One of the ways we explore the nether-nether liminal spaces of life is through fiction, a domain between the feasible and impossible, human and superhuman, past and future, reality and fantasy. In this short story by author Gina Ochsner, we are escorted right up to the edge of what might be and are left paddling between the lines.
Shine
by
Gina Ochsner
His Word is in my heart like a fire, like a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.
Jeremiah 20:9 NIV
Once, a boy fell in love with fire. It happened in the usual way. One winter morning his mother built a roaring blaze in their little grate, and from that moment on, the boy was smitten. Although the mother did not have strong eyes, the boy did and he loved to look at the dancing flames. He loved how they were blue at the bottom, then turned yellow and orange. He could sit for over an hour staring at those flames, studying them as if he were reading his life’s future.
The boy would be sitting there now, still staring at those flames had not three things happened.
First, the boy’s grandfather, a person about whom he knew very little, fell gravely ill. The boy and his mother, along with a vast assortment of relatives, neighbors, and friends, went to visit the old man.
There inside the old man’s home was an enormous pot-bellied stove, bigger than any stove he’d seen before. This stove was the second thing, not just because of its great size or the way it wobbled a little on its iron legs, as if the fire frizzling and snapping inside of it made it dance. What drew the boy’s interest to the stove was the great quantity of coals in the stove’s iron belly and the way iron stove had turned cherry red from the heat.
As the boy and his mother passed the pot-bellied stove a low cough rumbled from a room no bigger than a broom closet.
Inside, the boy’s grandfather lay small and crumpled in a bed pushed next to the wall. On this wall hung a poster for a traveling circus.
This poster was the third thing, because near the bottom, ringed in a circle of fire was a photo of the boy’s grandfather when he was a much younger man. In the picture the young man had a handlebar mustache and his face glowed with a strange interior light. Scrolled beneath the photo were the words: Mircea the Great: Eater of Unquenchable Fires. This was how the boy discovered that his grandfather was in love with fire, too.
“Come here, my boy.” The grandfather’s voice flaked like bits of ash floating on hot air. But his face glowed and eyes shone with a fierce light.
The boy leaned over his grandfather, carefully pressing his cheek next to his grandfather’s bristly ashen one. “What is the secret of fire-eating?” the boy asked.
Like an ember over which a small gust of air passes, the old man’s eyes brightened. “Love,” he rasped, and his voice smelled like a dry scorched wind.
Then the grandfather’s gaze travelled from one family member to the next and settled finally on wiry looking man who was not part of the family and not one of the neighbors. The man looked very much like the boy’s grandfather: the skin on the backs of his hands and neck was creased like a wallet which had been opened and closed many, many times. He had no eyebrows, as if they’d been scorched.
But his face shone as if he’d swallowed a lantern. He wore blue trousers made of silk that had thin gold piping down the sides. It was clear that at one time these trousers had been very fine, though the boy could tell from the shine on the knees and the cuffs how very worn (well-loved, his mother might say) they really were.
“I’m hot,” the boy’s grandfather said to the old man in the blue trousers. The man shuffled to the kitchen, found a glass, filled it with water, and gave it to the boy’s grandfather. The man drank the water, smiled, then closed his eyes. And then the boy’s grandfather was gone, as if the water had extinguished him.
As the friends, family, and neighbors filed solemnly through the kitchen and past the cherry red pot-bellied stove, the man in the blue trousers gave each of them an empty tin of sprats. Where there should have been sprats there was instead a single coal taken from the clattering pot-bellied stove.
“He would have wanted you all to have some of his fire,” the old man said to each of the friends, relatives and neighbors as he gave them a tin. But to the boy he whispered:
“This coal is special. Don’t let it go out.”
From that day forward the boy’s mother was careful not to talk too much about the boy’s famous fire-eating grandfather. She wanted her son to take up other hobbies, like football or chess or classical Spanish guitar, because it seemed these days that the world had little use for what seemed strange and irrelevant passions such as taming lions, walking wires or even, eating fire.
But it was no good. The boy was consumed with the idea of eating fire just as his grandfather the Great Mircea had done.
The coal the boy kept burning and from it he lit matches and candles and cigars. And these he practiced swallowing morning, noon and night. If his mother put a book before him he would tear the pages out one by one, set them on fire and swallow them. Many fine and worthy books were consumed in this manner.
