where the fire burns 2 | fiction

find all chapters under 'fiction' tab

The man woke on his back in a pool of sweat and bile as heat rose to caustic levels. The way heat always did at night once the big fires had been lit. Smoke rose from a heart-shaped ashtray and hovered like fog in the room, static as a cloud on a windless day. He focused on a crack in the ceiling that reminded him of rivers, hummed a song once sung to him by a community mother. He imagined the things he missed most before the fires came. The taste of sugar on his lips, clean clothes, the soft touch of a loving woman. All the things he had grown up knowing without there ever being a time he didn’t: nature, song, care, now as absent and unreachable in his daily existence as the sight of stars. Stars long since vanished from the sky. Stars that now belonged to Masters of the Faraway Lands. Controllers who had found a way to turn the of glow stars into nuclear reactors. The man lay in pain knowing his pain was nothing in comparison to those who slept outside. He also understood he was unlike others.

A dim lamp glow ambered an otherwise lightless space. An absence of natural light and home comfort. The sense of something missing accompanied the man wherever he travelled, and this sense became a companion. The room was largely empty. A mattress with springs that pierced his skin as if undergoing acupuncture, a bedside table riddled with termites. Something rotted in a bin placed in a corner. Pink wallpaper peeled from brick and revealed black mould. The space could accommodate little more than the width and length of the mattress. The ceiling was six-foot high and when stood, the man’s curly hair met a yellow stain that had grown in the hours since his arrival. A goo dripped like tar and formed a puddle on the ground. The shape of the stain reminded the man of a seal he had once spotted swimming alongside his canoe as he rowed through blood red waters in search of safer land. Light flickered on and off and gave the man a headache. Where is the comfort, the man thought.

The room was the size of a storage cupboard he had worked from as a boy. Back then, he would wake as a crimson sky beamed rays of light soon consumed by smoke caused by the land occupation wars. As a boy, the man would dress in rags and make his way to the storage cupboard, turn on a light and fill a bucket with brown water. If the tap ran cold, he understood it would be a much longer day spent cleaning the corridors. A concern he may miss the only bus back to camp and would have to walk through the dead trees was a daily one. Concern grew throughout a working day like vine up a wall. The boy would add ammonia or bleach to the bucket of brown water and use the mophead to mix chemicals. If the tap ran hot, he preferred ammonia as it stung his skin less than bleach.

Floor sixty-three was the floor where the most senior members of staff in the government building worked. In the two years that the boy mopped floors, he never saw another person enter the building. Still, each day on arrival, muddied footprints covered the corridors. This confused the boy, but he had learnt in recent years that there was much in the world that could not be explained. It had been several years since he had touched fresh mud.

One morning at work, Law Enforcers arrived at the government building. Dressed in black jumpsuits, face masks and tin helmets, a Law Enforcer marched over to the boy and told him they had come to shut down the building. The boy heard them arrive in steel wheel machines with loud engines. As they climbed stairs and marched along the corridor towards him in single file, he closed his eyes, held his breath in fear of being gassed. Silently, he counted the steps it took them to reach him. It was the first time the boy had counted passed one hundred and this realisation distracted him for a moment. Law Enforcers moved towards him slowly like rain clouds on a breezy day. Rain clouds the boy hadn’t seen since a very young boy. Each thudding step the Law Enforcers made reminded him of when they had come to his village years earlier with guns to take elders and betrayers away. The elders and betrayers had refused to leave until they faced the consequences of their refusal.

How is it possible that blood can run through a village like flood water? The boy had thought that fateful day.

One of the Law Enforcers approached him and pointed a gun in his freckled face. It was a black gun like all the other guns the boy had seen in his life. The gun was heavy looking, had a long pipe shaped barrel, a hook trigger and handle several inches long. The boy wondered how such a small hole could cause so much pain in the world. Guns reminded the boy of burnt sticks he would find and pretend was a gun with other boys from his community in the woods near his childhood home. Wood now reminded the boy of how easily fires can start when a group of people control power.

