1. A fire is not at all like love.
2. “All’s well that ends well.” [i]
3. We were burning cardboard on the doorstep of your house at night. The weather was warm and there was no wind.
4. We didn’t intend to build a fire.
1. The pine needles littering your front yard had multiplied since I last stopped by.
2. The last piece of cardboard crumbled into gray ash on the edge of the porch.
3. Gathering handfuls of dry needles we built a pyre. You lit your cigarette off a low flame and jumped back, burned.
4. (You underestimated the intensity.)
5. I lit mine from yours.
6. I had never built a fire with you.
7. I had never built a fire.
1. The pine needles were what caught the fence on fire.
2. The fence caught the house on fire, or we caught the house on fire.
3. We burned everything. We burned our clothes.
4. “Every choice an artist makes is an act of exclusion as well as inclusion.” [ii]
5. The flames spit and fumed, well-fed, and we watched each other’s faces through the licks, our poised smiles distorted in the heat like hellish Cheshire cats.
6. We built the fire too close to the door.
7. When you approached the house to get water the doorknob was (almost) too hot to touch.
8. “In partial-thickness, or 2nd degree burns, the skin surface is damaged, but the injury is limited to outer layers.” [iii]
9. You took a picture of my smile, orange-toothed and euphoric in the waxing light.
10. A fire is very much like a friendship.
11. Smoking makes your teeth yellow, not orange.
12. “Use of color in art is determined at least as much by the artist’s personal inclinations and cultural contexts as by the materials at hand.” [iv]
13. I am not an artist.
14. I would paint the scene with fire-colors.
1. The next day the landlord left you a typed notice on the door.
2. A threat of eviction for reckless damage to property.
3. A tangle of pencil handwriting in the margin of the typed legal notice, scribbled
4. Joe: if you ever want to stop drinking, give me a call. I did not get in trouble every time I drank but every time I got in trouble, I had been drinking. – Mike
5. Mike is a poet landlord.
6. Your house did not burn down.
1. “All’s well that ends well.” [v]
2. Your eyes always look like you are squinting into a fire.
3. A fire is not at all like love.
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[i] William Shakespeare, British playwright
[ii] The Chemistry of Color, published 1974
[iii] Wilderness and Rescue Medicine: A Practical Guide for the Basic and Advanced Practitioner, 2nd edition
[iv] The Chemistry of Color
[v] Optimism/Bullshit