The boy didn’t have a lot of friends, only acquaintances who lived in the same building as he did and who went to the same school. They weren’t impressed by the boy’s unusual talents.
“Who cares about fire,” said one tallish boy who always been a torment to every other boy younger and smaller than himself. “My grandpa knew a man who could walk twenty kilometers on his hands. My grandmother knew a woman who trained her cats to pluck at a mandolin. Are you going to swallow fire while you walk on your hands or have trained cats pluck at a mandolin?”
The boy merely shrugged his shoulders. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that consuming fire would seem ordinary to other people. “I’m still in training,” he said at last, and he struck a match against the building, flicked it into the air where it turned in circles. Then he caught the match on his tongue. If it stung, the boy didn’t let on. He was still puzzling over his grandfather’s piece of advice: love. What did love have to do with fire?
Day and night the boy practiced. It was probably a good thing his mother didn’t have keen eyesight: she might have worried if she could have seen the quantity of sharp and blazing items that he tossed into the air and passed behind his back and between his legs . She might have watched as he put lighted taper after taper down his throat, where, poof! Out they went. She might have seen his keen disappointment at what seemed to him his complete failure.
“Mother,” the boy said one day. “I practice and practice, but I don’t get any better.” And his voice could not have been any more crumpled or small.
The mother squinted at her boy. She understood his frustration. From her own girlhood attempts to eat fire, she knew that it was one thing to hold fire in your mouth. It is quite another to hold it in your belly and sent it leaping back out again.
She put one hand on each of her son’s shoulders. “You have done all that a boy with some talent can do. Now you must visit your grandfather’s apprentice. Oh–and take that coal with you.”
Deep in the heart of a vast concrete forest, the apprentice lived in a tiny hut. Tall apartment buildings loomed on every side, casting long shadows over his hut. This was, in part, why the apprentice had grown to love fire almost as much as Mircea the Great had. Fire produced light that scattered those long shadows. And fire produced heat that drew the coldness out of his bones.
Sure, with fire came hazards: twice he’d almost burned down his kitchen and soot lined his wrinkles and the walls of his little house. He had a lingering cough and a general impatience split evenly between people who carelessly set a fire and those who snuffed a flame when they had no reason to. This was why he wouldn’t allow anyone into his tiny hut until they answered a few questions.
The boy knocked on the apprentice’s door. With his dark hair and a thin down of dark hair above his upper lip that with care might someday be groomed into a handlebar mustache, the boy looked so like the Mircea the Great that the Apprentice was stunned for a moment. Then he barked:
“Do you love fire?”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“Did you bring a coal burning hot and fierce?”
“Yes,” said the boy.
The small door slowly swung open on rusty hinges.
The boy recognized the apprentice. He was the same old man with leathery looking skin who had been at his grandfather’s apartment. He was wearing the blue trousers that shone at the knees.
The apprentice pointed to the kitchen where a stove sat humming and crackling with a stout fire. A bright bed of coals smoldered beneath the flames. “Something you should know about fire,” the apprentice lifted a finger in the air. “It consumes what it loves. Watch this.” The apprentice lifted a glass to his lips. The glass was full of liquid the color of fish oil. The apprentice drank it in one gulp. Then he lit a match, opened his mouth, tossed the match inside. He closed his mouth and winked at the boy. The apprentice lifted finger in the air, winked at the boy, then opened his mouth wide, wide. A jet of orange fire blazed from his opened mouth and scorched a swath of carpet.
“I’m afraid,” the boy said so suddenly he seemed to surprise himself with the words.
“Good,” the apprentice smiled. “You should be.” He rubbed his dry hands together and the boy thought he saw a little spark fly out from between the man’s palms. “Now it’s your turn. Show me what you know how to do.”
And so the boy showed the apprentice all the tricks he’d mastered. But it was as before, the moment the flame touched the inside of his mouth or tongue, it fizzled out.
“What am I doing wrong?” The boy asked.
The apprentice tipped his head and nodded at the boy’s tin. “You forgot to swallow the coal. The coal keeps all other fires lit.”
Now, why hadn’t he thought of that before? The boy wondered. And then on the heels of that question was a more pressing one:
“Will it hurt?” The boy asked.
“No more than anything else does.” The apprentice said as he handed the boy a glass filled with the liquid that looked like fish oil. The boy understood what he needed to do: he drank the liquid then balanced the coal on his tongue as if it were a pill from a doctor’s clinic. Then he tipped his head back and swallowed it whole. It burned terribly as it travelled down his throat and settled in the pit of his stomach.
