By Margo Pecha
Nothing remained of Solomon’s grandmother save for a few charred fingertips, a toe, and a stinking pile of ash. She’d ignited in her recliner while watching her programs. The TV still chattered and flickered in the background, oblivious to the passage of time. It was not the college homecoming Solomon had anticipated.
“To alight oneself is the gravest sin,” his grandmother had told him as a child, hugging him tight. “One must trust in spontaneous ignition, to be kindled by the Spark when the time is right.”
Solomon had sat in his grandmother’s lap and nodded, a small boy pretending he understood. His uncle had just doused himself in gasoline at the Fourth of July picnic and struck a match, screaming at the top of his lungs as the flames engulfed him. Solomon had covered his face with an arm as the flash of heat rushed over him, forgetting the hot dog dripping mustard in his other hand.
“To combust from within is to be worthy,” his grandmother had continued, placing a hand over her heart. “It’s an end to the daily strife and suffering. Do not be afraid. It is an honor to be chosen for something greater. The pain is only temporary, is secondary to that moment of joyous transformation. The flame we become is eternal.”
Now a sob caught in his throat, and he gathered the remaining bits of her into an empty shoebox to bury in the family plot behind the house. He’d briefly contemplated calling emergency services, but t his was what she would have wanted. They’d all been buried without ceremony or intervention from the state.
He eyed the side table with its overflowing ashtray and empty liquor bottles, and his lip lifted in disgust. She’d turned herself into a human candle, a fatty, gaseous wick that had burned slowly as she slept in a drunken stupor. He toed at the cigarette butts littering the floor, the most likely culprits. He wondered if she’d even felt the pain. In the end he supposed she’d gotten what she wanted, even if it was accidental. Was it still a sin if it wasn’t intentional? He wasn’t sure, but he hoped she’d felt some sort of rapture.
* * *
Solomon’s own parents had died when he was just a child of two. They’d gone up hand in hand, high school sweethearts to the very end. Those present often told Solomon they’d never seen a truer love, a stronger devotion—to each other and to the Spark. His grandmother had raised him on her own, feeding his mind with stories of their stewardship and strength, stories that simultaneously scared and awed him.
As a child he’d lie in bed at night, terrified he’d fall asleep only to wake again to his skin blistering and curling beneath the sudden eruption of glittering orange flames from his chest. Despite assurances from his grandmother that combustion was nothing to fear, he remained anxious at the idea of being horrifically taken before he was ready.
An only child, he’d endured a rather mediocre adolescence on the compound until he was kicked out of the Conflagration’s homeschool group due to a series of escalating pranks, the culmination of which involved hiding garden slugs inside Jason Oberman’s sister’s sandwich. Whether or not Jason was also involved was never determined by the adults present, and Solomon wasn’t about to rat on his best friend.
And so, at fifteen, he found himself at public school for the first time in his life, cut off from all he knew and previously understood about his place in the world he’d inhabited. He was teased for the enamel pin he wore that depicted a blackened human form surrounded by orange fire, and he was ridiculed for the pamphlets about transformative combustion he handed out to his peers. They taunted him with insults like “inbred” and “trailer trash,” words he knew, on some misguided level, related to the rambling acreage dotted with sagging homes that he lived on.
A few weeks into winter term, Mrs. Hensel had taken him aside and removed the pin from the lapel of his coat, suggesting he keep his reading material at home. It was scaring the other kids.
“I took a look at some of your flyers,” she’d said, pocketing the pin. “They’re not based in science, Solomon. Do you understand?”
He’d stared at the ground and shrugged. Her shoes were sensible low-heeled pumps, just like his grandmother’s.
“I don’t want to see them again, ok? You’re too smart to fall for that junk.”
He lingered in the hallway long after the sharp echoes of her heels on the floor had faded.
The next day she set a copy of Firestarter on his desk. “I thought you might enjoy this,” she’d said, then returned to the front of the room as the bell rang, signaling the start of the period.
He eyed the cover incredulously. He expected this kind of joke from the other kids, but not Mrs. Hensel. Embarrassed, he slipped the book into his backpack before anyone could see it.
Anger simmered beneath his skin the rest of the school day, flaring whenever he caught a glimpse of the book peeking from his backpack. By seventh period he was vibrating with anger, fighting the urge to do something destructive as he busted through the school’s heavy doors and careened home on his bike.
