slowly and you could burn shapes
and letters and patterns. I was
fascinated by it.
That afternoon I was teaching
this kid how to do it. We were
inside the servants’ quarters, which
was really more of a toolshed added
on to the back of the house, full of
wooden ladders, buckets of old
paint, turpentine. I had a box of
matches with me, too—all my usual
fire-making tools. We were sitting
on an old mattress that they used to
sleep on the floor, basically a sack
stuffed with dried straw. The sun
was beaming in through the
window, and I was showing the kid