SUMMER READING: ANONYMOUS FIRE
You were always fascinated by fire. Until you decided it was time to set the ultimate fire.
Anonymous fire
Your fascination for fire started in that big yellow, countryside house. There was no central heating. Every room had its own fireplace that needed to be lit every morning before breakfast. For this you had to follow steps in the right sequence.
Step one: pull the chimney damper open so that the smoke can pass through the chimney. When you forgot this step, the room filled with puffs of smoke. Every time you forgot, your grandmother laughingly shouted from the kitchen:
“You will learn, eventually!”
Little did she know.
Step two: collect two lumps of dry wood and place them opposite each other. Place in between lots of small pieces of wood and a bit of yesterday’s newspaper. Light it up.
Step three: Stay at the fireplace and add lumps of wood till the outside of the fireplace is radiating enough heat to warm up the room.
With great fascination you watched how slowly the logs burned down and turned into ash. There your grandmother taught you a lesson for a lifetime:
“Always start with a small flame and make sure the wood is dry enough to start burning. Make sure you provide ideal conditions so the flame turns into a fire. Then it will always go right!”
Little did she know what kind of impact these words had on her grandchild.
It was in that house you decided to undertake this venture. All these years you kept it to yourself. Until then you lived according to the book of life. You were spotless, never made a misstep. As you were good company everybody wanted to hang out with you. After receiving a degree summa cum laude at a prestigious university, you soon found yourself in a well paid job. When you earnt enough you bought a detached house with a big garden and high fence.
After work you indulged in your ‘guilty pleasure’: making a fire. When with family or friends you were the one who volunteered to light the BBQ or campfire. Everytime you lit a match you became speechless and watched obsessively how a small flame turned into a big fire. It moved you deeply. You always said the smoke made your eyes tear up. You lied.
One day you decided it was time
With your background nobody suspected you. You were not like that typical arsonist newspapers wrote about. A lonewolf looking for sensation. Or a bunch of drunk youngsters dropping a burning cigarette without thinking. That made this venture even more thrilling for you!
It was all planned out. You went on a holiday with friends, rented a boat to go island hopping. It gave you plenty of opportunity to choose your target island. With an excuse of a wrongly booked flight you stayed a bit longer than your friends.
That night it was dark and your only beacon was that of the moon rays over the windy, dark sea. Smoothly you moored off the boat on a small boat dock at an uninhabitable part of the island. A week earlier you had already discovered this hidden dock with your friends. While they were sleeping out their hangover, you had plenty of time to prepare the place where your ultimate venture took place.
The biggest challenge was not to leave traces that would lead to you. When you walked in the dark to the designated fire spot, you wore high boots and walked on the dry grass so you would not leave any shoeprints. You made sure your traces burned down. It went as planned: you collected dry grass and made heaps in three places about half a metre apart. Walking carefully backwards in the direction of the sea you stopped and used a flint to make a small flame in the first heap. It lit up instantly. The other two heaps caught flame in no time as well. Now it was a matter of letting the drought and the wind do the rest.
You sailed far enough from the island and dropped the anchor in the sea.Tears of happiness ran down your cheek as you watched how the small flames had turned into a fast spreading fire.
It took weeks for the fire to be contained, ruining acres of land. By that time you had already left the country. The sensation in you continued. As it was the first big nature fire of the season the media was on top of the news. And so were you. You burst with pride and almost gave yourself away once in a heating discussion at work. Every evening you browsed the internet for the latest photo’s and recordings of the fire, saving each image in different folders. Firemen unrolling hoses, making trenches to prevent the fire from spreading. Your highlight was the footage of a helicopter unloading a large bag of water above the raging fire. How you wished you had seen that for real! You also kept track of the size of the fire on a map.
One evening experts were discussing on a television programme the key question:
Who caused the fire?
It became clear this was not a forest fire caused by drought or a discarded cigarette. The fire was lit with intent. On hearing this you raged with anger.
“What went wrong?” you cried out.
The next morning you called in sick. Something you never had done in your life before. The next days you sat behind the laptop relentlessly seeking evidence if traces would lead to you. One night at 3 am in the morning somebody posted a drone photo showing three clear burn marks. On the image the boat dock was circled in red. On seeing this it made all your senses open up. By now you were completely obsessed but managed to play the game well. You joined online forums and enjoyed the discussions about possible perpetrators. Unseen you felt seen. Yet nobody knew you were the last puzzle piece. Until that day.
“Do you have feelings of regret?”
I asked myself while locking your cell door.
This summer I am posting some of my short stories. To find out why I started writing short stories read back my earlier post