The hidden sky shedding flakes like flowerheads, petaling the day as though with a million weddings’ worth of carnations; Cora Gundersun dressed all in white, while a pleasant whiteness cosseted her mind; the bleached-white wood of long-stemmed matches bundled efficiently…
The flame from the butane lighter ignited the first cluster of blue match heads, which made a sputtering-whooshing sound as they flared into a miniature torch. She dropped the lighter and piloted the Expedition away from the curb, onto Fitzgerald Avenue once more, heading downhill toward the intersection with Main Street.
At the end of Fitzgerald, directly across Main, stood the historic Veblen Hotel, built in 1886 and renovated three times since then, most recently the previous year. The restaurant claimed half the hotel’s ground-floor street frontage and provided large windows that, at this moment, captured an enchanting view of the quaint downtown district bespangled with falling snow.
As she approached the intersection that lay one long block uphill from Main Street, Cora held the steering wheel with her left hand and with her right plucked the bunch of long-stemmed bright-burning matches from the wet florist foam. She used it to light the second bunch, and then she tossed the first little torch into the back of the Expedition, where at once it ignited some of the two hundred match heads scattered among the gasoline cans.
The sulfur smell spreading through the vehicle had not been part of her fire-walking dream; but Cora didn’t find it offensive. She thought of it as the scent of invulnerability. The still, small voice told her to breathe deeply to inoculate herself against all risk of burning, to be again the figure of wonder that inspired awe in onlookers.
In the cargo space behind her, the carpet almost at once caught fire. The thin smoke was less appealing than the sulfurous fragrance of burning matches, but of course it could do her no harm.
On the drive to town, the gasoline in the fifteen cans had been affected by the motion of the SUV, sloshing and swirling against the confining metal walls, generating heat that caused a minor expansion in volume, raising from it fumes to swell the plastic wrap that served as caps on the filler holes and spouts. Those gossamer swatches of plastic film inflated like miniature balloons, and some partly detached from the rubber bands that fixed them in place. Volatile vapors condensed on the inner surface of those inadequate prophylactics, dribbled out through tiny breaches, and slithered down the cans, not in quantity, but in the thinnest streams, perhaps no more than an ounce or two from all the containers combined.
By the time Cora entered the final block of Fitzgerald and began to accelerate toward Main, toward the historic Veblen Hotel, the hungry flames crawled up the cans and found the plastic wrap and devoured it. As she threw the second bundle of burning matches into the space behind her, she heard the whump of one of those reservoirs of gasoline taking the fire unto itself, and then another whump, but because the cans were vented in two places and because the rapidly rising temperature was not quite yet sufficient to precipitate a catastrophic expansion of the fuel, no immediate explosion ensued, only the noisy rush of flames from spout and filler hole.
The rearview mirror presented a reflection of flames churning in kaleidoscopic splendor, and Cora saw pedestrians on the sidewalk stop and point and stare, stunned that she had progressed from fire-walking to fire-driving. Their astonishment delighted her, and she laughed, not in the least alarmed by the suddenly torrid air, for she was now as she had always been—fireproof. She was both the writer and the protagonist of this amazing story, and although the air was abruptly so dry and hot that it instantly chapped her lips and cracked the lining of her nostrils, she feared not, for the lovely inner voice that encouraged her must be the voice of the God who had counseled and protected Shadrach in the furnace. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego survived the capital punishment of the king’s furnace without one singed hair, and so would she escape this test unscorched, while onlookers marveled and called out in admiration.
As the flames lapped the back of the driver’s seat and purled across the console between the front seats, as smoke seethed forward, Cora Gundersun knew one terrible moment in this otherwise triumphant procession. She glimpsed a dog on a leash, standing with its master on the sidewalk. Although it was a golden retriever rather than a long-haired dachshund, she remembered Dixie Belle at home alone, and she was pierced by an intense longing for her sweet Dixie, a longing that for a moment cleared her mind, so that she realized the horror of her situation. But with whispered reassurance, the small voice within flushed terror away with a rush of joy, and she cried out in ecstasy as flames quivered from the console onto the hem of her skirt.
When the heat blew out the window of the tailgate door, much of the smoke was sucked out through that breach, flames on the console feathering backward and brushing bright wings across Cora’s curly hair. She tramped the accelerator to the floor. With the vivacity of an indomitable heroine in this best tale that she had ever written, she issued a cry of victory as she rocketed toward the intersection.
Under a hard sky whiter than a cataracted eye, through snow cascading like a crystallized Niagara, the white Expedition cleaved the torrents. And she, in white as in the dream, wearing the only dress in which she had ever felt somewhat pretty, drove through the front wall of the hotel restaurant, great sheets of glass crashing down on the attendees of the luncheon, tables and chairs and dishes and people flung aside by her grand entrance. At last, here were the explosions releasing Cora Gundersun from this world, as the vehicle rocked to a halt, gouts of blazing gasoline vomiting through the spacious room, a threat that even the six-man security team was inadequate to address, that engulfed them and the governor, who had come to town from the capital to celebrate the reopening of this historic hotel.