fire.

The wrinkles in the curtains take the shape of a woman’s collarbone as they move against my outstretched hands. Her collar bone, when she tossed her head back and grabbed the windowsill and let out her breath in gasps. But it’s too early in the day for thoughts of her. The neighbour’s dog won’t shut the fuck up but I don’t suppose I would either if I was left out in this cold with a chain around my neck. The red lights read 11am, and my breath forms wispy clouds about my head. The fireplace glow has long turned black and the thermostat is on the lam.
I roll onto my stomach and stare out the window. The defiant grey of tire lines pollute the white and prove the existence of human life, though it’s evidently to be found at the other end of those tracks. Remote car starters remind me of ghosts as an empty car is suddenly engulfed by a swirling miasma of exhaust. Only mobility ignores the cold. They may have found a cure for desolation, but I have a cure for time.
I pull on my boxers and a thick pair of socks. The glacial floor stings my feet even through these. I pull the blanket with me as I descend the stairs, let it drag behind me, dare it to trip me with each creak for two flights. I know that my fridge is empty, but pull the blanket over my head as I bend to peer at the wire shelves and sixty watt bulb. A forgotten apple is an unexpected treasure and I bite into its bruises as I put a glass pot of water on to boil. The blue flames make it glow like a memory or a reverie as the bubbles climb the glass walls and I toss in a pair of seed pods from their box and watch the sticky brown sap ooze out in smoky lines.


She wakes me with a whisper: “I have something to show you.” Her breath in my ear helps me rise, and I pull her body to mine so she’ll feel it. Her hair covers my face, snakes down my throat into my stomach, into my lungs, and I fill with her. She kisses me with lips drawn tight by a smile, pulls back to look in my heavy eyes. An orange ring circles her sky blue irises like a secret. That ring always appeared in her eyes in the morning, like the sun was rising within her, and like a miracle, by noon it was gone. She bites her smile then rocks her pelvis impatiently. Her voice jiggles with the movement and her mock impatience as she begs, “come o-on, get u-up, I have a sup-prise.” She grabs my hands and pulls me as she rises to stand upon the mattress, pulling me upright as she does. Satisfied, she lets go and hops from the bed with the pure exuberance I left somewhere in a Christmas morning long ago. The sheets fall from my nudity as I follow her down the stairs and find her peering out the bathroom window. “Look,” she sighs, “they’ve all bloomed at once. Your garden is a trip to the city of Oz.” Poppies, open wide in white and crimson red. It’s true, they were beautiful, and so was she. She wore her naked body like a gown of gold. I step closer to her, wrap my arms around to overlap below her breasts. I turn her by her hips to face me and lift her with a kiss. She wraps her legs around my waist and grips my neck tightly as I carry her down one more flight of stairs, through the kitchen and onto the dew damp grass swimming in white and red. I pretend not to have neighbours on the other side of the white wooden fence as we roll together, picking up grass cuttings with our sweaty skin.


The phone rings, and I manage a groggy syllable that passes for a greeting. James says something about hauling my ass out of hibernation for the night. James is immune to the cold, and abuses the receiver with shouts, but I mumble something affirmative before my fingers find the dial tone and attack the stubborn thermostat. I toss my body, still blanket-clothed, onto the navy blue couch to drink another glass of bitter brown tea and masturbate until my belly glows with drying semen and my mind climbs like a released balloon without one note attached to the string.
James pounds on the door insistently, half-heartedly yelling obscenities that the banker next door is sure to appreciate. I unlock the door and pull on a pair of jeans. James pretends not to notice the dishes abandoned on every countertop or the gritty film on the floor. I pretend not to notice his pretending, and make no apologies. It’s nothing but three floors of empty rooms now and I won’t keep it clean for me. I find a sweater that smells clean and pull on a toque and my coat. We walk to the pub down the street, our skin burning from the velocity with which our body heat is pulled from our cheeks and eyes. This is the kind of cold that makes men want to give up in snow banks or dark alleys. The trick is to breathe as little as possible, or not at all. As soon as you draw the cold inside of you, you’re a dead man.
The pub is packed with regulars who refuse to make eye contact. I’ve been coming to the same pub for four years and somehow still haven’t managed to have a sustained conversation with one of these familiar faces. I’m no regular, I’m just the guy who lives down the street, and I’ll blame it on the songs screaming from the corners. James disappears in the crowd, and re-emerges with two women whose eyes are on a continuous slant in the direction of the bathroom. The traffic through the impossibly small single bathroom is continuous as people disappear behind the peeling blue door to fuck drunkenly or snort lines of coke off the dirty toilet tank. The shifty fuckers all think they’re inconspicuous, but the place is crawling with their disease, and their secret has eyes of its own. Even James has those eyes, and I loathe that I’m wasting my time with a junkie. He screams something that is lost in the thumping music sounds, and heads for the door. I guess that’s goodnight, and I guess that makes this one mine. Her name is Mandy or Maggie or Mindy and she can’t possibly speak to me over the noise, but her shifty eyes find mine for a minute and she grabs my crotch so I shrug and take her home. I can’t help but wonder if her affection is motivated by a desire to avoid the bathroom line, but I take her from behind on the couch by the kitchen so I don’t have to look at her face and


