Smoke

In that place, everything tasted of smoke. The fire was always burning there, and the windows rarely open. Rather, the fire was always smoldering inside of her, and her eyes were rarely open to let in the light, let out the smoke. The smoke leaked out through her joints, through elbows and knees where bones ended and began, through seams in her memories where one anxiety ended and another began. In those seams, there shone a brief crack of blissful uninvolvement. Yet even from those seams, the smoke leaked out. Everything in that place was being smoked, gradually. The couches, the bedclothes, even the wooden furniture: they all looked like people who had been sitting forever around a campfire.

The fire inside was always being fed. Papers, news from outside, words spoken by enemies, words spoken by friends who might become enemies, these were all fuel. She ate them up, barely chewing. They must have scraped her throat on the way down. Despite the damage done to her throat by the smoke and by all the rough edges that she swallowed almost-whole, she talked and talked.

The smoke poured out through her flapping, fidgeting mouth. The smoke got in the eyes of the people around her. She could see through the smoke; she'd been practicing for years. She hardly noticed it anymore, and in fact when she felt the fire burning low, she would frantically rebank it. (If it burned out, how would she keep warm? Would she even be alive?)

But the people around her were not used to the smoke. They squinted and couldn't see. All the food tasted of nothing but fire. They lost their appetites, but they never told her. They could see her building the fire, tending the fire. Sometimes this made them angry. Sometimes it just made them sad. One by one, they went away. They needed the open air.

Every time that someone came or went, wind would blow through the open door. The fire would flare up in the sudden rush of oxygen, but the smoke would dissipate for just a moment.

And then the door would close, and the fire would keep burning.

[Tuesday is Fireday in Japanese]

One unfortunate word, and a handful of ill-starred incidents; one frightened girl, and a hundred conversations that burst into flames when her eyes were closed. She doesn't dare blink anymore, and her eyes are drying out.

But eventually, she has to sleep, and when she does, she dreams.

She sees the wildfires through her eyelids. Before she even wakes up, she is running. Before the spark is even struck, she is running: all it takes is the tinderbox, the flint. The grass on the golden hills is dry. It rustles and cracks as she passes through. She sprints across the slope, staggers, sobs. The heat of the sun is strong on her skin. Summer is stuck here, caught in the long grass. The sun is a hole burnt through the hard blue sky.

She doesn't look back, the girl who keeps running and tumbling, squeezing her eyes shut. She doesn't want to see. She hears the roaring of the conflagration in her ears, though she's not sure: is it her blood pounding, her heart crackling? The merciless sky doesn't soften. She feels it glare down on her, and she won't meet its gaze. This is another reason she keeps her eyes closed, when she can.

Finally she falls. Scraped palms, scratched knees, lungs grabbing the air, she finally opens her eyes. Heat waves squiggle over the hills behind her, and a haze of cloud drifts there. She is too far away now to see if the cloud is smoke, if heat is streaming up from licking flames. She is too far away to tell if the fire she saw with her eyes closed ever burned through her skin to set the hills ablaze.

She blinks, and the flames kiss her again, and she vows never to sleep anymore, or at least not to dream. But you can only watch for so long. The spark will fly in her mind again soon, and she will wear her feet out running.