Questions by Fire

We say cross my heart and hope to die, but two out of three know they lie.

“No,” she whispered as he doused her body with gasoline. How had she gotten to this point? She knew it represented a climax of some order of despair or activity of attrition, but of what specifics? She remembers that weeks before they dropped their daughter off at her mother’s and checked into a cheap motel on the outskirts of town. They carried in with them enough groceries and heroin for a three week bender. It started off so well. Needle and vein. Ecstasy. Her lover beside her.

They rarely ate. The heroin ran dry after one week. He left her in the dark motel room, her optimism waning and realization tightly locked within her as she slid the bolt into its place. The moments alone found her wondering what, exactly, did she think the outcome would resemble. Catastrophe, her mind whispered to her as softly as the snail slides over the leaf and leaves a silver trail of slime behind. Did the leaf know the snail left traces? Would it matter? She thought of her body as a cockroach, all armored with the unknown to cover the softer flesh. She sought the corner and remained there until he returned.

“No,” she shook her head as the deluge of gas emptied out the can and over his body. Her eyes stung; his remained closed as he threw the red can in the back of the car and climbed in, shutting the door. Climax, she thought, required forward chronological order, but could life retrograde, reverse itself, the build up would be destroyed, and an anticlimactic implosion would occur, requiring her to look for the genesis not the consummation of events, and how far back would she go, without anxiety. Would she vacuum her life back into the womb? He locked the doors.

He locked the door behind him and bolted it. They shot up, and eyes sank deeper into the flesh as the flesh itself began to sag from the bone, and the bone began to dissemble from the marrow. The night claims what is hers, she thought as she slid off the bed and studied with the lexicon of weevils the carpet fibers. Do weevils wear watches? How do they know when and where and does the question why ever affect any of nature other than a human being? Why, she thought then repeated the word as if it contained a clue to her predicament pending. Why? Why? Why? Ten times, and the mystery burrowed itself into her flesh. She would receive no answer from repetition.

“No,” she said and tapped on her window weakly. He retrieved the second gas can from the back seat. He poured the gas on the back floor and she heard it go glup, glup glup, quicker as air entered the can. He moved the can to the center console and continued pouring. She faded from the present and remembered why she was where she was, but it didn’t make the moment more solid; It didn’t make the build-up or the climax something she wanted. She loathed this moment as she loathed the moments leading up to the moment. “Vacuum,” she said as her head hit the window and her eyes closed revealing the tired eyelashes moving disturbed like a centipede.

He no longer resembled her lover. The room, with the shades drawn, appeared to be cast out of the depths of Dante’s hell and the walls breathed a combination of flesh and metal like a living Giger painting. The floor moved like liquid lava. Screams, deciphered with the grammatical knowledge of a bed mite, penetrated her little ear. Did all things so small hear hell’s constant dirge? And what of silence? Silence existed only in heaven. Earth’s rotation, the constant motion led the rebel yell of the worm in the dirt. She no longer walked. She crawled, lost within the cavities of her cells. He shot her up-he appearing more and more like the final spiral of hell, but still not the climax-shot her up with venom. She watched him bite into her arm, pincher ant, small, but not to be hidden from the eyes of a mite. This has to end, my dear. She heard him say that.

“No,” she pulled her head from the window and grabbed his hand as he emptied the second gas can. “We can’t do this.” Her hand felt weak, and she fell back against the door and her shoulder took the brunt, letting her head softly careen back against the window. Her forehead smeared the window with sweat, gasoline, and some grease. What sort of living hell, she thought, could be so intense that this seemed a possible alternative? She had no answer. Two kinds of people exist in life: those who believe there are more good answers than there are questions, and those who believe questions far outweigh the paltry answers found in a life long search. She had questions. The plethora of questions, she called them. Her first question never changed. How did we get to this moment? She had asked herself that question in the crib? Now, here, presently, the question weighed more than it used to.

The third week of lockdown in the hell they created, he turned violent. The food rotted on the mini kitchen table and in the refrigerator. She thought decay made a home for everything but thought. The body could get accustomed to it, but the mind found problems with it, rebelled against it, could not accept transformation thus called it death. His violence wasn’t against her, though she took much. It functioned as a repellent to the decay his bones felt but his mind refused to accept. They were dying. If something didn’t change they would die, a slow decay, a leaf under the pressure and weight of snowfall. Did the snow know? He decided to take this decay into his own hands. She agreed, but she didn’t remember exactly what to.

“No,” she pleaded as he lit the match. He eyed her with his violence, with his hate of decaying anymore than they had to. She could have reached the lock and lifted it and exited the car, but something held her back. Did she agree to this? Had her life passed the no return point clause? Did her mind no longer think of the future? Does a branch cry when it breaks off the tree? Inevitable, perhaps she thought as the match flung its way to the floor of the car and the flames burst. The flames spread over her legs and up her torso and arms. The flames screamed like red snakes from hell and consumed her. “No. No. No,” passersby witnessed the girl scream as the flames devoured her entire body. She didn’t hear her own scream-the silence of pain drowned out all noise.

I sat next to a man at rehab who suffered third degrees burns all over his body. He worked as a welder and his overalls got covered in grease just as a spark from above fell upon him and ignited the stain. I asked him, because I had heard, if the burning only hurt for a bit then numbed because it killed the nerve endings. “Hell no,” he said. Then said one last word to himself quietly-“No.”

Why didn’t you leave the car? I wonder. She replies to me, almost as if I should know the question and the answer, “Would you break a promise?” But the pain, the pain had to have been excruciating.