The Fire (A short story I wrote and posted 9/29/08)

The Fire

He lit the match.

The dew.

Those first tentative flickers were a lifetime of uncertainty as he tried to nurture the tiny flame.

The breeze.

A shaky moment passed when the match nearly went out--his last one. The trick was getting that morsel of heat from point A, ignition, to point B, kindling. But the span across these two points, merely a foot, may as well have been an astronomical unit.

The darkness.

He focused on that spasm of light in that second immediately following ignition. Doubt began to set in. When he had struck the match, he had been so certain, so sure of himself, that the thought of failing, of being left out in the cold, had been impossible. Now that the impossibility gave in to plausibility, he wondered how he had allowed himself to be so foolish, careless.

The chill.

He'd been through this before; why hadn't he learned his lesson by now?

The flame began to burn hot and blue on the tip of the wooden, strike-anywhere match. Instead of striking it just anywhere, he had carefully chosen just the right rock with the perfect texture. He had waited for just the right moment, lest he strike before he was ready. Of course, he now realized, this had all been an illusion. There was never a perfect place, nor a perfect time. You took your chance and either wound up with warmth and light, or chill and darkness, he thought to himself.

He thought about all this in the two seconds following the first second.

The stillness.

Now the match really started to burn strongly. He regained his confidence and began moving the flame toward the kindling. It--the little flame--resisted the damp air and a sudden, slightly-rustling breeze. The first thing, of course, was that he shouldn't have been out here to begin with. The season had changed for the colder and the remoteness of the place created the potential for isolation. It might be a self-inflicted isolation, but, once alone, what was the difference? His craving to know was his strength and his weakness. It propelled him forward into new territories and the unknown; this time, it propelled him toward the possibility of the ultimate unknown territory. (Death was always a possibility, but it was a little more dangerous this time.) To him, home was a resting place where he resumed contact with the real world, if it could be called that (or was this the real world and all else simply insignificant actions in which people engaged to pass the time?). But home was also a tough place to stay for a man with a restless nature.

The match held his furrowed gaze as it tried to reassure him that, yes, there would be fire and, no, he wouldn't freeze or be left in the dark. It seemed to suggest to him that all he had to do was protect and nurture its flame and it would give him all that he was missing.

He missed warmth.

The snow.

He missed light.

The new moon.

The world contracted into the triangular space between the match, the kindling, and himself. The match, its flame more specifically, was his life-saver. It held all the promise of survival, of a tomorrow and a thousand futures. If he took care of it, it would repay his care a hundred-fold. If he moved too quickly or too slowly, or allowed his rapid breathing to contact it, it would abandon him and never return. He tried not to think of this, but the feat of not-thinking cause it to become central to his consciousness. Each of those milliseconds were dedicated to that sole thought--abandonment--causing him to panic a little. The flame held strong and he was once again pacified.

The match reached the kindling. He gently set it down in the center of the soft, nest-like, organic material and gave himself the impression of a lover whispering encouraging words to the other as he coaxed the flame to ignite the fuel. The flame bloomed and grew. Success. He added a couple pieces of wood--hopefully, they were dry enough.

The snow.

He looked around him, concerned about this new-yet-familiar problem. Would the weather make another attempt to intervene?

The wind.

The wood caught fire so he added a couple more logs and relaxed a little.

He began to feel the warmth. It touched his face and caressed his extremeties. He hadn't realized how violently he had been shaking (was it from the cold or something else?), but the fire soon began to do its restorative, healing work.

It was his, and his alone, and not a soul could take it from him. He stared into it; he admired its beauty, the grace in its movements, as it danced before him, filling him with awe and pleasure. He added more wood and did not notice the wall of white forming around him. He did not see the pale blanket now covering everything within his rapidly failing range of vision, previously caused be darkness, but now resulting from the encroaching blizzard. The fire remained central to his being and his attention; his existence derived meaning from it and he was ignorant of its fragility.

The temperature.

The shaking became violent again and only at this moment did he take notice of what was happening around him. He was too late. Perhaps if he had been more alert he could have done something to protect it--to avoid this. He became desperate, and the fire echoed his desperation, each one clinging to the other to escape death. The fire needed his fuel and he needed the fire's brilliance.

The blizzard.

In the remaining seconds of their lives, he could not break his gaze as his eyes clung to the final, failing ember. The snow blanketed the mound of ashes and wood and smothered him as his violent contortions gave way to the insane peeling away of clothing that accompanies hypothermia. He thought about tomorrow and a thousand futures and he felt like he was burning.