“The Light in Their Eyes Went Out Like Flowers in the Dark” - A Short Story

The last time, I had seen them last. Over and under, above the horizon and starless sky. It was, just like those other times. Their ire, iron was branded by fire as escaped horses came on and ran by. People were scattered. Everyone ran everywhere. It was as if, the entire world came afire, and as the flames roared on in a dance of themselves, so too did the people surrounding houses. Then came the ones dressed for fires, with masks, yelling as they whittled the scarlet down to licks over a while, the cries echoing on-throughout as if someone died, though nobody had.

“It was just a fire,” I heard someone tell another. “Wildfire that just came.”

Only stone withstood the heat, yet looked eaten away by moths to an old jacket, cackled by pitch-smoke, charred with embers. Lots of brick rubble whistled hollow amidst wind as shadowed, ashen caricatures of what used to be. Everything looked as though it’d been painted charcoal before being set to pyre. Moments like that, I wondered if there wasn’t anything fire couldn’t eat through.

Few wandered like sleepwalk. Old fields, backyards, acres of open meadow down road, some just went into night, walking-crosses who wasn’t firefighting, every other upon the soles of their skin.

It took long for others to come, others from town and state over. Most of the road went off to other places, but some stood out before what used to be houses, gazing stilly. I didn’t live on the street, but knew a person who did, house farthest east the main road, sometimes overlooked how it was tucked away behind the curve. She asked me to go check up on it, see if anything needed tending to that empty house, like it was a person who needed company.

What could I say was the reason which escaped those nearby, where begun the fire that engulfed it all? How could the conversation go, I wondered, kicking smoked debris of soot, charred sediment as jetsam littering the road. The smoke was too thick to make an entry, I’d say, to see what wasn’t gone in the onyx of night, lingering brume like water up into the astra.

“How come you’re still around,” asked the elderly fellow whom just before had disclosed, lived several houses down, someone I’d seen as a visitor, prior. “I don’t believe you even live here, do you?” he asked, though no answer would save what used to be his house then-if a suttee behind him.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s happenstance I even came today. I was supposed to have come tomorrow.” There was nothing more to give beyond an ambling trail of voice.

He shook his head and after a moment, left to wander back over by the remains of what once was his house.

“The fire spreads fast,” a voice called, some feet away, then began to shout. “I said, the fire was faster than expected,” they yelled, though there wasn’t an answer after that.  

The light in their eyes went out like flowers in the dark. It was as if, the fire which roared and that took their houses was the only life the road had left, and once it was gone, and after everyone had taken to getting gone, everything that remained fell to night, the embers and smoke. Who would have known that a small, flickering candle of a child would lead to emancipation for so many. That great power, we all lived in its absence, aside it, beyond it, tried to tame it and keep it in its cage, but nothing could stop it once freed.

It wasn’t for the fault of fire. It was their hubris, the materials the builders chose in making them, the designers who built them so closely, the junk which fed the flames. It was their negligence, out to celebrate the holiday; it was as much their fault as it was for whoever let that light bleed into fire. It would be important what would matter next, those blessed by the sacrament of the flames’ purity.

After all, life was construed from fire. Creation itself was pyrotechnic, as well entropy, chaos arsonistic. Father as a human was a priest who danced with fire in Iwo Jima, mother as a human was an alchemist who helped birth white phosphorous. Even the flesh of destiny wasn’t coincidence, for my progenitors both escaped this world in cleansing fulgor. Thus, wherever I went, fire chased me.

As the sun began to crack beyond the horizon and turn to blue, I looked about the smoldering remains of the house. From two-storied extravagance became a heap of rubbish emanating volcanic charr into the dead, wintery, colorless and bland sky. The night had witnessed it, and the audience was gone. Nature had a way with putting them, their things, spaces, titles into place; fire was its equalizer, the planet’s way of saying to those who inhabited, festered her space, never at any moment are you safe, nor are your things that you create and worship, and that no matter how much power one ascribed to wield, the fire’s calcifying divinity could devour it all at any second.

To my surprise, there was yet still someone down road, caked by the cough and smudge of smoke, flames, who stood at the head aside the old church. He remained motionless as I took the time in a slow pace to approach him from afar. Though no one else could be seen, no other bonds of civilization beyond the realm of charr and brume, nevertheless, this middle-aged person looked over those remains of the church as if a grave. He made contact with my eyes, for a brief moment, then nodded, standing again without regard to my presence.

“Did you go here?” he asked, though took long consideration before emitting the sound.

“It’s gone now,” I told him. “To the wind and sky.”

“A church is never gone,” he refrained, then cleared his throat. “That is only but one part, yet still part of what all surrounds us.”

I shook my head, though he didn’t see, but felt compelled to tell him something. “They say before the bible was written, the word of creation came from flames. Prophets passed down their stories of the voice of creation talking to them by fire, like a gateway, window into heaven. In that way, it’s a symbol of holiness than the opposite. That is the way I interpret things, and how I’d like to think of the world being cleansed, and if it needed one, or many houses, even an entire little road in the middle of nowhere in the night, then…so be it.”

Beginning to walk away, the man, who stared ahead at the foot of what used to be a church as I spoke, turned my direction. I smiled in a most appropriate way, and after some time, he did too.

“So be it,” he said, following a nod and smirk, then-turning back to face the rubble. “So be it.”

The end.

© 2024, A. M. D’Angelo