The Fire

She shared her dreams with him as the night grew longer, as the flames licked beyond the planks on the outside of the lakeside cabin and in through long-broken windows. The soaring embers met with the specks of the stars as he crossed his arms. Their faces were hot from flame and their backs grew cold, facing the night.

"There are a lot of times when I just want to cut it off. You know what I mean. Just end it."

This both surprised him and did not surprise him. She seemed well put-together, and she was used to hearing how maturely she'd handled this and others of life's obstacles. But he'd had a first impression of a girl in a clean office, climbing a career ladder, a head full of closet philosophy and a fistful of Prozac. He had been almost right - the fist was full of Zoloft and the office was clean except for doodles on water-stained paper and cans of iced tea.

"Why haven't you done it?" he asked.

A curtain rod fell inside the cabin, overtaken by flames. Embers gushed through the window in a cloud from the impact. They both stepped back in reaction, faces aglow.

"Everyone wants to do it. I've spent so long trying to be sane that I can't bear going out like a crazy person."

He raised an eyebrow. "Noble." She didn't hear him.

"I feel like this is closing the last door of my childhood. Like I have closure now; like I can focus on the future."

"Understandable," he replied. "Destruction is often satisfying."

"It's too bad things like suicide are so final. Because if destruction is satisfying, that would be the largest act of its kind, and, well..."

"There's murder."

"That's way too easy to get in trouble for."

They lapsed back into silence as the flames began curling the shingles and smoke billowed away over the moon's light. Her childhood. How could he agree to such an act - arson, as it were, but maybe only if they were caught? - without knowing what exactly happened in this house? He'd never exactly revered law, but...

"I was raped when I was a child."

He swallowed hard. He supposed it made sense.

"More than once. Often."

After a long, awkward pause, the kind that just keeps growing over minutes and seconds, he sighed. “I guess that’s a good enough reason to do this.”

“I guess.” She hugged herself, the smooth night breeze rustling her hair. “We spent a lot of summers here as a family. My father, you know, when he was laid off…we had to move. So we stopped coming.” She shuddered. “A lot happened here. Other places, too, but this place most often.”

Anyone else would have started blubbering through these sentences, snot and ugly tears running down their fishified faces as they gulped through the story. God forbid, anyone else might even try to turn to him for opening, comforting arms. Never her. Thankfully, never her. Though his feelings for her grew by the day, he still could not bring himself to savor and covet human touch. She didn’t know this about him, and neither did most others. She wouldn’t have cared. Another reason why he liked her so much. Why he’d burn down a house with her, whether or not its walls were painted with pain and suffering.

“You’ve come through it well,” he told her honestly.

She pursed her lips, squinted her eyes in thought. At that moment, the cabin’s roof, so heavy under years of abuse and horror, drooping from licking, relentless flames, sagged and caved in. The embers flew into the night sky in one huge rush, causing them to take steps back until they were outside the circle of light and heat. Here it was cold.

A log broke away from the crumbling mass and rolled clumsily down the bank, splashing into the water.

“How do we know when it’s done?”

She blinked. “Well, I guess when it’s all fallen down we can call it done.”

“It’s well on the way.”

“It is.”

They were standing closer than they’d been before, a realization that had always made him bristle and take a casual step outward. This time, though slightly tense, he remained in place.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I don’t normally think like this, but I’ve told you something that nobody else knows, except those involved.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Isn’t this a time when one would normally share something in return?”

It was. Not only did he want to avoid the situation of taking the attention from her and diverting it to himself, he also didn’t know what to share. His life, he’d found over the years of adulthood he’d made it to, was mostly unremarkable. He’d shared stories and found others sharing the same ones, with interesting variables, but all the same.

“Nothing to say, really. My parents hit me a lot as a kid; they got bad, but everyone’s parents did.”

“Not everyone. Definitely not everyone.”

They were silent, mulling over a world seen only in baby toy and carpet advertisements, where spilling juice on the floor meant a shake of the head and a reach for the paper towels. Where mothers stayed home when children were sick, instead of going to work because there were late bills to be paid, eventually.

“It was always sort of strange to me because my brothers and sisters never got any of it. It was pretty much focused on me. I know I was a difficult kid to be around.”

She said nothing, stared at the house as walls fell down.

“Even as a teenager I was a jerk to everyone. I guess I pushed their buttons. And I was the oldest, so I guess they didn’t know how to deal with it for the first time.”

He was making excuses, and she was receiving them. “I never felt like an abused child or anything. Times were hard now and then is all.”

“You’ve come through it well,” she told him honestly.

He gave her a half-grin.

With a loud crash the two remaining walls of the cabin collapsed, a hope springing up in his heart and hers under all the noise and light. And as he was captivated by the glory of a past thrown away, by the glowing and popping, a hand slipped into his, locked firmly around his fingers. Startled, he looked at her, but she looked only ahead with a small smile.

It was done, they knew. And as the night grew longer, they shared dreams in silence.