But none of the other kids on the property came out to see him after school, and Jason’s mother said he was grounded. Solomon chucked rocks in the pond for a while, then grew bored. Out of begrudging curiosity, he opened the book.
“What did you think?” Mrs. Hensel had asked him when he returned the book two days later.
“It was alright,” he said. “Do you have anything else?”
She gave him Fahrenheit 451 next, and he returned a few days later at lunch to ask her some questions about it. She sent him home with another book.
Soon he was spending lunch in her classroom, discussing whatever novel she’d picked out for him next, each one more challenging than the last. They slowly moved away from books about fire in the same way that Solomon saw his friends at home pulling away from him, too busy to hang out with the kid who attended secular school. Sometimes Mrs. Hensel would ask him questions about the Conflagration, and he found himself struggling to provide adequate answers. Over the next three years, he came to understand that his parents’ death was nothing more than a suicide pact encouraged by the Conflagration.
After his graduation ceremony, Mrs. Hensel had hugged him and, with tears in her eyes, told him how proud of him she was. She pressed something small and metal into his hand, and his fingers closed around the familiar pointed edges of his combustion pin.
He craned his neck up into the nearly empty bleachers, searching, but he couldn’t find his grandmother.
* * *
He dragged the ruined recliner out to the back porch and pushed it into the corner against the side of the house, leaving the slider door yawning open to air out the living room. Somewhere in the distant trees a raven mocked him, its call echoing off the barren landscape.
He sat in a weather-worn deck chair and held the shoebox in his lap, numbly gazing out at the weedy expanse that had ceased to be a backyard the moment he’d stopped mowing the lawn and left for college. The dwarf burning bushes planted along the edge of the lawn had shed their brilliant red leaves and now formed a scraggly, twiggy hedge. The surrounding countryside stretched off in either direction, vast and flat, punctuated here and there with neglected houses.
He was truly alone now, the last of the family and their bizarre religion. So this was how it all ended.
He tucked his chin into the collar of his coat, burrowing down beneath the November chill, and tried to decide what to do next. His life would continue as normal, he supposed. His diploma would arrive in a few weeks, and he’d return to his apartment on the other side of the state to continue job hunting.
He must have dozed, because the doorbell jolted him awake.
The cold had made his joints stiff, and he moved slowly back inside, setting the shoebox on the cluttered kitchen counter before peeking through the window near the front door. A young woman stood on the porch, shuffling her skinny legs in an attempt at generating warmth. Her breath huffed in a foggy cloud, billowing up from beneath a thick scarf coiled around the lower half of her face.
He cracked open the door and a blast of cold air rushed in, flinging the door open farther than he’d intended, which the woman mistook for an invitation and hurried inside.
“Oh,” she said, blinking rapidly at him as she unwound the scarf. “Solomon. Hello. I didn’t realize you were home.”
Her nostrils flared and her eyes widened, taking in the living room and the bare spot where his grandmother’s chair should have been. “Oh, Solomon,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry.” He could see the sheen of tears brimming along her lower lashes. “She was a good woman. Her flame will dance eternal in the coalescence.”
Solomon had no idea who she was. He hadn’t turned off the TV, and its chattering combined with the stench of burned flesh was overpowering and disorienting. But she’d said the right things, so she must have some affiliation with the Conflagration. He knew there were a handful of other families in the area that didn’t live on the property.
She laughed, lightly, and wiped at her wet cheeks with the sleeve of her coat. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
* * *
She helped him tidy the house and teased him while he tried to guess who she was. She moved easily about, knowing instinctively where things belonged. By the time she was pouring a box of pasta into a pot of water on the stove, the house had mostly aired out, and he still hadn’t figured out her identity.
“So, what were you doing here this afternoon?” he asked.
“I come by occasionally to help your grandmother with the chores. Keep her company. Or I did, anyway. She didn’t really have anyone else.”
His face burned at the indirect slight, but it explained why she was so comfortable moving about the house. His grandmother had never mentioned anyone coming by to help her, but they hadn’t been on the best terms since he’d left home and accused her of enabling his parents’ death.
“You still don’t know who I am?” she asked, and he shook his head.
