It felt like roots. Light
tendrils gripping his veins. In a panic, he tried to remember something happy.
A firm stalk to grasp as his feet slipped against the mud. For some reason, the
word “fig” slipped with ease into his head.
He remembered the stench
of the fig of his childhood. The way the fruit smelt as it lay rotting next to
the pool, and the way that smell dragged the fruit bats clapping their wings
out of the dark like admirers of a cult leader. Clap, clap, in the dusk.
They’d gorge themselves on the ripe fruit, and then shit down the walls of the house in purple streaks.
It looked like blood in
the slow autumn sunset.
He didn’t mind too much
about the massacre happening on his parent’s wall, but, instead, went to the
garage, where the chemicals were kept. The HTH for the pool, the Jeye’s fluid
for the drains. His neighbour had shown him how to let the Jeyes dribble into
the HTH in a jar and then bubble as the chemicals refused to get along… Explode…
A while later, his friend
lay in the hospital bed, crying without sound as the fluid seeped through the
thin tube into his veins. Living, not happy.
The burns doctors laughed
as they shared pots of coffee in the cafeteria. The hats of the coffee urns
dipping as they boiled. A sandwich sat under the lights, waiting for a surgeon
to point at it wearily. The surgeon’s wife lay at home, crying as a character
from a soapie fell out of love. Again.
He knew the dirty smell of
his friend- the way blonde hair smelled as it fizzed into flames. And he knew
that the time of childhood was past… The time of making fires for no reason and
living without consequences. No fires without burns.
On the radio, an
advertisement for detergent was playing.
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