Word Smoke

She had always heard of book burnings. Extravagant attempts to control the narrative, setting fire to ideas, the small-minded never realizing that the resulting smoke just spread the ideas far and wide.

She thought that civilization had grown beyond such displays. Today proved her wrong. She stopped on the staircase and looked into the library, to find her father piling books in the middle of the floor, pulling them randomly from the shelves and shouting incoherently about sedition and protests. As the pile grew, he alternated drinking a slug from the decanter of his best Scotch and pouring a slug over the pile. “That should burn . . . burn hot . . . burn it all . . .” he muttered. He seemed unaware of the drops of alcohol he dripped down his shirt front and across his sock feet.

She had always assumed that her father’s pristine grooming extended to the things she couldn’t see, but a part of her noted that he had a hole in the toe of one sock. “What a strange detail to notice,” she thought. He piled the books higher and higher, a mountain of pages and spines and covers, while she sat on the stairs clinging to the spindles and hoping he wouldn’t look her way.

She never dreamed that he would do any permanent harm. Minor destruction of replaceable things -- yes. Nicks and cracks, rips and tears, scratches and bruises – yes. But rarely anything that couldn’t be repaired. Never anything that didn’t heal and fade over time. It never occurred to her that this time might be different. At least not until he struck the first match, and by then it was too late.

The sunrise reds and yellows of the flame dancing happily on the end of the match had no meaning. Part of her brain had slowed to micro-movement, subdividing every second into infinite slices that didn’t end. Another part refused to see, refusing to watch the events unfold. And yet another part was moving faster than light, trying to find a way to make it stop but knowing she couldn’t. The fragments held her body in thrall, frozen in place, as they battled each other for control. She watched the match fall into the pile and appear to fade.

When the second match flame whooshed into being, her breath had only just started again. As the match fell, she realized that the first flame had only hidden, waiting to show itself as it climbed up through the paper soaked in alcohol. The second match landed on top of a book and slipped down to the one below it and then the one below that, leaving a tiny trail of fire behind it. Its final resting place was squarely in the middle of a puddle of Scotch, pooled in the crease of a spine of a thick book that was splayed open. The flame moved ever faster as it followed the network of drips and streams across the pile and onto the floor. By the time it reached her father’s sock – the one without the hole – it had grown like a wave crashing into shore. It splashed up across his feet and up the front of his pants leg, finally making the leap to his sodden vest and shirt in a sudden surge.

He roared in rage, beating his breast in anger that his own actions had turned on him. His bravado only succeeded in making it worse. The Scotch in his hand was transformed into flame as if by magic. Ellie’s brain finally unlocked her body and allowed her to run down the stairs and into the library just as her father turned and lunged through the glass of the French doors, leaving a trail of flames behind him. The shattered glass and shards of wood did nothing to muffle the sound of his screams as the fire ate away at his clothes and skin. She tried to leap over the pile of books to get to the French doors but the flames bit into her skirts and the book covers grabbed at her ankles as if to say, “Save us!”

She realized that she was in the middle of the pyre as she fell backward, arms outstretched in the hope that the air would solidify and hold her up. She became a feather floating through the wind of flame and as she landed, she looked up. Smoke hung so thick in the library’s rafters that she could read words in it, the words her father had been trying so hard to destroy. She smiled as she reached further into the flames, knowing the ideas her father called sedition would drift out of the room and across the country to enflame ever more people, becoming embers that could flame up at the slightest breeze. It wouldn’t take long before the fire would be too large to fight. The ones who tried to contain it would have to give up and let it burn itself out, leaving a path of destruction that could be rebuilt better and stronger by the ones who had breathed in the words.