one can was as good as another when survival was at stake, but Dutch found that hard to believe—especially when he realized he’d been given a can of fancy olives instead of pasta or corn.
Heating the food was never a problem.
Sometimes Dutch lay on his back on the asphalt and stared at the sun until it hurt to look. He thought about the ancient civilization that could have lived on that sun before it began to seethe and burn. He wondered if one day the fire that consumed Earth would warm some distant planet and change their seasons and grow their trees and heat their living rooms in the morning and light the side of his brother’s smiling face.
Luis told Dutch that Dutch worried too much; that there was nothing about this smoking planet that was new. While spraypainting the curvaceous shadow beneath a pair of breasts on the side of the police department, Luis said that the evergrowing flames only made concrete the abstract reality of an individual’s opportunities narrowing with the passage of time. Then Luis snapped his fingers at Dutch until he made Dutch aware that he wanted the can of cool teal. Luis had two years of a liberal arts education—the two years that instilled principles but not the two years that instilled when to shut up about them.
[4]Dutch asked, “Would you still paint tits on walls if every wall already had them?”
. . .
Some days Dutch wanted to be Anna-Sophia. She looked like something born out of a fire: thick, cinderblack hair; dark eyebrows that should’ve been too thick to be beautiful; smudgy brown makeup around hazel eyes. Her lips were red. Not the red of lipstick or the red of a Corvette but the red of metal heated to the point of surprise.
The most important thing about Anna-Sophia was that she didn’t love the fire any less for it being unquenchable.
Some days in high school, the only thing that had gotten Dutch to the end of the day was the promise of striking a match. Sometimes he’d hear that scratch and it would give him a shiver of release, even if it was merely a piece of cardboard ripping or the sole of a shoe scuffed on ragged asphalt.
Now a match was a weapon, and a guilty one at that, and there was no release. But not for Anna-Sophia. Dutch watched her poised before the flames that burned eternally in the median of I-95, her lips parted, the reflection in her pupils darting like a nervous glance. As the firefighters—wielding concrete, not water—battled feverishly, her expression was one of deep satisfaction. The world was on fire, and she’d started it.
Anna-Sophia clutched Dutch’s arm and laughed. Her eyes were misty with ecstasy. When she saw his somber expression, she released him.
“Ah, Dutch, you’re such a control freak. It’s not the same when you didn’t start them, is it?”
Dutch said, “It’s not that. It’s just not the same when you have cake for every meal.”
He could see she couldn’t understand.
“I would like it to stop now,” he said, simply.
He’d decided that a few weeks earlier. Months after everyone else had, but still, he’d gotten there eventually, well before the earth became another sun.
Anna-Sophia watched the firefighters pour concrete on brittle grass. They glanced fearfully up at the spitting sparks; all it took was one to catch ahold of their sleeve and they would be lost in a slow, impervious fire.
“I know everything there is to know about fire,” she said. It sounded like a confession.
Dutch considered how, before all this, he might have wanted to hold her hand, or to kiss her, but now he only looked blandly at her fingers as he said, “Then put it out.”
Anna-Sophia said, “You don’t see, Dutch. It’s not about the starting. It’s about seeing it through to the end.”
(She didn’t say she couldn’t.)
. . .
That night, the wind changed and sent a spark into Luis’s paints. When the cans exploded it was like the whole planet sucked in its breath. The fire snaked across the asphalt they slept on and incinerated the mats beneath Luis and Alyssa. There was no evidence Joshua had ever been there.
Dutch was spared because he was on the roof, watching the stars through the rippling air. He heard the bark of the explosion, then Alyssa’s abbreviated scream, and then silence.
He crashed downstairs. Anna-Sophia was crouched beside a glowing ember on the concrete floor, one side of her face dirty with soot. Her fingers were an inch away from the heat.
