The Flame That Spreads

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Its flame did not flicker. Its wax did not melt. I sat crisscross on a patch of dirt and watched. I would not miss what was coming.

Carly came out from behind a white spruce tree, breathing heavily. She threw her pack down and sat at my side, mimicking my pose. She knew how important this was. I wanted to reach over and kiss her. But I couldn’t. Be the candle, I told myself. Unwavering.

My knees ached after three hours, then my lower back and neck. Another hour later my eyes faded, and my head hung. The stars hazed behind the treetops. But I would not let myself sleep. Eyes forward, I unfolded a baggie of cocaine from my coat pocket, dipped two fingertips, and inhaled. The back of my brain came alert. My eyes shot open. Suddenly it didn’t hurt to hold my neck straight. I took another fingertip for good measure.

Two weeks ago, I went to Oneida and stayed at Turning Stone Casino. I bought cocaine from a man in the lobby. He said it was the kind that gave good luck. That night I blew five thousand dollars at the roulette table, and another half-grand up my nose. When I ran out of money, I stumbled back to the Motel 6 on the outskirts of the city.

Halfway there, I felt eyes on me. I looked around and spotted a tall woman under the rusted eave of an abandoned catholic church. She smoked a swisher-sweet cigarillo. Her tie-dye shirt was three sizes too big, and the edges had begun to fray. She stared at me behind oversized gas station sunglasses.

“I see your suffering,” she said.

“My what? Are you a cop?”

She grabbed my wrist. My reflection on the sunglasses swung into view: drooping, overtired eyes sprung open.

“I see your suffering,” she repeated. “You paid more than you owe.”

“You must’ve been at the casino last night,” I said. “Trust me, I paid.”

“I see your older brother, over your childhood bed,” she said.

I stopped.

“I see the machete in his hands. Your father’s blood…” she said and looked up. She squeezed my wrist. “Everywhere.”

“Stop.”

“What if you could make it right?” she asked.

“Truitt died years ago, in the mental ward.”

“You’re not the only one,” she said. She let go of me, pulled her shirt up, and exposed her lower torso. A half-circular scar spread around her belly button in jagged lines. “Injustice is everywhere.”

“How can you say that so calmly?”

She smiled, dragged long on her cigarillo. “I got even.”

I made it back to the hotel room before daylight. Carly stirred the puffy white bed and groaned when I turned on the light. I lay next to her and stared at the slanted purple light coming through the blinds. My eyes wouldn’t close.

“You okay?” she asked.

I waited to respond. “Something weird just happened,” I finally said.

When I finished telling her, she cocked her head, letting the story drip into her ear and settle. “What’re you gonna do?” she finally asked. “Your trauma has followed you everywhere you’ve gone. This could be a chance to ease your mind.”

“Something’s…off about her.”

“Well, there’s always more to a person,” she said. “What if I believed everything my mom said about you?”

I pulled her closer.

Sharp pain in my neck brought me back to the woods. The candle remained vigilant in the cabin window. Morning sun splattered the side of a hill to the south, then spread. I did not take my eyes off the candle. It burned strong. And its light would not be dwarfed.

Carly drooped forward, then collapsed. I knew she wouldn’t make it. While I was getting into my trouble at night, she hardly stayed up past midnight most of the time. We couldn’t be more different. All those teachers said she was doomed when we got together. The same teachers who kicked me out of school for being late, who let Carly do whatever she wanted as long as she kept her four-point-oh grade point average. I couldn’t help being a night owl and right now, when it really mattered, it came quite in handy. I took another bump.

Something moved inside the cabin.

Floorboards groaned. It took all the willpower I had to stay on the candle. A human form crept through a darkened doorway and into the living room. Its head hung low, swaying under a crown of beads. As it neared, candlelight revealed the tall woman, now naked, smeared in ash, with her hair slicked back with blood. The only thing she wore was her sunglasses, reflecting the candlelight. She stopped in the center of the room, swaying. She dropped her shoulders and looked up, shaking and breathing violently. She swayed to the candle, grabbed it with both hands, and carried it to the door. She came out to the small front porch, where she came to a perfect stillness.

“There is no turning back,” she said. “Someone who has caused suffering will have it done to them.”

I nodded.

“Balance, above all,” she said and held the candle aloft, aimed perfectly at the sun.

The flame exploded, blasting her sunglasses away. The eyes underneath were gone, leaving blackened pits surrounded by exposed bone. She kept them on the fire as it multiplied, bloomed past the trees, into the sky. Sunlight shot over the ridgeline and met the fire, causing a conical tornado of white and orange blaze. The cone expanded high, swirling out to space. Then it descended, brightening as it condensed. It flattened outward and fell around us, incinerating trees in every direction. I found myself in the eye of a firestorm. Flames raged in every direction and tore the trees and ground to shreds.

A being hovered above us: humanoid, covered in slimy, moon-grey skin. From the waist down, it stood on a hearty formation of four legs, like a buffalo. Two arms extended on either side, each holding an end of a ropelike appendage originating from the center of its belly button, like an umbilical cord. It landed on the dirt and looked at the tall woman, then at me. It let out a harrowing shriek at the sky that lasted a full minute. When it finished, it swung the cordlike appendage overhead, then brought it down like a whip.

Carly screamed and grabbed her leg. It had been wrapped ankle to thigh. She pulled at it, but only tore patches of skin that stuck to suction cups along the being’s cord. The being sprung out and galloped in a rising circular motion along the inner edge of the storm, dragging her through. Her agony rang all the way to the stars.