Smokeless Fire

Each night Jane awakes to the smell of fire.

She can hardly remember a single instance, but each time Jane is confronted with the familiarity of it. At first, she thinks she’s dreaming it. Then she thinks it a recurring dream. But over time the dark circles form around her eyes and deepen beyond her, or anyone else’s, denial—like growing pools of ink in small bowls, that surround confused corneas floating in the center, tired, and afraid.

And there it is again. The smell of fire. She almost forgot. The smoke that follows disaster, like black follows white. But where is it coming from?

The room is clear. And the house is dark.

Everyone is asleep, except for Jane. Paranoid, she lifts the candle on her bedside table to her nose and inhales deep. It smells like the old man’s cologne—a smell her sister’s love, but not her favorite. It gives her that much more wakefulness and she stands, and as she does her lungs fill with smoke. And pain.

Smoke rises. Get down.

Jane catches her breath on the ground and crawls low, with her chin nearly touching the ground, and makes her way to the door. She needs to see if her sisters are okay, and how much fire there is. It feels all too familiar.

She can see the door and the hallway beyond it.

In fact, she can see everything. The room is empty and not foggy in the slightest, and where black smoke, ash, and violent heat waves should suffocate the air there is nothing. Except a clear, heavy pressure and thickness to the air surrounding her. As well as the ever-present smell of smokeless fire.

In the thick there is a constant movement, like gas bursting from a pipe, but not random or sporadic. Even in the darkness of this room, on this moonless night, there is a nearly solid tube of motion plunging and pulling its way through the thick air, out the doorway, and down the hall towards the stairs that lead to the first floor. Pulling Jane just slightly with it, tugging her subtly out of bed.

Jane stands up in the sightless smoke and still can’t breathe. Instead, her lungs fill with heat and burn on the inside, despite her skin tightening to prick points to fight off the chill her nightgown offers no protection from.

Jane feels the pull again. And with it, relief as she moves with the distortion. She steps more fully into this channel and takes her first full breath in minutes and realizes with it just how dire this night truly is.

I need to get out of the house.

Jane struggles to follow this single path the smoke wants her to take as she makes her way down the dark hallway. The doors to her sister’s rooms are closed. She opens her mouth to scream to wake them, but there is no air for it and no sound comes out. It’s all she can manage to stay in constant motion as the smoke ushers her to the stairs.

Instead of walking, or even running, her feet stumble between each step, and she fall with an unintentional control and speed until she reaches the bottom, where the smoke, or whatever it is, obscures even more of the house.

Down here more than distortion, there is mostly darkness.

Through it, Jane can only see a single path forward. And that path is clear, like looking through the light of a keyhole illuminating a one-way path framed by the front doorway. On the edges of this blinding light, where the room begins to darken and blur outside the motion, Jane can see her father asleep on the couch, sitting by the TV.

He must have fallen asleep to midnight runs of M.A.S.H. again.

Jane can’t see or hear it now, though. Only a hiss.

She coughs and brings her hands to her chest and Jane can’t breathe again. Air-only comes to her as her steady walk breaks into a run. She reaches out to her dad, through the dark pressure, and brushes her father’s wispy, thin, golden hair that folds over the couch cushion. Jane tries to scream, or even speak, to wake her father who is so close to her now.

The only words she can mutter, and only barely then are, “Please…Da-“

But as soon as she touches his head, she is pulled forward and down to the ground. Her limbs fall over her, and more than the motion, she is more surprised by the sound of it, because there is no sound to the impact. Because there is no impact.

Without stopping, Jane is pulled frictionless through the room, taking parts of the rug with her, and towards the light. Which is when her suspicions are replaced with abject horror. She tumbles over herself and can hear the joints in her body cracking as they are jerked as if by many invisible hands, or ropes tied around her neck and limbs. My legs are pulled up and outward and the skin on the nape of her neck and upper back are torn as she is pulled violently through the door and towards the light.

And for the first time, she can scream.

Her lungs burn, and now her body does, too. Out here, the cold moonless night air is pounded with heat waves from the inferno standing behemothic in front of her.

The fire is real.

And it feels real as her feet are pulled towards it. And Jane is moved within it.

She can no longer her scream over the oppressive sound of the air as it is being ripped to pieces by the flames. She can no longer feel the forces that pull her which don’t hesitate as they pull her further into the fire and towards its center.

Jane cannot make out the feeling of which parts of her are in the fire or not, same as she cannot make out which screams are hers’, the fires’, or her father’s as he belts indirectly past her ear and puts his arm under hers, and pulls hard away from the fire.

The force pulls her, this time harder, into the fire, and in its dancing flames, she sees faces before involuntarily covering her eyes with her arms. There is no discernible moment where her hair is incinerated, just a recognizable smell that follows. All Jane can feel is one huge blanket of pain that both covers her lower body and moves beyond it. Jane kicks with legs that she can no longer feel and may no longer be there, her father pulls hard and they both fall back onto the grass, away from the fire, which reaches out for them.

Without hesitation, he continues to pull Jane back, several feet from the raging inferno in front of them and towards the deck of their home. The fire is both hotter and I am number than it was moments ago. The light intensifies as the ripping sound becomes a screech and eventually a high pitch shriek that stretches out across the entire field of the ranch, leaving only the smallest gap for her father to shout…

“YOU CAN’T HAVE HER.”

Silence.

“AND YOU CAN’T HAVE ME.”

At that moment, the fire roars inwards and the pressure in the air evaporates. Then, the light concentrates into a pillar of light and intensifies, except for two piercing black points standing unshielded in the center of the fire, looking out.

The two black points move outward as flame, and light, curl and whip around them. And from the fire emerges a figure with eyes darker than the smokeless starry night around it, wearing shades of red and black like armor.

“I will have what is mine, Johnathon. And I will take from you the life you took from me.” Scanning the farm, illuminating everting upon sight, his eyes land on Jane. Then, shift to the windows of the second floor—before locking in on her father.

“And Johnathon, you have so much to give.”