The apprentice peered at him carefully. “How do you feel?”
“Warm.”
“Good. Swallow another,” the Apprentice pointed to the bed of coals in the stove.
And so the boy did.
“How do you feel?”
“Warmer.”
“Good.”
And this went on and on for hours until the boy’s belly could hold no more coals and the apprentice sent the boy home. As he walked home, the boy felt not a particle of pain, not an ounce of discomfort. He merely felt warm, from the pit of his stomach to the crown of his head.
And something else: in the reflection of the many glass windows he passed, he saw that his face had changed. His face was acquiring a glow not at all unlike that of his grandfather’s.
As he trundled up the stairwell of his apartment building, the boy encountered the tallish boy, the one who had teased him. The tallish boy could not help but notice how the boy’s face shone like a beacon or the otherworldly confidence about the boy as he strode past him and up the stairs. It was so very strange that the tallish boy could not think of a single insult to hurl in the boy’s direction.
His mother, however, was overjoyed at the sight of her son all a-glow. For starters, with her poor eyesight she’d never been able to see him as clearly as now, and she could see how very happy he was. For the apprentice had been right: the right coal lodged in the right place fires all fire. As long as the boy took care not to douse the coals, he could swallow fire and send it back out of his mouth as much as he liked.
Walls being what they are in such apartment buildings, that is, thin, it didn’t take long for all the neighbors to hear about the boy’s transformation. And the boy, so excited about his new skills, couldn’t help but juggle fiery sticks and insert them into his open mouth and withdraw them, still flaming. This delighted the very young. But it horrified the elderly who, in principle, devote as much time and energy as possible into dampening any such sights or news of sights they might find potentially shocking.
And times were different. It was a different sort of a world the boy lived in, very different from the day of the Mircea the Great where oddities and strangeness were embraced, heralded, revered.
“It’s not natural,” said one elderly woman who often said this of anything she did not understand.
“It can’t be healthy,” said the superintendent to the boy’s mother. “He should see someone about this. Professionally.”
The mother shook her head. “This is what he’s meant for, what he’s made to do and be.”
This was all fine and well while the light was a novelty, but after some time the residents of the apartment building had enough. They could not look at the boy without getting a headache.
“Why not wear sunglasses?” The boy’s mother suggested to anyone who complained. The truth was, she liked how her son turned her darkness to light. She did not mind keeping a roaring fire in the grate so that he could eat coals whenever he felt the need.
Of course the simple solution for the boy: stop eating fire. But once you’ve tasted it, it becomes you. You never want to feel cold again. You never want to live in darkness.
The second solution, and this the tallish boy thought up all by himself: douse the boy and thus, douse the light. This he proposed to do with a large bucket and a hose.
And this the tallish boy attempted one morning as the boy passed in the stairwell. But the moment the water touched the boy, it sizzled and evaporated into scalding steam. The boy tried again, several days in a row, but the fact of the matter was no one had water wet enough to quench the burning boy.
“Well, it will not do to have a boy walking around like a beacon, like a living lamppost. It will upset and disturb other boys who may try to imitate him.
“It’s very dangerous,” the elderly tenant agreed.
“Give a boy a match or a candle or a lighter and the trouble is sure to follow.”
But they could not separate the boy from the fire or the fire from the boy. In fact, it seemed as the days when by that he was actually glowing brighter.
“This will not do” the neighbors cornered the mother and her beaming boy. “It is unfair that the abnormalities of the one should inconvenience the many.” It was the words they used, the formality of them and the flat, atonal way they said them as if the words themselves suggested distance, that the woman understood that she and her boy would have to do something right away.
Early the next morning the boy and his mother left the apartment building. Of course, because the boy’s face was a-glow, brighter than a freshly scrubbed moon, the neighbors could see quite clearly what was happening. And they sighed in relief. They’d get some sleep at last; they’d not be bothered by light where they did not want it. And the strangeness of a boy with coals swilling in his belly and a face alight with an unquenchable fire would dim as these things do in time, until the boy faded to a rattling packet of words, a bit of a fairy tale the elderly told their grandchildren to scare them.
But on cloudless evenings when the fogs lifted their skirts, if those grandchildren were to look to the hills they might see a light, small but certain. You can still see it from time to time.
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