Nicholas Day - At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames

You are one of them, one of us, an infinite being

The dream never ends

None of this is real

And it wasn’t just my life passing before my eyes, but the lives of those I loved, and I could no longer tell where my dream ended and their dreams began. The reward for a life lived. No more secrets. No more ghosts.

I left myself and left reality and I could finally see time for what it was.

An infinite circle.

Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds.

Every mother and father is a little ship that escorts its passenger from oblivion to a world of flesh and blood. We are all immigrants, from a land that can only be compared to a sleep without dreams. We assimilate by learning the culture and struggling with the language, the customs. And these are usually imparted to us by our captains, in the hope that we can someday become captains ourselves, and be ready to teach whatever passengers may come aboard our own little ship sailing in the sea of finite time.

What about the flies?

What about what?

The flies… did you ask them?

She hadn’t. She didn’t consider the idea. Ask the flies… what was that supposed to mean?

Flies have been around for a long time. If anyone will know, it will be them.

They’re just flies.

That’s true. They are just flies. You are just a little girl. What do you know, little girl? Do you know where your mother and father are?

No, no I don’t.

Would you like to find out?

She nodded.

Then let’s ask the flies.

The flies scattered when she tried to approach. She looked to Death.

You don’t have to chase them, just ask.

She didn’t take a step, but turned and glared at the flies. They began to regroup.

There’s so many of them. Which one do I ask?

Just ask. If one knows, then they all will.

She watched. A group of ten flies became twenty, then one hundred, and then a great buzzing hum. She looked above at the swirling mass, the living cloud of black bugs and their beating wings.

She asked her question.

“Love,” buzzed the flies in response.

She cried.

I watched an obese boy in a red shirt. He reminded me of a candy apple. I wonder what kind of treat I remind people of. I can only hope they are more kind than I am.

His mother’s dog, barking, inside their house, sees nothing.

I wonder what will happen to the dog. Sometime later, I find out it was put to sleep.

Emily moved closer to me, never taking her eyes off mine. She breathed through her mouth. I feel her breath blanket my neck and run smoothly across my chin.

Why can’t you touch me?

I’m afraid.

You watch me during class. I’ve caught you but you always look away. She closes her eyes and leans toward me. What are you afraid of?

Nothing.

Her skin tells me that I am not alone. Our kiss is nothing less than the death of stars at the beginning of time, a warm truth, illuminating everything.

The smell of my own burning hair creeps through the kaleidoscope and brings me back to The Night Cap, for a moment, and I catch a couple bars of a song I heard, years ago, and that I played obsessively for Emily after we were married.

It’s funny how some albums, some songs, are like a séance that conjures up ghosts, the ghosts of moments, the look on someone’s face years ago, the uncertainty before first embraces, holding hands, being alone, being a ghost in any given moment, really.

We are all machines meant to record, that consume recordings through our ears and our eyes and everything is playing on a constant loop, so as to create facsimiles of recorded moments, simultaneously recording them and experiencing them, again and again.

I miss different people on different days and I try to get out the old recordings to play them, but they are wearing out.

At some point, you lose it all and what you are left with is knowing that you lived, that you heard a voice, saw a face, touched another human being.

We yearn for one another until we can only yearn for the facsimile, then at the end we have neither and we are forced—ourselves—to become a recording, a ghost, to be remembered during someone else’s séance, someone else’s favorite song.

My eardrums burst. All my hair is gone. The kaleidoscope returns.

All the dead—once children—dreaming and unable to wake… for dream is now reality, unknowable and infinite.

That was the headline. Or, at least, that’s what I remember it saying.

It came with a certain amount of notoriety. News folks covered it when it happened and news folks still ask about it from time to time. Everybody wants to hear about the Act of God, about the spontaneous combustion. I was even on the tube a couple of times, once on a local show and another time was for some fancy cable show all about goofy stuff like UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster and God knows what, I don’t know.

I never had cable.

Now that you know about my daddy and all, well, I guess I ought to get into real quick as to why I was thinking about it at all, why you should know about it. Why you should know about me, in a roundabout kind of way, because Momma seemed to think I got a lot of what made Daddy, well, Daddy, I guess.

“Firecracker is just the spitting image of his poppa, don’t you think?”

It was a question I’d heard her ask over and over ‘til she finally died, and even after she was gone I could still hear her asking.

The thing is, I never really knew how much I actually am like my daddy, or like my daddy was, rather. I didn’t know until I got a little older, a little longer in the tooth. If I had to compare it to something, getting older, I mean, I guess I’d have to say that it’s a lot like opening a window, because damned if the years just don’t show you a bunch of things you never saw before. The thing about it is—getting older—the thing that window showed me more clear than anything else, was me. And I don’t mean like no damn mirror, because that’s just the surface, just a reflection, and I don’t need any clarification on that. I got a mirror in my bathroom. I know what I look like. No, I mean a window that looks out over a great yard that’s just packed with everything you ever did, and everything you know your mom and pop ever did and on and on. I look out that window long enough, and I can finally see Firecracker.

In a funny way, seeing me was a lot like seeing my daddy. Some call it sins of the father, I guess, but scientifically I think we can all agree we are just bits and pieces of our parents anyhow. So, I got to thinking about Daddy, about how he burst into flames when I was a kid, about how he could appreciate a good looking woman and how he and I would watch Mackeninny sunbathe in the summer.

Sometimes, when I’m missing Dad, I’ll cruise on by the Wood River pool. Daddy loved that pool. I love it now.

Like I said, I’m a lot like my dad.

And I got the fire inside me.

Everybody is dead.

None of this is real. The dream never ends.

You are one of them, one of us, an infinite being.

“You’ve been spying on me for years,” I say.

“I’ve been watching you fall in love,” Death says.

“I wasn’t falling in love, I was in love. With her. Always.”