Cooling
by Elizabeth Genco
Fire is my friend, and it has been this way for as long as I can remember. Everyone said that my mom had fire in her, and that she passed a little of that fire on to me. Even my dad, when he said anything to me at all. So after the mucous pooled in her lungs, drowning her from the inside out, and after they set her in the damp earth, deep where the fire could never go, the flames inside me rose up. It was only right that they got their share of what was left.
This is exactly how she would have wanted it. Don't go trying to tell me otherwise.
Unfortunately, the law didn't see it that way. They didn't see a young woman cleaning up unfinished business. They saw the charred bones of our old house and they knew that it wasn't an accident.
This time, I waited until two straight weeks of summer sun had sucked all the moisture out of every bit of wood in the county. I snuck out of the house a few nights ago and cut four small holes in the corner of Mr. Hibbs' shed. The flames will grow strong from the newspaper stuffed in the holes and it'll spread to the walls and the floor and I can almost guarantee that there will be no paper left when Mr. Hibbs returns from his annual pilgrimage to the Southern Maine Auto Show. But just in case, I doused it with kerosene, not gasoline. Gasoline sinks down into the soil and waits patiently for the fire inspectors. I'm not going back to juvie again.
Old Man Hibbs has never left well enough alone, with his perpetual comments about my hair, knees, or whatever other body part caught his attention that day, every day, since about the time I could walk. My father saw it all the time and never called him on it, not even on the day that we came home alone from the hospital. Maybe the fire would come for him next. Who says that Anna won't take me in? She would. I considered this possibility as I bent down to light the first match.
The paper caught easily but the flame stayed still, hovering there, as if waiting until the coast was clear. Within a couple of seconds, it withered, then disappeared completely.
I ripped another match across the side of the box and it burst into flame. That flame caught on the newspaper, just as it should, then burned in a little ring, like a kitten chasing its tail. Then the ring evaporated.
I tore off a piece of the paper and sniffed it. There was a trace of sulfur from the match, but it didn't smell like kerosene. It didn't smell like anything.
"You shouldn't play with those." The voice was soft and low and came from the direction of the clump of trees behind me.
A boy stood there, just in front of the trees. He was tall and shapely, with light hair that curled gently around his ears. He wore nothing but a pair of blue jeans. I guessed that he was about my age, but with the light fading, I couldn't be sure. "You shouldn't play with matches," he said.
"I'm not playing." It came out a little too defensively for my taste.
"You might burn yourself."
We stared at each other and waited. The gathering darkness would soon blot him out but for now I could still see his features. His face was slightly round, like he'd kept just a little bit of his baby fat. Large, soft eyes peeked out from beneath the flip of blond hair that waved over his brows. He might have been kind of handsome were it not for the fact that he was keeping me from my fire. Nobody keeps me from my fire.
"Go away," I said.
"No."
I would wait. I'd pretend to go away, then I'd double back and hide somewhere in the thicket, where I could keep a close watch on the shed. I could wait all night. It's not like my father would notice my absence.
The sky rumbled loudly, breaking our messed-up truce for a second. I looked up to see the sliver of the night's moon overcome by ash-grey clouds that had not been there before.
I looked back over at the boy. Now he was grinning, from ear to ear.
With a loud crack, the sky opened, and the first fat drops splashed me in the face. More followed, plip–plopping as they hit the side of Old Man Hibbs' shed.
The boy, still smiling, stepped forward. He stepped right up to me, ignoring the rules of personal space. I didn't have time to react before he took my face in his hands, and kissed me.
Maybe it was the rain, but his hands were thoroughly wet, as if he'd forgotten to dry them after washing. His lips were slick and cool and tasted like water. I felt the fire fall out from the middle of me.
He chuckled softly as he broke away. The sides of the shed were streaked with water. There would be no burning now. I turned back to the boy, mouth half open from the kiss, ready for another in spite of myself. But he was gone.
