Kerosene Heart

There is something beautiful about the fire. Frightening—it’s frightening, I must remind the voice in my head. The fire is beautiful, burning red and orange and so warm, but it is also frightening. It’s frightening because it is dangerous. Because it is dangerous for him. 

      My Rochester is strong and tall and brave, but the fire will burn him alive. It will burn him until his bones are ash and his blood is smoke, and I can’t have that. I look at the fire, and it frightens me, but he can’t be burned. I cannot let him burn.

      Smoke fills my lungs as I enter the hall. Warm, so, so very warm. The walls burn, and the house creaks, and the fire laughs. What a haunting sight. What a horror that befell this house. That is what people will say if we burn up here. A tragedy, it will be called. There has been too much tragedy within these walls already. He has faced too much tragedy.

My Rochester, whose fate has been marked by an unlucky star. To think that this happened to him along with everything else—his home, his livelihood going up in smoke. He won’t join it. I won’t let him. This will not be a tragedy. Not another one.

There has been too much tragedy in both our lives. Too much loneliness. I think of the first time I recognized that loneliness in his eyes, the same sort that I met each time I looked in the mirror. There are few in this world who can find value in such pain. I found mine in his eyes. We matched, two missing pieces that could fit nowhere else in this world. My loneliness meant something because it made me perfect for him. The thing that could save him from these dark and dreary halls that now threatened to collapse and burn him whole.

I know this house as well as I know my own mind. The halls are long and dusty, the rooms large and empty. He never opens the windows, I think. He doesn’t like the sunlight anymore, but people can change. They can learn to love what they never saw value in before. I know that they can.

Sprinting down the halls, I shout for my Rochester to answer, so that I can know that he is safe. He will be in his study because that is where he always goes to getaway. That gloomy little study with the heavy lock on the door. He used to never let me sit with him inside. Slowly, ever so slowly, that changed. The room I was once forbidden has become my favorite haunt. It is still gloomy, even when I leave him flowers by the latched window. Even when I spray my perfume on the cushions of the couch. Without sunlight, I don’t think it will ever brighten up, but my Rochester keeps everything under lock and key, and he is slow to change.

The glass in the windows crack as the house boils. The locks cannot keep the sunlight out now, not when the glass has shattered.

That glass grinds into the heels of my boots as I run. It cracks and grinds against stone floors and it joins the cacophony of the laughing fire as I sprint through the smoke towards where I know my Rochester to be. I’m getting close, or I think I am, but everything is so much less clear with the smoke. So much smoke. More smoke than I imagined.

But I can hear movement that isn’t a result of the flames and that smoke clears. A cough, a shout, a gasp of pain. My beating heart nearly stops. I cannot be too late; even if he is in pain, he is still alive. Covering my nose and mouth with the neck of my shirt to keep the smoke from my lungs, I break into a determined sprint towards the sound—towards the study.

The door is already open, my Rochester, leaning against the wood, crouched towards the ground. Falling to my knees beside him, I try to get him to stand. Initially, he meets me with resistance, but then he looks into my eyes and is quelled. This was always our way. The push and the pull, but in the end all we had was each other.

As I bring one of his arms to hold over my shoulder, I notice the burn on the hand. Round, the imprint of his family’s crest—a brand given when he opened the door to the study in his attempt to get away. Under the heat of the fire, the metal burned too hot. He had underestimated how much this house wanted to hurt him.

I would soothe the wound once we made it out of the flames. I swore I would. I’d wrap the brand in linens, I’d clean it with alcohol and tinctures. I would be kinder and softer than this house ever was. I would not punish him for his devotion to me like this place always did. I would not drown him in shadows and lock my doors to keep him trapped. I would not weigh him down with vines and ivy and old rotting bricks. When this house burns, we will not burn with it.

I help my Rochester stand, and we begin to stumble forward the way I came. The fire has grown hotter, the smoke, almost debilitating. I can feel my Rochester swaying against me, his weight is nearly too heavy for me to carry. The burnt hand hangs near my chin as I drag us through the house and I begin to worry. Will he notice that while his hands smell like melted flesh and smoke, mine smell like kerosene.

There is something pulling at the back of my head—a thought, a memory. I can’t be sure. Maybe it is the recollection of the first time we met. When I first came to this home looking for work, and that fire crackled in the stone hearth in his study, and the night felt so calm. Our beginning, though neither of us could have known at the time.

Or maybe it was the kerosene. The red curtains in my childhood home on fire as I stood in the street and watched. That night was cold. Was this the memory pulling at the back of my head? That horrible night when there had been no sunlight, no warmth, no arm slung over my shoulder, or a second heartbeat that told me to keep moving forward.

I heard my Rochester cough, and I shook the stupor from my brow and kept forward. Down the hall, down the winding staircase, flames licked our feet, but I did not let them stop us. I did not stand still to admire their red dancing lights, nor did I listen to their laughter as I passed.

And the door to the home that was always bolted shut was now hanging open and wide as I had left it. The broken hinge creaked as we stumbled out and into the open air. The smoke cleared, my Rochester gasped as he stumbled to the ground, landing on his hands and knees. I wrapped my arms around him to drag him further away. The house could collapse, the wooden beams could fall, the foundation crack and swallow us whole. This home was still dangerous—the fire, I corrected myself, the fire was still dangerous. But as we got further away to the far end of the property, I set my Rochester’s weary body down beside me and turned back to look at the flames.

It was different seeing it from this distance. The old Victorian home was alight with a red glow. The flames lunged from the broken windows, calling to me, waving us goodbye. The billow of smoke from the roof was black, as if purging the house from the dark spirits that once haunted these halls. Cleansing it from the inside out. All the massive doors that kept him locked away, all the dark corridors that once haunted him, were gone. There is nothing frightening about this at all.

      The fire is beautiful because it is mine. And he will be too, my Rochester.