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

Finally, I very casually make my way to the table where I proposed to Emily.

“You know what? You can tell the level of a person’s anxiety by the length of their fingernails.” And I held up my hand to show her.

The first time I’d ever worked up the courage to speak to Emily.

Senior year of high school, for sure, so I’d have been seventeen. In an elevator that broke down, getting nervous, and sitting between the second and third floor of the high school’s main building. We were both running late to class, though that didn’t really matter at that point. Class would be over long before the fire department would get us out.

I sucked at math anyway.

Emergency lights glowed and colored the elevator’s insides in deep red. Heard voices, faculty, I guessed, but they sounded a million miles away. Everything will be all right was their mantra.

The air inside the elevator bunched up your underwear and made your t-shirt feel one size too tight. Not the kind of warm that makes you sweat, it just made you uncomfortable. The red lights didn’t help, either; it looked like we were in an oven.

Or in Hell.

I thought about my morning, thought about homework, missed classes, anything other than broken elevators.

Emily had a kindness. Always first to say hello in the halls. She would hold a door open for you, even if her own hands were full. Emily, quick to joke, loved puns, though I rarely heard her laugh. Instead, she smiled. The better a joke the wider her smile, until her brown eyes were hardly visible. I felt very relaxed around her, even though I didn’t have the nerve to approach her. To my young senses, Emily had a kind of perfection usually reserved for dreams, like the hum of something fantastic.

You see, by this point, my addiction to love had already taken hold of me but my supplier was long gone. I needed a fix. Emily was my clumsy attempt to get high.

“You shouldn’t chew on your nails,” Emily told me. “It’s a bad habit.”

She was right and I know I blushed. My embarrassment went thankfully unnoticed. Red lights made all other shades obsolete.

People kept going on outside the elevator shaft. They tried to put us at ease, I suppose, but they sounded anxious. I decided to drown them out.

Then, I spaced out looking at that red light and I thought about a boy named Stephen.

I had known Stephen since grade school. An awkward kid, but super smart, and always wore the same red sweatshirt when we were very little. He looked like a big candy apple and I told him that, once. He kicked me in the balls. First time we’d really interacted.

The second time was also the last day he lived in my neighborhood.

Stephen shared the house across the street with his mom. His parents never married but his dad would come around every once in a while. This was back when my dad was still alive.

Stephen and I rode the same school bus and we would make the same walk home every day. Neither of us was too fond of one another. I thought Stephen to be nothing but a chubby, weird dork. He thought I acted like an insensitive moron. We didn’t know anything about each other, but we never really made the effort, so we would just glare at one another.

Every once in a while we’d mutter insults under our breath.

To irritate him, I walked on his side of the street, which forced him to walk on my side of the street. I loved doing this because I knew that he’d eventually have to cross over in order to get to his mom’s house. When we crossed paths, we’d enact our little ritual.

As soon as Stephen walked in an earshot, I uttered a very soft, “Bitch.”

To which Stephen would reply, “Asshole.”

The exchange enabled us to remind each other that we were there and we existed.

I let my eyes wander to Stephen and tried to anticipate when he would cross and I saw something that I initially thought looked like garbage all heaped together at the end of Stephen’s driveway. But it wasn’t garbage day and what I saw wasn’t bags. It was clothes.

A body lay by the road in front of Stephen’s house. The body had been his mother.

I dropped my books and turned toward Stephen. The clatter caught his attention. He looked at me and then beyond me and I could see the change in his expression. His eyes widened, mouth drooped into an ugly frown and that quickly became a scream. He flung his books to the street and he ran to his home. I held out a hand, as if I could grab all his pain and yank it away from existence.

I couldn’t hear Stephen’s screams.

I couldn’t hear anything at all.

Sound had disappeared. I’m not entirely sure I was even in my own body. I had become a camera, a simple observer to an event for which I had no way to compartmentalize.

Every moment slowed down and drew out to such a length that I could literally see between the seconds.

Time grinded to a halt like ancient clockwork.

Darkness and light became as a curtain, which rippled and pulled apart to reveal a human shape whose eyes shone like dying stars and whose clothes were fashioned from shadow and fog.

Death looked at me from the void outside of time.

He held his palms outward, as if this body and the boy’s grief were a gift to me.

The ghost of Stephen’s mother peered at me through the black folds of Death’s cloak, and then the specter retreated from reality, back through the curtain of light and illusion.

Time returned to normal and I heard mournful sobs like gasps of air.

A chubby little boy rocked his mother in an obscene reversal of their relationship up to that point. Stephen cried so much that his mother’s hair had dampened. An image of my own mother rocking me and singing a lullaby comforted me for all but a brief moment. Stephen’s lullaby articulated itself by way of streaming tears, screams and pleas for help.

Stephen’s wailing sounded like a heart breaking forever.

And I ran to him.

The trees were just sprouting leaves, some more developed than others, but still enough to shade us from the sun. Stephen threw his arms around me and I put my arms around him. Neighbors started coming out of their homes to see about all the commotion.

Dad marched out into the street. He heard Stephen screaming and figured we were fighting. Like he and Momma would fight.

Sometimes I could hear them through the walls. Always at night. They thought I was asleep.

Dad told me Stephen’s mother succumbed to the heat and she died exerting herself. Stephen moved into his father’s house that evening.

I felt Stephen’s fingers as though they were pressed into my back the whole night. I thought of him as a ghost and never realized how often he would return to my life and haunt me.

That’s when the bad dreams began. Nightmares about men made of fire.

And the terror of seeing between the seconds where Death watched and waited.

His legs were thick as his arms, like hams you’d see in the deli window at Christmas. He had height at his disposal, always looking down, always imposing. But there was a smile, and his eyes would disappear and you knew you were safe. His voice was deep and when he picked you up, the grip had the same foundation as the ground below. His skin was cheap soap in the morning, salty musk and oil at the end of a hard day. He made me small, insignificant.

I felt like his whole way of being was as a mountain to climb and I was unprepared for the journey, set up from birth to fail him, and thus fail myself. As a child, he had been God Above, but now he was a man, rough around the edges and used, a blunt instrument that was well-loved and then forgotten, replaced by something newer, more efficient, but somehow less.