He racked his brain as he prepared a salad, trying to think of anyone from his childhood he might have forgotten, but by the time the pasta was ready, he still had no idea other than that there was a vague familiarity to the crinkle of her eyes when she smiled and the angular cut of her jaw.
“Is this technically a blind date?” he joked as they sat down to eat.
She laughed and bit into a dinner roll, and then all at once he saw her as she’d been when they were kids, sinking her teeth into the slug sandwich.
“Oh my god, you’re Maggie Oberman,” he said, clutching his fork in a death grip.
“Guilty,” she said, and cracked a smile. Her eyes crinkled in that way he remembered, and it was like seeing her anew.
“The last time I saw you… you must have been ten, twelve?”
“Thirteen,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “To the day.”
His stomach clenched. Right. It had been her birthday.
“I’m… I’m so sorry,” he stammered. He resisted the urge to push his plate away, to check beneath the leaves of lettuce for an unwelcome surprise. “I’m not like that anymore.”
They sat in silence, staring at the nub of a fat, creamy candle on the dining table between them, dried wax puddled at its base. Maggie nibbled at the bread, lost in thought.
“It’s too bad it went out,” she said eventually. “You weren’t here with your grandmother to join the flames?”
Solomon grimaced. “No, she was gone when I arrived this afternoon.” A lump had lodged in his throat, and he swallowed rapidly, trying to force down the mix of emotions percolating within. “I’d just talked to her on the phone last night to let her know I was coming…” He sighed and set down his fork, remembering the scene that had greeted him, and his stomach turned once more.
“We can light it again from the coalescence at my parents’ house,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I know it’s not exactly the same, but it’s mostly ceremonial. Her flame burns bright regardless.”
“You don’t really believe that shit, do you?” he couldn’t help but ask.
She smiled sadly at him. “I saw my brother taken by the Spark. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
* * *
He’d only planned on staying until his diploma arrived, but he felt sorry for Maggie. She’d lost Jason so recently and seemed unhealthily attached to her parents—she still lived with them in her childhood bedroom at twenty-two. And with his grandmother’s death, did she even have any friends left, let alone anyone near her own age?
Then there was the lingering guilt from his childhood pranks, which she was too good to never mention. He felt like he owed it to her to stick around for a while, to prove his changed heart. Hell, maybe he could even talk her out of eventually setting herself on fire.
Somehow these swirling thoughts kept him tethered, delaying his departure long after his diploma arrived in the mail. The mortgage on his grandmother’s house was paid in full, so he didn’t have to worry about rent. And it was a comfortable house, all things considered. The basement was stocked full of nonperishables, and Maggie regularly came over wanting to cook for him. If it made her happy, who was he to deny her the pleasure?
Most nights she’d come over after her evening shift at the diner and they’d watch TV or play cards, but on the weekends they explored the abandoned homes littering the landscape, many of which had sat vacant for so long that neither of them knew who the previous occupants had been.
There were four properties totaling somewhere around twenty-five acres, dotted with sagging mobile homes and rusted-out RVs. Any fencing demarcating boundaries between the land had long been taken down to form one big commune, and as a child he’d been encouraged to ramble and wander with his friends as they pleased. The only difference now was that there were even more homes and even more trash littering the landscape, and he and Maggie appeared to be the only living souls.
They spent chilly afternoons walking the lonely expanse of the property, discussing books and their aspirations as they poked about the houses, voyeurs to the mundane intimacies of long-dead lives. They searched for clues among the faded photographs hanging on the walls, the rodent-nibbled boxes of cereal in the pantries, attempting to discern anything about the people who’d existed there previously. Despite the perceived closeness of their community, some had still felt the urge to loot, strewing the deceased’s belongings about. Many of the homes displayed sooty, blackened patches on the floor or couch, testaments to those who had vanished in such a horrific manner.
The emptiness of the structures seemed to sober Maggie, their bleakness and sadness enveloping the both of them like a weighted blanket. As the weeks passed and they continued to explore, she seemed to let go of some of her upbringing, no longer mentioning sparks or flames or spontaneous ignition. She still wore her own combustion pin on her coat, but he suspected it was because she’d forgotten it was there. He had a hunch that if he were to remove it without her knowledge, she wouldn’t even realize it was missing.
“I’m not as innocent as you think I am,” she told him one day.
