fire

1/15/20 - “Flax-golden tales” is a writing exercise created by Erin Morgenstern, and they are 10 sentence short stories inspired by photographs. Here’s one I wrote from a writing session I had w/ a friend.


“Don’t burn,” he whispers, voice barely lifting over the howling wind, his hot breath fanning down my exposed throat like a flame, there and gone.

My headpiece is slipping, the gold combs barely finding purchase in my oiled black hair, and with each step, my scarlet robes split further at the collar -- a blossom peeling its petals for the morning sun. But the nectar is only my scrubbed-pink flesh, and the sun is fire held in a young boy’s hands, and the boy is not a boy but a god.

It is the unknown that make my people fear him, this strange visitor that could raise fire with one strike, could craft light in darkness from the palm of his hand. It is with this fear that I am tentatively offered, as bride or food I have yet to know. In our village of cobblestone roads, we hem our clothes in silver, yet for this god that has brought us bricks the color of rust, my people have bathed me in his bloody, gruesome red.

He brings the fire so close, sweat bubbles up from my pores, and I can hear him laugh, a child’s mean tease, a man’s false confidence, because he believes me powerless.

But it is only by being so close, that I can see his hands are human; I can see how they flinch from the embers; I can see that his palms are a raw pink from the heat, that they are not empty.

I reach to hold his hands, a lover’s caress that, as I steal what must be a tool and not the work of gods from his grasp, turns my touch into fire itself. I bring the flame to his neck, the way he brought his breath to mine, and, smiling, unflinching even as my fingertips blacken, I say to the false god, “Don’t burn.”