A Light In the Dark

This flash fiction piece was previously published in the now-defunct FORTH Magazine, in January 2015.

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I’m there the night he sets the house on fire. He’s sitting there in his favorite armchair, and the flames are licking around him, like flames do. There’s an old Etta James song on the radio, and somewhere on a television set people are watching us. They are screaming for me to tell him that he’s burning, like he doesn’t already know, like he can’t feel the raised edges of his own skin as it boils and blisters. Like if I tell him he will say oh, how silly of me not to notice, I’ll call the fire brigade right away, when the truth is, he’s laughing. He’s watching the flickers with frantic clarity, watching the horrors dance over his body. And the truth is: he’s watching mine, pale and naked on the sofa, and grinning at the way his handiwork illuminates me in the darkness.

The people are watching us on a television set and they are afraid for us, and he says tell them I was happy, he says tell them to go fuck themselves, or sometimes, all he will say is pass me the papers and there we are again with the lighter in our hands, or the matches, or the torch, and I don’t say anything but yes, please, okay, because he is overwhelmingly alive like this. We don’t talk about heaven or hell, or much of anything really; it’s just his long fingers and his wide mouth and the way he’s always lit me up in ecstasy. They want me to show him that he’s burning, but he says that’s only a problem if the fuel is running low: if Kleinzahler stops writing poetry on thin pages, or the store on the corner stops selling cheap whiskey, or he chokes on his own vomit and there’s no more sweet, stale oxygen left for him to bastardize. The fire’s all right, it means he has something left to contribute. The fire’s alright, it chips away at his charred edges.

There are words for this, I know; some nouns like muse and mistress and misery. I don’t want them. I want the way his sooty hands trail paths across my belly. I want the way the sweat pools in his collar, as he tries to breathe against me; the way he chokes on every wrecked syllable and laves my blistered fingers with his tongue. The people are in front of their television sets and they are crying as we are consumed, but tomorrow they will have forgotten we were ever here at all, and

They want me to tell him that he’s burning. They’re a match-spark-breath too late.