Unspontaneous Combustion

Five years ago, a young couple was startled awake and went to battle with a raging fire that had mysteriously broken out in their home. Whether or not they won the battle is debatable; either way, they lost their lives. As the flames rose higher, a small eleven-year-old boy huddled closer to the mailbox, whether in grief or in fear, as his parents gave one last futile attempt to save the family heirlooms, the favorite books, the childhood photos. The little boy watched with increasing horror as all that he loved went up in flames. 

Five years later, a boy in the bedroom of an old house holds his hand over an open flame, close enough to feel the heat of the candle but not be burned. He imagines the flames rising, swallowing him whole, engulfing the world in a magnificent blaze. 

It is late summer, but Aiden’s room is a graveyard of candles. Lit candles cover every surface from the dresser to the bookshelf to the shelves on the wall. Lighters litter the floor, dancing in the shadows of the flickering flames. In the corner, a small conflagration blazes in a brick fireplace, as if the house remembers with nostalgia an older time, a simpler time. 

Aiden closes his eyes and inhales the smoke, savoring the way the pungent fumes fill his head. He can feel the temperature rising in the room, the flames burning with an unapologetic intensity so far from the rehearsed subtleties of humanity. 

Fire is Aiden’s life, his obsession. It is a thing to be loved and feared, an untameable force. He learned this five years ago, when the blaze that killed his parents left him untouched, except for a spark that landed in his heart, kindling a blaze of its own, a force just as untameable.

He watches outside the two-story window as the sun goes down, safe in his personal cave of flame. In the distance, a brightly colored bird flies into the sun, and Aiden looks away from its blinding light. When he glances back at the darkening sky, the mysterious bird has vanished. As the world becomes darker and darker, Aiden’s room becomes a beacon of light, and island of heat in a cold, dark ocean. One by one he extinguishes the flames, until only the fireplace blaze remains. With the flickering flames telling an ancient, untranslatable tale, Aiden lies down in bed, entranced by the dangerous beauty. As he watches, the flames sway in an invisible wind, forming and reforming into countless animated shapes, constantly flowing from one shape to another, until a strong wind blows the flame into the shape of a bird. It was the bird that had flown into the sun, a bird of vibrant red, orange, and yellow hue. Aiden thinks, as he instinctively shuts his eyes, that the bird looks like fire personified. 

The light becomes too bright to watch, and when Aiden opens his eyes, he stands in a dark forest. That is, the remains of one. The scorched, hollow skeletons of trees reach up into a smoky sky, and the ground is powdery ash beneath his feet. The phoenix flies ahead of him, its fiery wings lapping against the tree trunks, as a bonfire envelops marshmallows. Aiden follows the bird, his footsteps silent against the ash-coated forest floor. As he walks along, he begins to notice scorched carvings in the tree trunks, simple depictions of life throughout history. One shows a group of stick figures huddled around a small campfire. They wield primitive-looking weapons, and one man stands apart from the rest, waving a torch in the face of a saber-toothed tiger, who fearfully eyes the flame. 

The next trunk bears an image of a blaze swallowing up what appears to be a small village. Entire families flee the scene, while teepee-like structures crumple under a blanket of smoke.

Another shows a large family sitting around a fireplace much like the one in his bedroom. A woman sits on a sofa, her arm encircling a little girl who snuggles into her mother’s side, her smiling face illuminated by the light. Another illustrates a lightning bolt, directed into a rod that translates it into its more docile form, electricity. 

Aiden stops in his tracks as he reaches the last tree trunk, as the phoenix leads him to the mouth of a small clearing. This tree bears four images, each more intricate than the last.  It shows a familiar house, one he once knew well. A man and a woman stand side by side in the front yard, while a small boy frolics in the shade of a towering oak tree. Smiling sadly, he moves onto the next image. It shows the same scene, but engulfed in flames. As he watches, the little boy flees the scene, while his parents head in the opposite direction, sprinting into the burning building to save what they can save, which is, of course, nothing. 

The next picture shows a blackened home, stripped of its furnishings, its beauty, its inhabitants, destroyed by the very thing that had sustained it. It is vacant, empty, the oak tree in the front yard a shadow of its former self, its branches crumbling, showering the yard with ash. 

Aiden swallows hard, and steels himself for the destruction that surely will come in the last image. He turns his eyes to the base of the trunk, he blinks as he sees the last picture, a scene very different from what he had expected. In the last scene, the house has imploded, the roof has collapsed and the walls are giving way to the weight that presses down on them. But that’s not all. In the midst of the destruction, the blackened wood and the empty home, green saplings have arisen from the ashes. The oak tree whose shade Aiden had played in was gone, collapsed in a pile of disintegrated wood. But from the top of the heap a green sprout is just visible. Vines climb up the sides of the collapsed house, their flowers shyly opening up as Aiden watches, his eyes wide. 

Slowly he turns away from the tree and continues onward, into the clearing where the phoenix had stopped to perch on a blackened tree limb. Aiden looks around. The clearing is wide and green, an unlikely place in a fire-blackened forest. But as he looks closer he sees that it had been burned, had been destroyed like the rest of the woods. The grass grows in ash instead of soil and the green leaves emerge from scorched tree trunks. In the middle of the clearing is a small oak sapling. 

Aiden looks back to the mysterious bird, who looks back at him with intense eyes. With a shockingly loud caw the bird falls from its perch, transforming in midair from a fiery bird to a heap of ashes, which shower over the little oak tree. As Aiden watches, the tree begins to grow, first expanding skyward, and then outward, until it is a mighty oak tree reaching toward the sky.. And still it grows; it grows until it seems to reach directly into the sun. Aiden cranes his neck back to see the top, where a small spark seems to flash for just a moment, and then the forest begins to disappear. As quickly as it had appeared, it vanishes, and Aiden finds himself in his bedroom, gazing once more at the blazing fireplace. 

He looks around at the room, littered with the remains of candles, and is struck with an idea. Gathering up the candles, the lighters, the matches, he opens a window, the night breeze in cool contrast with the smoky air he had become accustomed to. He drops the candles out the window, watching them fall the two stories to the ground, hitting the dirt with a crash as wax and glass collide with the rocky ground. 

Suddenly tired, he returns to bed, leaving the window open, enjoying the fresh air for the first time in years, and goes to sleep. 

In the morning, a flash of light wakes him, and he hurries out of bed, craning his neck out the window. Fifteen feet below, a small sapling has begun to grow out of a pile of broken glass.

Elise Stankus 2020. All Rights Reserved.