They were exploring the ruins of his uncle’s house, left to rot and molder after his death. It was one of the only homes whose former occupant he was sure of, tucked back toward the edge of the property and sheltered behind a barren grove of quaking aspens. From the mold-spotted window, he could see other dilapidated houses scattered in the distance. The setting sun reflected off their windowpanes, illuminating them as if from within.
He turned from the window and she stepped toward him, picking her way across the mildewed carpet and wrapping her arms around his waist. She tipped her head back and stared into his eyes, a smile tugging at her lips.
“I’m not totally in the dark about the world.”
* * *
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked later in bed, tracing circles on her back with the tip of a finger. “How they all pretend it’s this mysterious force picking and choosing, when we all turn a blind eye to the fact that they’re just setting themselves on fire?”
Maggie turned to face him, her bleary face dubious.
“Self-immolation is considered holy by some religions.”
“But not ours,” he pushed back.
She shrugged. “Does it really matter? They’re happy in their last moments.”
Images of his uncle flashed through his mind, howling in agony as the funnel of flames churned around him. He hadn’t seemed happy.
“Don’t you care that we’ve been lied to our whole lives?”
“No.” She turned toward him and embraced him. “Not if every lie has led us to being right here.”
* * *
He stayed through the spring, until the ground had thawed enough and they were able to bury the shoebox containing his grandmother’s fingers and toe, which they’d kept in the deep freeze through the winter. He picked up some freelance jobs online and transcribed interviews late into the evenings when Maggie worked swing shifts at the diner.
The days blurred into bedsheets, into rainstorms and power outages and weeks entangled in each other’s limbs. They smoked cigarettes out back and drank coffee in the family plot, talking to his dead relatives as they tramped through the mud. Sometimes they wandered down the road over to her family’s house and had dinner with her parents and various other members of the Conflagration, the coalescence dancing brightly between them as they ate. He despised the candle but swallowed his disgust out of self-preservation. They were feeding him, after all, and he didn’t really have a steady job.
He left these meals tense and irritated; too much talk of all the things he’d tried to distance himself from boiled his blood. Maggie’s parents had even sent a tealight home with him, kindled by their coalescence, which he’d reluctantly used to light his grandmother’s puddle of a candle. At night when he couldn’t sleep, he’d wander downstairs and stare resentfully into its flickering flame.
He wondered why he still lingered—he certainly wasn’t happy here, even though he enjoyed the time he spent with Maggie. He should be job hunting. What was the point of leaving home and getting a degree if he didn’t use it?
But then the headlights of Maggie’s car would flash across the dark living room as she pulled into the driveway, and he’d shut his laptop and forget about his doubts as they tumbled into bed.
* * *
He was asleep when she did it.
He could never be sure what exactly tugged him to the surface of consciousness since Maggie never made a sound. He bobbed in and out of wakefulness, relishing the warmth radiating off her body tucked against his chest. Until he became too hot. Painfully so. And since when did Maggie’s hair smell like smoke?
He opened his eyes to a wall of orange flames. They leapt and danced around him, tongues licking his bare skin. He cried out and struggled from beneath the tangled sheets, his skin searing and blistering. Panic surged through him.
Maggie lay unmoving beside him, engulfed in fire. He beat at her body with the blankets, the smoldering pillow, trying to smother the blaze, but his activity only drove the fire to a new frenzy. It spread from the bed to the nightstand, to the carpets, and with a sob he realized she was already gone. Beneath the inferno Maggie’s skin blackened and peeled.
He choked and retched, snot pouring down his nose and eyes burning from the acrid smoke filling the room. He scrambled off the bed, falling to the floor. His raw flesh screamed, but he managed to crawl from the bedroom and down the stairs, fumbling his car keys on the way out of the house.
He stumbled to his car and climbed in, naked, and sped off. A cloud of dust trailed his car until his tires bumped the highway onramp. In the rearview mirror a black plume of smoke funneled into the sky.
He never went back.
* * *
Maggie’s parents must have found the ruined house at some point. No doubt they went looking for her when she hadn’t returned home for a few days. For a while he received phone calls from an unknown number, but he never answered, didn’t want to be pulled back into the Conflagration and all it entailed. Better to let them all think he was dead, too.
The images of her blackening flesh kept him up at night, the crackle of the flames filling his head and waking him with a start, covered in a sheen of sweat and his heart hammering behind his ribs. Her betrayal weighed like a pile of stones in his chest, crushing and agonizing.
