But he was already staggering off into the crowd.
They said that he went down to the garden late at night and balanced his foot upon
a bar of wood. Under it a fist of cloth soaked in gasoline. Over it a slab of concrete, to
keep him from moving. They said he managed to hold his foot in the fire for a good
five minutes. That it was a miracle he burned
himself for so long.
Aoife didn’t emerge from her room for a week.
I swept up the takeaway cartons and pens; played
her favourite Liebestraum; told her it hadn’t
been her fault. When she finally came out she
was listening to another world. I spoke and she barely heard.
I shouted and the words dissolved to ash.
They say a prophet is not without honour, save in her own country.
“You’re mistaking fantasy for fortune-telling,” said Elif.
“Maybe.” I looked down at my ordinary hands — unblessed, the nails bitten.
“You can’t fall in love with forest fires.” But you could, I thought. You could fall in
love with the smell of your life going up in smoke.
“He’s alive, you know,” she said.
I’d heard. With grafts and pain and crutches — but Jamie would live.
“If I hadn’t told him —”
“He’ll thank you, later.”
“But I was sure,” she said. “It’s not his thanks I deserve.”
In the end, it was Orla who set the fire. It could have been anyone: my past striding
up from behind me; my own fingers trembling on the match. A tooth for a tooth,
burn for burn. Some things cannot be changed.
I had been out that afternoon, buying her peonies and jam. As I walked back I saw
the sky scrawled dark with smoke, and I knew. Only one side of the building blazed.
The air crimped and pinched as I sprinted down the hallway, hurled myself up the
stairs. Beyond the front door, the heat was an anvil. Bitter char of carbon; of fire
applied to skin. Orla, pink and still, crumpled across the floor.
Peonies sparked and caught. Glass split.
In the middle of the front room — in the thick of leaping flames — stood the
prophet. Brilliant with fire and unburnt. Another one of her hand-me-downs, an
ecstatic inheritance of immolation: to give the body over to the burning.
She was shining, the hieroglyphs of her bones dipped radiant. Her body bloomed
into translucence even as I watched. The scrape of crows, and groan of timber. The
saint illuminated, possessed by light.
I stepped close and wrapped myself around her. We burned together but still I
could touch her, still I could press my cheek to hers.
A miracle at last, if not the one I wanted. I kissed her.
“Tell me my future,” I said.
She told me, and her mouth was a struck match. Her skin still hot, as if a furnace
lit beneath her ribs. The air still shimmering about her head, as if I could see the dead
god whispering in her ear.
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