Solaritude by Robert Reece

Purification through fire. This was the last thought in a long, meditative contemplation of methods to ease the pain.  Ideas burned consuming. Golden aureole ablaze, she would be light cutting through prosaic night stupor.  Simple, pure. A luminous non-entity. She remembered the photo her father took of her on her 7^th birthday, the candlelight reflecting in her mossy eyes. He said they looked like copper pennies. He left 3 weeks later. Why didn’t he follow that melancholy flame back home like a meager lighthouse? Maybe she was supposed to trudge after him into the vacant nightness instead.

When Santa Ana drift haze covered downtown in ashen strata, she knew what had burned. The valley of smoke. Chamise burned. Thistle burned. Blackened bark of Engelmann Oak. The first layers of dermis burned and peeled back to reveal pink supple flesh of youth. Rattlesnake dens and eggs of crow. A murder burned, too. Crows called her name, crying out in charcoal robes. Maybe they always had. A crow pecked at the rain gutter with its obsidian beak, echoing in her room just after Matt forced himself through the door. When she cried afterward, he said her eyes looked shit green. She preferred copper pennies. He drove away before his parents found out he had stolen the car and was driving with just a learner’s permit. A year or two later, Matt showed her the needle. Love at first sight. Matt’s voice sank into the cosmic microwave background. She left a birthday candle burning in the rain gutter so the crow would peck out her dad’s eyes if he ever found their house again. The needle pointed north, and she never saw anyone again.

When she decided to pull back the soot blankets and get out of bed, the rest would pay attention. She’d sit for a time at Arco Plaza. Stare at the downtown library. It burned just the same not so long ago. Before the gardens and the quotes of higher learning and reptilian skeleton fountains. Before the executive lunches and children’s tours. Long before all of this, the books knew even if the people reading them didn’t. All those ideas.  Painstakingly typed, printed, cataloged, cross-referenced, published, and checked out. Ideas fuming violently upwards, blotting out the sun. Weaving plumes into a macramé of purple and black smoke as concepts were consumed and incinerated. Countless volumes were sent back into the void from which they were grabbed. She would be there soon to join them. First, though, her conscience would become a beacon. A flaming banner for anyone traveling on the Harbor freeway north. She’d see them at the 7th street Bridge.

She found a shard of the sun in a dumpster behind the old Barker Bros. building, just up the alley from where she slept most of the time. A can of lighter fluid dressed in solaritude yellow with indigo trim. She squeezed the metal lung, and shimmering fumes exhaled from its single plastic nostril.  Looking through the translucent petroleum emissions, the world appeared as if it were submerged in water. Liquid fire showering as she doused herself with the contents. Enough butane remained to cover her thoroughly. This would be the first step and the most important. Tantamount only to how she leaped off the bridge. Ornithic grace ruled trajectory. But before that, fusion. The ignition of a new star in the crushing dark. A single match, struck at the bottom near her feet would allow for the rapid ascension of flame. The caustic torch would spread quickly, across her limbs, neck, and face. She knew there could be no hesitation.

Sleep had been evasive. She avoided eye contact with people on the street lest they whisper about her plans. But she was used to their furtive glances – sometimes it made it easier for her to hear what they were saying. Bank executives made of old bricks and cobalt stepped out of the California Club on Flower. A drop of oil in holy water. A rainbow slick expanding. That’s when she heard them describe the motorcade carrying a foreign dignitary and the Mayor to City Hall from the port of Long Beach. They would travel north on the Harbor freeway with an ETA of 5:00 when the buildings in downtown reflected the dying sun in amber and coral.  Her spectacle would reflect in every window, too. A million fiery images in a million panes of glass. Reflected like a million receptors in the compound eye of a massive fly made of concrete, marble, and chrome.

It was colder than it had been for months. She paid attention to such things.  Observing, waiting, calculating astronomical accuracy. The clock on the library knew about her ideas, giving its blessing as it chimed 5:00. She made her way to the bridge.  The lighter fluid’s coolness made her skin shudder as it permeated every stitch in her clothes. Cold and soothing as the wind blew west and the traffic blew north. She stood high up on the railing of the 7^th Street bridge. The headlights were now watching her. Two copper pennies in the birthday candlelight.  The pattern in the clogged lanes changed as the lead units of the motorcade approached. Once she had drained the lighter fluid can of its contents, she tossed it down into traffic where it struck a CHP officer. He crashed near the center divider. Sirens followed, traffic halted. The mayoral town car just below her. She stood above them all.  Towering in her beauty. Fumes racing nasal blood. They had never noticed their Venus before until now. She would create the pulsar burst across a pitch-black galaxy so her father would find his way home. Her thoughts crystalline and infinite in dark energy.  Her suffering lifted as she gazed into the acid blonde tongue flame sticking out of the top of her lighter. It licked and spat and beckoned her kiss. She lit her feet first. The flame lolled its way up her legs, across her abdomen. Plasma fever spreading. The warmth enveloped her face in a soft wallop of pure heat, and she was blinded in love’s final flame. Her flaming body cascaded over the aluminum railing. Falling, daring spirals as she laughed on the weightless way down. She exploded flesh and charred pain on the metallic blue hood of the mayor’s town car. Her spirit expanded across the icy universe while the occupants screamed in magnificent terror. Exploding, pure, into the nothing. Even through the tears, the eyes of the great fly could not look away.

Robert Reece

Image: A lighted march with yellow flame and grey smoke. From Pixabay.com