He didn’t sleep well. The burn marks on his chest and thighs ached and throbbed long after the wounds had healed. The leathery scars were a constant reminder of his fear and failure, how nothing he could have said or done would have made a difference. He showered and dressed in the dark, unable to stomach the sight of himself.
He found a steady job in his field and rented a ramshackle apartment. He attended various support groups, hunkering down in metal folding chairs while he stared into the black abyss of paper cups of coffee, careful to avoid the steam wafting into his face.
It was at one of these groups where he eventually met Violet. She’d sat next to him and made snide comments under her breath while the counselor droned on about grief and trauma, and everyone sat in a circle nodding sadly. He knew she was trying to get a reaction out of him, but his mind was too thick with the swirling fog of guilt and abandonment to care.
She tried again, week after week, until finally garnering a smirk from him, at which point she cornered him at the coffee station and asked if he’d like to go out sometime. Caught off guard, he said yes.
Their first date was a disaster. He’d unknowingly picked a restaurant accented with lit candles on every table. His hands shook uncontrollably, which she mistook as nervousness. He spilled his drink on her when he tried to put the candles out, the taunting dance of the flames just too much for him to handle.
“Sorry,” he muttered, unable to look her in the eyes. “I don’t like fire.”
She laughed it off and told him it was fine; she didn’t really like the dress she was wearing anyway. And to his surprise, she invited him to a movie the following week.
Gradually, in time, he forgot about Maggie. His mind didn’t conjure images of her burning, blackening body each time he went to sleep. His childhood became the faded, hazy memories of a nightmare one couldn’t quite recall all the details of, but which certain smells or objects elicited a sudden, adverse reaction.
A few years after moving in with Violet, he found her at the computer with the webpage for the Conflagration open on the screen.
“What are you looking at?” he asked sharply, and she turned to him with a profound sadness etched into the creases of her face.
“I was cleaning your car, and I found this under the seat,” she said, extending her palm toward him. His combustion pin rested in her hand. “I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up. Why didn’t you tell me?”
His face reddened and he turned away, but she caught him in a hug and pressed herself into him. “I just thought you’d been in a house fire. I’m so sorry. Those people can’t hurt you anymore. You’re safe here.”
He couldn’t bear to think of Maggie again—already his breath was coming in panicked little gasps. Violet shushed him with soothing sounds and folded him into her arms, rocking him gently until his shaking subsided.
* * *
When she told him she was pregnant, he cried. He didn’t know anything about being a father, couldn’t even remember his own. How could he possibly be one? It would be a disaster; the child would end up just as anxious as he was.
“It’s an opportunity for growth,” Violet said, placing his hands on the swell of her stomach. “A chance to begin again.”
They decorated the nursery in shades of green, calming colors that evoked the mysteriousness and solitude of an evergreen forest. Violet’s excitement was contagious, and after a while he began to think everything might end up alright after all.
The labor was intense and complicated. He clutched her hand as she sweated and huffed and screamed in agony for nearly two days, and when the first cries of their child filled the room, he smoothed back Violet’s damp hair and kissed her forehead, telling her how proud of her he was, how he’d never met anyone stronger.
The doctor placed the baby in his arms and heat swelled in his heart, throbbing and spreading hot through his veins as he gazed down at his beautiful daughter. He laughed, delighted, as the blood boiled and raced through his body. Sweat trickled down his forehead as the pressure within ballooned. He held his child before him, the most incredible thing he’d ever seen, and could swear his hands shimmered, molten and golden, beneath the skin. His vision blurred but he smiled wider, his heart fracturing.
And then it was consuming him, a roaring sound filling his ears. He could see Violet was screaming—and god, she was beautiful too!—but he couldn’t hear her over the crackling and snapping of the flames leaping around him. Violet tumbled from the hospital bed and tangled in the IV tubing, scrambling for the baby as she clawed her way toward him before a veil of black smoke obscured his vision.
He hugged his daughter closer and smiled. He was alight and shining, howling his rapture as the flames devoured him.
* * *
Margo Pecha lives in southwest Washington state where she writes about obsession, paranoia, and rurality. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies like Even Cozier Cosmic and is forthcoming from Fraidy Cat Quarterly and Demagogue Press. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s working in her gardens and herding chickens.
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