While his wife slept, Dr. Vincent R. Smith packed up their belongings. He couldn’t wait until Monday. He’d bought two one-way tickets over the phone to Italy. Janet deserved that much. She had sacrificed her life and career as a schoolteacher to follow him here. She tried to make the best of things. His moods, the managers, their wives who gossiped in her face; the undrinkable water and spells of diarrhea; the many unfamiliar bugs that pestered them at night, paying polite visits to their nostrils and other orifices. Especially this unbearable heat that left their bed a lagoon, the mosquito netting merely trapping it. No, he would save her from all of this and explain later.
Smith walked downstairs to his study and sat on the floor, where it was coolest. The ceiling fan whirred, its usual hum quieted by the dense, syrupy air. He would recommend a colder country after Italy. Switzerland, perhaps. They had missed winter in Washington this year, and maybe they could celebrate a true Christmas in the mountains. Smith wanted children and would tell Janet so in the Alps. No woman could possibly say no to something that romantic.
Smith didn’t hear José María walk into his study. Somehow Smith didn’t even smell the gasoline José María had stolen from the plantation shed. Smith was lost in his own future. But he would soon find out that when a man alters another man’s future, the other can alter his right back.
Smith’s mind was still floating over the fumes when the precipitous flames reached his body. The books in his study quickly became tinder. Binders of scholarly articles, first-edition novels, and an album of family photos all ignited. The fire’s thirst climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, tossing back Janet like a shot. It spread to the living room and down the hall to the foyer, devouring its rejected memos and Persian rug. It made its way right into the kitchen, boiling wine in bottles and soup on the stove. Then it hurled itself out the back door like scraps for the dogs, and followed the moonlit trails of gasoline José María had poured all throughout the plantation.
Moments before the fire untangled Smith’s flesh, he noticed José María and his black eyes towering over him, a blade impaled in his left arm, which in the moment resembled a cross. Before Smith could scream, he and José María were swallowed together by the fire. Their destinies crashing down on them with the ceiling beams. José María embraced Smith with both arms, crushing him, igniting as if made of gasoline too.
The shark’s tooth strung on his necklace pierced into both their chests, linking them together as they burned alive.