Kneeling to meet his eyes, the Law Enforcer told the boy that he no longer had a job mopping floors at the government building. It was time to go. Another Law Enforcer then suggested the boy thank them for closing the building because now he wouldn’t have to mop the corridor and could instead witness a great explosion. A third Law Enforcer then told the boy to mop up any black stains caused by their leather boots before he left because it was his duty. The Law Enforcers continued marching along the corridor until out of sight. The boy mopped the corridor for a second time and made his way to the wooden hut by the side of the road for payment. Before he had reached the wooden hut, a loud explosion could be heard in the distance. The boy didn’t look back.

Stood outside the wooden hut, he pulled back a curtain and entered through a hole with splintered wood. Once inside, he slowly approached the fat man who managed the government building. Surprised, the fat man stood up from a three-legged stool and approached the boy. Then he pressed his bloated stomach against the boy’s chin, placed a hand on his head and began squeezing his skull as though a pimple.

‘Why are you here?’ he said.

‘For one day pay,’ the boy said.

‘Law Enforcers came?’

‘Yes. They told me to go and blew up the building.’

‘Then why are you stood in my fresh wood hut?’

‘One day pay.’

The fat man squeezed his skull tighter, inducing a grimace from the boy.

‘Boy,’ he said, ‘the only thing you deserve is a beating for asking I should pay. You should count yourself lucky a beating isn’t what you receive. We both know who’s responsible for the government building communication machine going missing.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the boy said. ‘The only machines I have seen belong to Law Enforcers. They drove to the government building in many of them.’

‘You lie, boy.’

‘No.’

‘Bull crap, boy.’

The smell of the fat man who managed the government building reminded the boy of a rotting seal he had once found washed up on a shore after a day spent fishing. Seagulls picked at the seal’s flesh the way the boy had once plucked a berry from a tree. A circle of life in the animal kingdom that as the boy grew, had become a reality for human beings. Each day the boy entered the wooden hut, located by the side of a cracked road covered in potholes one mile from the government building, he held his breath, often until a coughing fit overcame him and he gasped for air.

‘You have sickness?’

‘No.’

‘The last thing the world needs is another sick boy.’

‘I’m not sick.’

‘Time to walk the road like the other boys.’

The boy hadn’t seen cars on the road in years. Only the bus with no windows or seats and a rusty shell for a frame. It came and went once a day, only stopping outside the hut if the boy was present. Every day the bus was driven by a new driver. Each driver shared the same hollow eyed, ghostly expression. They looked like zombies the boy had read about in fiction books before the Faraway Lands War began and books were taken away and used as fuel.

‘Did the bus come?’

The fat man who managed the government building smirked. ‘What do you think?’

Stood inside the wooden hut, the boy informed the fat man who managed the government building that Law Enforcers had made him mop the floor twice.

‘They make us all do work we don’t wish to do, boy.’

‘But I cleaned twice.’

The fat man farted. A long whining balloon like exhale that released a rotting fish stench that engulfed the space like mustard gas. The boy heaved.

‘You really are asking for that beating, aren’t you boy?’

‘No beating please,’ the boy said.

‘The building is gone, go on your way.’

The boy’s lungs began to burn as he continued to refuse oxygen.

‘How will I eat?’

The fat man who managed the government building smiled, his crooked teeth a seaweed green. Sweat on his face ran like rain down a windowpane. Releasing his hand from the boy’s skull, he poked him in the stomach.

‘You think you’re the only one who needs feeding?’

The boy looked up at fat cheeks that reminded him of a cartoon rabbit he once saw on a screen with movement.

‘I did my job.’

‘So did many of the dead.’ Pushing the boy back, he fell through the curtain and landed on his back by the side of the road. The fat man stood over him and pointed at the broken road.

‘Go find work where the fires burn,’ he said, ‘if your stomach can handle it.’

The boy panted as he looked up at the fat man’s finger that reminded him of sausages he had once shared with a community mother. It was a finger that had pointed at a mile of corridor on the boy’s first day at the government building. A corridor with no windows and occasional light, empty spaces with locked doors and one accessible storage cupboard. It was a job that the boy—now a sick man trapped in the dormancy of another comfortless room—remembered vividly as lost jungle fever began to consume him. Just as the night bugs came to feast on the flesh of the weak and the dying found outside.