#hamtini

[Issue #11: Fire]

Have you noticed that everyone seems to have an opinion about what’s wrong with this country? The list of supposed national grievances is without end. It’s the government! It’s the media! It’s the weather! It’s Labradoodles! I don’t know about you, but whenever I see these blowhards open their mouths, it takes all my energy not to lunge at them and set fire to their heads.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, expressing yourself through fire is a perfectly normal response to the frustrations of everyday life. For example, when a waiter brings you the wrong menu item, most people will complain loudly, stiff the waiter in an act of passive-aggressive indignation, or perhaps just eat the food anyway to avoid making a fuss.

But the only appropriate reaction to this situation is to light a match and allow your food to burst into glorious flame. This unequivocally sends the message that the order has no place on your table. And do the waiters come to you in a hurry! I bet you’ve never had service at that high level of attention before.

Now, I’ve been called many things in my life—a pyro, a pyromaniac, a sufferer of pyromania—but no one has had the wisdom to call me who I truly am: a liberator, a freer of feelings, of the kindling inside you that needs just that one last spark of anger before bursting into a beautiful display of fiery self-expression.

However, this country’s lawmakers take issue with my stance, and this, my friends, is what’s truly wrong with this country. Our so-called “freedom” of expression is a laughable farce if it excludes setting random things on fire.

So I urge everyone reading this not to let society extinguish your urges with its restrictive, flame-retardant rules. Whether it’s a malfunctioning computer, a car that won’t start, or a cat that keeps waking you up at 5 in the morning, a well-placed blaze sets all things right.

Also, staring at fire is fucking amazing.

[Issue 11: Fire]

“Mary-fucking-Frances!”

My roommate Essie’s shaking me awake. I can barely hear her through the ringing in my thick head. My mouth and throat feel dryer than the giant martini I decided to cap my night with. Great idea, that: my tonsils may now be permanently stuck together.

“Okay okay okay,” I mumble as I struggle to open my eyes and prop myself up on my left elbow.

That’s when I see him. The Irish guy, what was his name? My desperate, closing-time hookup is still here and looks like a nervous rat—a very long rat, darting from one glass terrarium wall to another. I can’t remember his name. Killian? Kieran? Whatever.

This is when I notice that I’m naked from the waist down. I’m pretty sure I passed out while getting head, but I’m beyond embarrassment right now.

As a pair of jeans hits my right shoulder, a realization: the ringing’s too loud.

“Jayzus, get dressed!” yells the guy.

Oh shit, the building’s on fire.

* * *

Outside, on Darling Street, the late spring morning starts to overtake the flashing lights. I shiver in a scratchy wool blanket—it smells exactly like a friend’s ski cabin, fireplace and all—and wait for my turn to talk to the cop.

Essie’s crying uncontrollably, and the cop—who I can’t believe still wears a Burt Reynolds mustache—can’t seem to decide whether to comfort her or walk away. She can’t find her cat, adopted four days ago from the local shelter. “What will I put on the flyers?” she manages between sobs. There’s a lot of snot. “He doesn’t even have a name yet!”

Keanan—the cop talked to him first, so I could pretend to remember—is trying to warm me up by standing close behind and rubbing each of my arms simultaneously. “You okay?” he leans down and asks, for only the fifty-fourth time. I try to answer, but when I open my mouth, the clatter of my teeth is louder than the squeak of my voice. Instead I think I wish I were wearing socks.

[Issue 11: Fire]

As soon as I see him I feel warmth spreading through me like I’ve been basking in the sun. He is literally radiant, it’s incredible. If I could, I’d make a life just in the half inch between us. I’d live there, never touching, in the heat of the atomic particles smashing against each other as they come off our bodies. I’d wander endlessly over the soft sands of his skin like a ghost in the desert, a line of long windswept dunes drawing me toward the tangled briar patches tucked away behind his ears and between his legs.

Even after all this time, he still smells like summer flowers, fresh air, salt, campfires. Every day I wake with that scent in my head, and feel the hunger in me. I gave up fighting it long ago. Now my existence is simply a meditation on his perfection, each movement a gesture in the sacred dance of our pairing. I do this because we cannot speak the same language. I must communicate my devotion in silent prayer. Maybe if he knew he would understand that what I have to do, I do as a ritual, worshipping at his altar. Maybe if he knew he wouldn’t cry so.

I’m pulled to him like a doomed satellite. Trapped in his gravity, I circle him in a long slow spiral, an orgasmic cycle of movement, the scent of stone and metal. I watch his eyes fill with tears, they always betray him, though he stopped crying out many ages ago. I begin, caressing the side of his abdomen with my beak, covering his tortured face with my wing, digging my talons deep into his flesh where his long arm meets his chest. I drag a long chasm under his rib and open his belly like a treasure chest filled with molten ruby hued rivers. I breathe deep and plunge my head in to pull out the finest, darkest jewel. I consume his steaming liver like a priest consuming the flesh of a sacrifice. Piece by piece I tear away and swallow and its heat warms me from the inside.

