"Blaze" -- July 15

Word count: 1800

Blaze

Since his first episode at age ten, when he had woken up with his bed and body in flames after a nightmare, Ari had lived in a little stone hut with the blacksmith and his fire-scarred hound. His mother came to visit three times a week, bringing money for his board and a basket of home food. Sometimes she brought him new clothes.

Ari held up the latest new tunic she’d brought. The fabric was waxy and stiff.

“It’ll mold to you,” his mother said, leaning against the doorway of his room, where he’d retired to escape the noise of the forge for an hour.

“I tested this one four times,” his mother continued. “I think it will work.”

Ari slipped the tunic over his bare shoulders. The fabric was cold and stiff against his skin. It slipped on the sweat still drying from his shoulders and sat on him like a wet blanket.

“Thanks,” he said, shifting his shoulders so it would settle.

His mother sighed. “If you don’t like it, don’t wear it,” she said.

Ari slipped it off and laid it aside, folding it neatly at the top of his bed. “I’ll try it,” he said.

“We miss you at home.”

“I miss you too.” Ari pasted a thin smile on his face, disgusted at himself for the lie. The clothes she worked so hard to make fireproof and the treats she baked for him had the cheap taint of guilt on them. It had been seven years; surely they had gotten used to his absence by now. In all those years, despite her fear, he had never again set his bed afire.

“Ari!”

“That’s the master.” Ari stood, leaving the basket atop his bed.

“Goodbye,” his mother said. She reached up for a hug.

Ari embraced her awkwardly, his gangly limbs poking out, and left as quickly as he could, loping back to the forge.

“The bench,” the blacksmith said as Ari hurried his apron on. A stack of twisted pieces of metal waited for him. The forge had died while he was gone and the apprentice was nowhere in sight.

Ari spread his fingers, a familiar rush of heat flooding up his arm and throughout his body as flames licked upward from his palm and fingers. Sweat began to bead on the back of his neck as he bent to restart the forge and begin his work.

****

Ari ducked out the front door into the cool of the night, a small cloth bag over his shoulder. Colin would be shutting down his shop soon. Last night, they’d heard the night birds singing to the full moon, and tonight the wild dogs would start their hunting runs.

Ari spread his fingers, sending flames spiraling from his fingers to light his way down the dark path.

Colin’s shop was the only one lit on the narrow street. Inside, the young merchant swept the floor with a scraggly broom. Ari knocked at the doorpost and Colin beckoned him in.

“Will you gather the spears? I want two.” Colin pointed with his broom handle toward the door to the storage room.

Ari picked four short, straight hunting spears. Across the city, other young men performed the same rituals, testing the weights of their weapons, checking the edges. The wild dogs made good hunting, and hunting them kept them off the chickens and geese.

Colin locked the shop and the two shouldered their spears and set off down the street. Ari held his hand out ahead of them, flaming softly to light their way.

“You’re going to stop that when we get into the woods right?”

“Don’t be stupid, Colin.”

Colin gave Ari a punch on the shoulder. “I’m just joking.”

Ari waved the fire in Colin’s face.

“Don’t singe my eyebrows.”

As they left the outskirts of the city and slipped into the woods, Ari let the fire in his fingers die down, then slowly burn out. They worked their way softly through the trees and undergrowth, spears held at the ready. The dogs stalked rabbit runs and streamsides, always moving in packs. The trick was to surprise a pack of them.

“Is it strange for you, lighting yourself up like that?” Colin asked as they worked their way toward a stream.

Ari kept his voice low and his hands tucked neatly around his spears, fingers close together.

“It was at first, but not now. I think other people find it strange.”

“What do you mean?”

“People treat me differently. I don’t think they trust me.” My own mother doesn’t trust me, he thought, but Colin knew that. Anyone who had eyes knew that.

“Can’t you control it?”

“Most of the time.”

The two paused to listen for the running water of the brook, then adjusted their course to work toward it.

“Are there times you can’t control it?”

“That would be what ‘most of the time’ means, Colin.”

Colin huffed. In the distance another group of boys whooped as they located a pack. Colin and Ari found their favorite place by the brook and crouched down to wait for another pack to snuffle along its edges.

Colin spoke first after a time. “It must be handy for working with—”

Suddenly their hiding place was deluged with pattering feet and skittering tails. Not expecting the explosion of motion, Ari jumped straight up and crashed into a rock that formed one of the walls of their little enclave. Heat spread throughout his body as adrenaline pumped through his system.