Nobody, but nobody, keeps me from my fire. They can only postpone it for a little while.
* * * * *
Two days later, I sat in the damp woods with my matches before a small bit of my kindling stash. The rain that began on the night of my ill–fated attempt at torching Old Man Hibbs' shed kept up for two days. Most folks, including my father, were happy that the dry spell seemed to be over. You might say that I wasn't happy.
I had been coming to this patch of woods for years. When I was a little kid, only the sturdiest pieces of fallen timber would do for the forts I'd build, small fortresses made with my own sweat and tears, designed to shut the world out. I never would have dreamed of bringing matches here then.
I gazed at the trees stretching for the sky above me, the tops a million miles away. I closed my eyes and imagined what a forest fire, the kind that went on for days, must look like. Flames hanging from branches, trees rooted in their spot, unable to escape. I took a deep breath of damp pine.
The trees were in no danger now. Still wet from two days of solid rain, they would need more than my little pile of popsicle sticks, fallen twigs and wood chips filched from the bucket next to the woodstove. That is, if I wanted them to burn, which I didn't. They would also need the newspaper under the kindling to catch, which it wasn't. The large wet spots in the paper's middle that seemed to have come from nowhere when my eyes were closed might have had something to do with it. I closed them again, and sighed.
"Why do you play with matches?" he asked. When I opened my eyes, he was sitting right next to me, almost touching. Once again, he was naked from the waist up. In the daylight I could see that he wasn't wearing any shoes or socks.
"Why do you care?" I asked.
"You're pretty," he said.
Nobody had ever kissed me before. Nobody had ever called me pretty. Yet here was this kid who could sneak around without being seen or heard for the purpose of confronting bewildered girls in their most private moments. I felt the sparks swirl around my stomach, longing to travel the length of my veins and through my hands and out to where the matches waited patiently. But something else was swimming down there with the sparks. Something was in the way, something I couldn't put my finger on.
He definitely had the upper hand. I didn't like it, not one bit.
He reached out and touched my head, catching a few locks of my hair in his fingers, then ran his hands down to the end of them and stopped short. The orange wisps flickered in the corner of my eye when he finally let go. "So pretty." He leaned his face in close. I moved away.
"You think that just. . . makes everything okay?" I asked.
He looked confused, not hurt, at the question. "Doesn't it?"
Now that I'd had one kiss, I definitely wanted another. And then another, and another. But I also wanted some answers. "What's your name?" I demanded.
"Name?" he laughed. "Why would I need one?" He looked at me as if I'd just said something foolish. "What's your name?"
Glory, I almost said. As in, shot–down–in–a–blaze–of. But I stopped myself just in time. Why should I give up the goods when he was holding out on me?
"Who are you, anyway? What do you —"
He lunged forward, catching me in mid–sentence. He explored my mouth gently, but deliberately, as if he were looking for something. After a minute or so, he broke away suddenly, then took my face in his hands. His eyes, one blue and one green, traced the shape of my face.
"You taste dry," he said. "You're hot and dry inside. We can fix that, but it's not easy."
What the hell was he saying? I didn't need fixing. But he didn't need to know that. He needed to kiss me again.
The boy stood up. He leaned over and brushed his lips against my forehead, then smiled and started to back away.
"Wait — where are you going?" I cried. "Come back!"
The boy blew me a kiss, then turned around, marching towards a pile of the trees' fallen remains and cast–offs that I'd cleared so that I could sit down. "STOP!" I yelled. But he just kept walking. A few paces later, he vanished into thin air.
I thought I saw something shimmering in the air, glinting against the light. His jeans tumbled to the ground and a dark spot formed just before the pile, quickly spreading outward.
The soil where the jeans fell was soaking wet when I touched it, as if someone had poured a whole bucket of water on the ground in the shape of a perfect circle. The jeans were soaked, too.
I picked up the jeans and hugged them to me, to absorb some of what he left behind.