| |
Sample Stories
A
Gift of Fire
Anna Buckner
“Is this me?” I asked the wind, sitting on a pile of ashes,
half-burned papers, and smoldering stuffed animals. “Is there a
purpose to this nightmare?”
The fire spread rapidly. My mother and I were in the kitchen
when we saw smoke rising above the doorway. We rushed to the
corridor. Already the heat was oppressive. At the far end of the
hallway, my bedroom was shooting flames out the door. We barely
had time to run out of the apartment.
Kind neighbors opened their doors and we called the fire
station. It was such a cold January. Mountains of snow prevented
traffic from moving fast. It took the firemen half an hour to
get to our building. By then, the damage was done. But we were
alive, although shocked.
When we re-entered the apartment, the smell was terrible. Inside
the kitchen cabinets, the Tupperware had melted into globs of
white plastic. Some of them had melted over the edge of the
shelf and onto the shelf underneath, leaving a cobweb of plastic
threads linking shelf to shelf.
The whole apartment was pitch black.
My bedroom was empty and dark as a cave. Whatever was not burned
had been thrown outside onto the sidewalk. A pile of smoldering
ashes. Childhood memories, secret diaries, schoolbooks, research
for my next paper. All gone. My clothes. My guitar. My bed.
There’s something eerie about picking out remnants of your life
from the sidewalk. I remember a fierce wind when I went out to
look at the pile outside. Snow covered the top half of my old
life. Smoke still escaped from the inside of the mound. Several
half-burned pieces of paper gently glided away in the sky, like
feathers on the wind.
You don’t think about not being materialistic when something
like this happens. You want your things back. Now. You want your
life back, the way it was before.
But did I really want it back?
For years, had I not made loud noises about leaving for a
foreign country? Had I not made half-baked plans several times
to go out on my own? Had I not dreamed of being far away from
here?
I stayed long enough to help my mother redo the apartment and
get settled again. Friends came and offered shelter while
helping scrub furniture.
Then, I boarded a plane for England.
For a year, I thought back on the fire. The fire that wrecked my
sleepy life. The fire that made me move. The fire that kicked me
out of a torpor and into action. From dream to reality. Not just
a fire. A cosmic wake up call. An alarm clock set by the Powers
That Be. A gift of fire.
There is also a mystery attached to this blaze. The firemen
never found an explanation for its start. The captain shrugged
and said something about a “possible bad plug.” Well, the
electricity had been checked recently and the insurance agent
did not think there was a problem there.
To this day, seventeen years later, there is still no
explanation.
But I know what it was. I know this fire was for me. How else
can I account for the fact that only my bedroom was reduced to
ashes?
I know it was sent as a present to open up a new life. It was a
sacred fire, a liberating fire, a purifying fire. A sacred fire
needed to instill life in the corpse-like Frankenstein I had
become. A fire of hope. And it was not too big or powerful. Just
enough to get me started on the right path.
Today, when I see a fire in a fireplace, I am not scared. I
think “thank you.” Thank you for having been the agent of my
freedom. For making space for the new. New clothes, new guitar,
new bed, of course, but, most importantly, new and happy life.
-
TOP
- |
|