Dutch snatched her hand and tugged her to her feet. He was not gentle, but he was no rougher with her than she was with herself. He didn’t ask if the others were still alive somewhere in the fire. It wasn’t the sort of question that was relevant anymore.
He wanted to miss them, but he couldn’t. The fires were burning him from the inside out.
“I know you think I’m not sorry about them,” Anna-Sophia said, later.
Dutch was meditating on the difference between burning down a barn and burning down a person. He didn’t look at Anna-Sophia; he was tired of looking at the flames.
(She had never said that she was sorry.)
. . .
Dutch had once watched a television program about underwater volcanoes. Near volcanoes, where the ground fissured all the way to the center of the earth, the water was hot enough to boil but couldn’t because of the weight of all the water lying on top of it. Life shouldn’t have been able to thrive there, but it did. Tube worms, looking like obscene lipstick tubes, clung to the rocks near the vents. The program had declared the tube worms masters of evolution and survival.
Dutch laid on his back and let the sun turn his closed eyelids bright red. [5]Perhaps, in one hundred years, humans would have skin that didn’t bubble in the heat. Perhaps, in one thousand years, they’d be able to survive on the beaches of ash that blew out of the flames. Perhaps, in twenty thousand years, humans would be able to walk through the fire. Evolution was a trust fund, but Dutch was poor now.
Above Dutch’s closed eyes, a familiar sound, unheard for hundreds of days, scratched into reality. Just the timbre of it, the impossibility of it, sent a rush through him.
He opened his eyes. He focused first on the heel of the hand inches from his nose, and then on the fingers above it, and then the struck match that the fingers held. A tiny, invincible flame glowed at the tip of it.
“Jesus Christ,” Dutch said.
Anna-Sophia’s hand didn’t shake. “I know you liked it. I have another.”
The fire slowly ate down the stalk of the match. He resented that she had been the one to strike it. It shouldn’t have been struck at all, but if it had been, he wanted it to have been him. The memory of the sound tormented him.
“Let me up.”
The flame pulled itself down the match toward Anna-Sophia’s fingers. In the old days, instinct would’ve taken over: feel the heat of the nearing flame, shake the match, toss it in the sink. Watch it blacken and dim.
Unhurriedly, Anna-Sophia stood, dropping the match onto the concrete. The flame finished the cardboard and then, small and starving, it searched the surface of the concrete for sustenance. Dutch was surprised at how hard he had to struggle with the muscle memory of stamping it out. He couldn’t stop staring at that new flame, irrelevant in a world of flames, and when he didn’t move, Anna-Sophia grabbed his jaw and kissed him.
“Why would you do that?” Dutch asked. “There’s enough in the world already.”
Anna-Sophia pulled a book of matches from her pocket. They were stamped with the name of a hotel. All but one had been torn out.
“This one’s for you,” she said, pressing the matchbook into his palm. Her mouth was curved into something not quite like a smile. It was a face that saw into his soul, how badly he missed wanting.
Dutch ran his thumb along the match. If he was like Anna-Sophia, he could strike it and love the new fire for the hydra that it was. There was still release to be had.
Anna-Sophia smiled down at the tiny flame at her feet, captivated even by a fire the size of her thumb.
Dutch tore the match from the book. He’d torn too slowly; the tail end was ragged and spear-shaped. Now very much space between skin and match head.
Anna-Sophia looked up into his face.
He tugged the match between the striking surface and the cover, and there it was, the sound: the almost inaudible breath of the match head igniting. Then the rushing hiss of the pioneer flame bursting into the air.
Anna-Sophia’s face was a cathedral lit by the sputtering match. Every want, every desire that Dutch had ever possessed—everything he had thought he’d lost—was in her expression. He’d never realized how what he’d taken to be adoration was really fear.
He could feel his heartbeat again, crashing chaotically in his ears. “Tell me you love it,” she said.
Dutch lit her hair on fire.
(He didn’t say that he didn’t.)
When the match fell to the concrete by his feet, it went out.