I wonder if this was how Zeus intended it to be, that I, should find my own torture in the punishment of Prometheus. To love the titan, but to deliver his eternal torment trapped in the form of an eagle. All for daring to love man enough to bring him fire. 

[Issue 11: Fire]

He's standing in the kitchen slicing jalapeños for the burgers. He looks out the window to the yard. He sees that she’s not wearing her ring.

She’s standing by the fire. The men are elsewhere. The kids have pulled them into a touch football game.

She's not wearing her ring, and she's flipping the patties with an intensity he hasn't seen before.

It's that green dress with the flared skirt, the one with the white birds on it. She'd laughed that she was like a Portlandia sketch, and he’d laughed with her, watching that one snaggle tooth he so loved, the one barely screwed into her mouth. Like a lightbulb that needed just one more twist to be bright-white like the rest.

She wasn't showing yet, and not everyone at the party knew. It was only 13 weeks. He could understand. Apparently Jon had been a real asshole about it so far.

In his mind's eye they'd done everything, gone everywhere. Pressed up against the wall of the bar. Over the bar itself, her hair dangling into the well bottles.

It certainly wasn’t his fault, falling for his best friend’s girl. He pulled back the tab of another Modelo, considering. He’d known her first, in college, although her hair had been terrible then. Bleached and loud. She’d been going through a weird bi phase, with a string of rhinestone studs up her right ear. It wasn’t a good look.

Now, though, the 2015 her.

He couldn’t sleep.

She was everywhere he looked, her laughter a burble in his ear when he tossed and turned in bed. On the treadmill, in the lyrics of The National songs he listened to on repeat, like a fucking jerk. In the faces of other women, even, as he watches them reading on the subway, trying to parse her features from theirs.

A glint caught his eye. He looked. A pound of raw meat on the counter, with a paw print scooped out. A Hansel & Gretel trail of crumbs leading away from the lump of beef.

And her engagement ring, sparking in the sun.

Photo: Robyn Lee, Flickr

[Issue 11: Fire]

Chase dropped the stick and sprinted as hard as he possibly could. When he finally stopped, he turned back, and watched a tiny corner of the night explode into day.

A few months back, Chase and Trip left the clan, after an argument with Grog and Thak and the other elders. They never really fit in, anyway -- Chase and Trip’s boat shoes and pastel polo shirts always separated them from the rest of the clan, who preferred moose-hide loincloths and bare feet. While Grog and the elders knew that the best way to spend their days was smashing one rock into another rock, and migrating great distances in search of water, food, and shelter-providing caves not completely filled with bears, Chase and Trip insisted on shiftlessly sitting around, playing X-Box and shotgunning cans of light beer. They refused to hunt, and they sure as shit didn’t gather. No matter how many Three Wise Homo Erectus shots they bought Lucy, she refused to sleep with them, preferring the men in the clan who didn’t shave. They didn’t fit, so when the clan left for yet another migration, they stayed.

But as a panting Chase inched back towards the light, a different kind of light than he had ever seen, a hotter light than he had ever felt, a light that made him put on his Ray-Bans even though it was night, a light he couldn’t look away from, he realized the separation had been worth it. He didn’t yet understand exactly what he had created, and how it would alter the entire world forever, but he knew what it meant for his immediate future: the “Around the Pangea” party would rage all night, and it was going to be fucking great.

[Issue 11: Fire]

We ate dinner at the table in the backyard. The lobster carcasses, sucked clean and spent, lay lifeless in a football pile-up on a kick-wheel ceramic platter. The natural bug spray was worthless. We batted mosquitos away from our faces like so many bothersome details, swatted at them on our sweaty legs. The basil was in bloom. Soft, dimpled raspberries sat wet in bowls. The Maine nights were cool, so we pitched a tent fireside. I spilled the bourbon in the grass and couldn’t remember the words to the songs I love. But the days were hot and still, the air heavy as wet laundry. We traveled from one body of water to another. He carried me on his back into a still green creek in the woods to a tiny island of stones. We stepped out of our clothes, and I waded waist-deep into the water. Another day, sticky as a fly strip. He pointed the way from the passenger seat, and we pulled off the main road to a town suspended in time, unmoving as an insect in amber. We sat on a sun-bleached slab of driftwood, slipped out of clothes again, and tip-toed across the uneven stones pressing into the soft arches of our feet, down to the lapping edge, then into the cold water, ragged rocks underfoot. The day was bright, and we bobbed underwater like corks. I tilted myself back, held on the water’s surface like a hammock. The bay was filled with moored sailboats, and then suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing: At the sun on my face, the cold water stinging my eyes, salty in my mouth; at the wind, spirited as a pony; at the man who stood naked nearby, as tall and stately as a heron. We waded back to the shore and I said thank you thank you thank you, that was such a good idea, and he shooed it away, of course. The seat belts clicked, our hair wet in the windows-down wind. He said let’s go for ice cream, and we did.