He didn’t realize what had happened until Colin had ahold of his shoulders and shook him gently. His shirt smelled singed. He looked down at his clothes.

They were ripped and covered in soot. He put a hand to his close-shorn hair, only to find it brittle and sooty.

“What happened?” he asked Colin.

“Are you all right?” Colin answered.

“Did I light up?”

“Like a dandelion in the summer.”

Ari cursed to himself. No wonder the townspeople didn’t trust him, he thought. He ran a hand through his burned hair and sat down, leaning against the rock.

It was the first episode he’d had since he was ten. Ari clasped his hands around his long legs to hide the shaking.

Colin picked up the scattered spears. “I think, after that, we won’t catch anything tonight,” he said. He held out a hand to Ari.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll burn you?” Ari spread his fingers and tiny flames twined around them.

“Not intentionally.”

Ari put out the fire and took his friend’s hand. Colin handed Ari his spears, and Ari followed him out of the forest, all thoughts of hunting laid aside.

****

Ari dreamed of being ten years old. He was skinny and not as strong as other boys his age. There was a sense of dread in the air, settling into his lungs and stomach, as he crouched in the woods.

Something leaped out at him from the shadows. It wrapped around his face, black and suffocating.

He woke to flames.

Disoriented, heart pounding, he woke drenched in sweat to an orange glow at the door. In the hallway beyond, flames twisted up the walls. Half-dazed with sleep, he stumbled out of bed, just aware enough to know the fire would spread quickly in Colin’s shop and that it had not come from him.

The movement and the brilliant hot glare woke him fully as he stumbled into the hallway. The flames licked at his shoulders. He stepped over an overturned lamp at the end of the hallway and made for the door. Beneath his feet, the floorboards were brittle.

Ari stumbled out the door of Colin’s shop and into the middle of a small crowd of people clustering in the street. Fire gleamed on their faces.

“Colin, where’s Colin?” Ari demanded, scanning for his friend. The people took a step back, sending dark looks his way.

“Where’s Colin?” he demanded again. Behind him, beams cracked.

“You tell me, Fire Boy,” one of the men said, shooting a vengeful look at Ari before turning on his heel to order a bucket brigade.

Ari’s heart leaped up into his throat. The fire wasn’t his fault. Not this time. He had seen the lamp overturned in the hallway that had started it all.

And Colin was still inside.

Ari plunged back into the flames without a second thought. Behind him, the beam over the door cracked and fell, sending a blast of heat through the hallway.

Ari dodged through the main shop. The outlines of furniture and walls shimmered in the heat. Flames tried to catch on Ari’s skin, but they could not.

He found Colin crouched in a corner that had not yet begun to burn, coughing and choking.

“Ari!”

“Are you all right?” Ari crouched down beside his friend, scanning him for signs of injury.

“Did you—”

“No!” Ari looked toward the door, charting the clearest path through the flames. “I didn’t start it.”

There was no clear path. Ari could see the door, but everything between them was covered in hot orange flames. The fire crept along the ceiling toward Colin’s corner.

“I can’t get through that,” Colin said, grabbing Ari’s arm. “You can. Go. Get help!”

“No!” Ari pointed upward. A black crack spread across the ceiling, half-hidden in smoke and soot. “It won’t last much longer. Come with me. I have an idea.”

Side by side, the two battled through the flames toward the storeroom where Ari had slept. Ari ducked through the flames into the room and grabbed his bag, leaping back out through the door as it cracked and fell. He fumbled in the bag and pulled out his long black tunic, stiff and heavy and waxy.

“Put this on,” he ordered Colin, handing it to him. “Quickly.”

“What is this?” Colin slid it over his head, coughing. He swayed and nearly fell.

“My mother made it.” Ari grabbed Colin’s arm and dragged him. He could just make out the outline of the door within the flames. They had seconds before it collapsed. The flames closed around them, blinding Ari with hot orange light.

Then they were in the fresh air, and Colin sank in the middle of the street, gasping roughly at the cool night. He refused to let go of Ari’s arm. Exclaiming townspeople gathered in a knot, the fire forgotten. This time they looked at Ari with new respect and almost apology.

Colin handed the tunic back to Ari when he got back on his feet. “Your mother made this for you?”

“It’s fireproof,” Ari explained, shrugging. “I tend to scorch clothes.”

Colin laughed as Ari took the tunic. “Thank you,” he said. “I would have died.”

Ari smiled. “Good thing you’re friends with me, then,” he said, and winked.