I cannot tell where she ends and I begin. We are liquid, sweat and sweet sex and movement. Her eyes swallow mine. This is the kind of love that shows in distressed furnishings. We dissolve into each other and our sweat, and her weight on me makes more sense than my own skin. I tell her secrets with my eyes, in a language that cannot be spoken.


at least now my heat is on. She screams like a crushed animal with her climax and leaves before my water is boiled after cutting a pair of lines with her i.d. card on the cover of a collection of anonymous love poems. I warn her of the dangers of breathing as she zips her menacingly pointed boots and reaches for the door. I take my tea to bed with me; it’s the only way I’ll sleep.
I start a fire to chase the chill from the corners and lay on my back, the empty mug warming the soft hollow of space below my bellybutton. In poppy-induced sleep there are no dreams but a voice in the back of my head that is hers asks, “Tell me what it feels like?”
In a time-less space I answer, “You just close your eyes and drift”
“You see things?”
“No, you just go to a place inside your eyelids. A place that’s not here.” There no words with which to explain, so we tumble into silence and I drift in her voice and my words and a pitch black Oz to a place in absence of dreams.

“Shit honey, please wake up! Can you hear me?” she is screaming. I start awake with the image of fire painted on my lids. In my nebulous confusion I cannot discern if the fire is real or imagined, but stare dumbly at the flames that are safely contained by a chain mail screen and dying alongside my euphoria. The danger is real. Fear fills me and I’m convinced I am dying, convinced I’ve just seen god and he’ll burn me alive for my sins. I stare at my hands, now foreign to me, before submerging my face in their clammy darkness. The clock lights are blinking, but I did not catch the blackout.
With sudden lucidity I fly down both flights of stairs and tear the box of seedpods from the cupboard above the stove. I cannot feel the burn of lost breath as I race back up with equal speed. I will save myself. I set the box down on the bed and wrestle with the chain mail curtain. The fire is nearly dead so I reach for some kindling scraps, but am startled by the sudden movement of the box. They are scared for their lives. The seedpods jump and the box lid nearly quakes open so I leap for it, kindling still in hand. I press it shut as tightly as I can, then drop the kindling and stretch desperately to reach for my phonebook without allowing them the chance to escape. The cover tears off in my fingers barely reaching as I pull it closer and frantically place its weight atop the thrashing box. I run downstairs in search of heavy books to supplement the phone book weight. As an afterthought I set a conga drum atop the print-filled pile. Satisfied that this pile will guard the box, I turn to the fire. The kindling will not catch. Clenched jawed and resolute, I crumple the torn yellow phone book cover and tear the back pages from the book of poems below the conga drum. All this crumpled print I toss atop the coals. I blow everything I have onto the hot coals but they’ve joined leagues with that thrashing box and resist ignition. I breathe in gusts until I fear I’ll lose my head, but the black type allusions and yellow ink cover finally dissolve in flame. I uncover the box and open it to watch well over one hundred seed pods writhe. I toss a handful in and can hear them scream, though it’s likely just the sound of boiling sap and smoke escaping the lacy black mouths of the pods. I burn another handful and another and stare at them as they drink in purging fire. The screams quiet and they are nothing but hollow shells for self-seeding.
Ten silent pods roll moon trails along the bottom of the cardboard box. These will guide me through the time-dense days to come.