'Three hundred, sixty-five degrees'

Acrid. Charred. Auburn, almost. It penetrated the nostrils with force, malice even, thin, spindly tendrils of it reaching in thorny curls up and inwards, lining everything it touched with a layer of sooty smog, marking its ever-expanding territory. The smoke had been the first sign that something was wrong, this creeping doom silently traversing the tranquil space like some expanding wraith, some malevolent cloud of ill intent, the secrecy of its march undone only by the fullness of the scent. If it hadn’t been for the smell, well…who could say what would be left now. Of the house. Of him. Of his mother. It had saved their lives, there was no doubting that. Still, it clung. Reminded. Insisted. It was spiced, almost, something like cinnamon mixed in amongst the charcoal, something exotic and sweet and cruel on the nose.

 It was ironic really. Every night for the past two years, following the direction of a similarly sleep-shy young doctor, Alex had elected to fall asleep to the digitalised sounds of a crackling fire, presented in any and all iteration available. The synthetic, blue light image of a dark-skied woodland scene with clearing-centre-campfire and old-fashioned, off-white bedrolls. The grated fireplace of some fictional, idyllic cabin, presumably somewhere up a mountain in hypothetical space, complete with frosted, snow-licked windows and happily snoozing small dog. There had even been what seemed a sort of bonfire version, though who was choosing to imagine sleeping outside surrounded by melting effigy and seasonal revelry he couldn’t begin to guess.

  Last night was the first time he’d slept accompanied by the nearby presence of an actual fire, three dimensional, hot and consuming. It was too early to determine the cause of it, if it could be determined at all. By the time the sensory alarm system of his sleeping body had been triggered it was too late to save anything of the downstairs from where it had originated, the sheets of greedy, ballooning flame having already made light work of the kitchen and the living room. It was a turn of great fortune that the house backed into the hill behind it in the way that it did, meaning his mother, in all of her sixty-eight years and for all the spasticity of her waning musculature, had only to make a short, harmless leap from her wide bedroom window onto the grassy earth atop it to afford herself safety. He assumed that’s how she’d gotten out at least, the stairs having been absolutely crisped well before he’d woken her with his shouts. He, Alex, had had somewhat less of a painless journey to safety. As it turns out, falling from the second-floor window of an ailing building isn’t as dramatic as it seems when aided by the welcoming arms of a thick lavender bush below, though a price still had to be paid, large swathes of the skin of his back rendered sawdust by the impact. He was doing his best to ignore the pain for now, something like adrenaline still keeping it at bay in the shock of the whole thing.

 It had taken the fire brigade just over an hour to arrive, summoned by a neighbour up the hill on first catching sight of the flames. If there’d been a kitchen left to speak of in the remains of the place his mother would likely have made them all a cup of tea, procured a biscuit from a flame licked tin if she could, for there was nothing left for the suited-up men to do but join them in solemn observation of the smouldering by that point. They’d barely said a word, offering him some general condolences and foregoing interaction with his mother altogether. He couldn’t hold their tardiness much against them. It was a fifty-minute drive to the nearest town at least, and the isolation of the place didn’t lend itself well to real time, satellite navigation of the narrow, choked roads, especially at night. The fire had all but starved itself as they came whirring up the lane, some whisps of smoke still spluttering cruelly out of midst of the ruin, gorging themselves on the last of the ample tinder of the wooden flooring, crackling and cackling and delighting in the feast. A hose had been innocently rolled out by a junior member of the firefighting crew until one much older and haughtier sergeant had placed a firm, wordless hand on his shoulder in compassionate imploring of his acknowledging the obvious.

 They’d left a short time later, just as the sun had breached the horizon, curiously peering over the rolling hills to catch a glimpse of the rumoured scene of utter destruction for itself. It was polite enough not to comment though, could it, it would doubtlessly have said something along the lines of –

‘Oh, shit.’

- before going about its busy day of illuminating the landscape and nourishing the flora. Maybe it would have felt some degree of bashfulness, some shame at the destructive work of it’s distant, temperate relative, offered a sort of muted, apology-by-association even. But the sun was not to blame.

  ‘I knew this was going to happen,’ Alex’s mother had said at around five am, resigned and reflective following a stretch of silence.

 ‘What do you mean?' He asked, suspicious, 'do you think you know what caused it?’

 ‘No, no, not like that,’ she waved his words away, irritated, ‘I mean I knew the house would burn down someday. I was told it would happen, a long time ago.’

 Alex loved his mother, in the way that most children do. He was the only child, much to his detriment, having been coddled by her his whole life in the absence of his wantaway father to such an extent that they had become almost like one at times, a sort of stagnant, sickly arrangement of stultifying closeness, like a sweet left melting, squashed, in a forgotten pocket of a stuffed bag. He had paid the price in personality with an off-putting neoteny, reliant for survival on her always, still unsure of how best to wash and fold clothes or make toast or talk to any woman that wasn’t her. Still, for all their rotten uniformity there was enough distance left for him to recognise that she was going on one of her questionable, speculative voyages into the realm of the mystical, something he could never really get with, she being predisposed, it seemed, to an indulgence in the belief of the supernatural and man’s capacity to contact it in fleeting moments, all for no clear, apparent purpose.

   ‘Let me guess,’ he sighed, the character of his voice something akin to that of a moth-stricken jumper, ‘some lady at the fair warned you once? Read it in her cards or something did she?’

This would be far from the first time this had happened.

 ‘As a matter of fact, she did,’ his mother snapped, crow-like for a moment, ‘and I don’t appreciate your tone. Besides…she didn’t use cards…she read it in my palms…’

  If he’d had the bravery Alex would have rolled his eyes at her at this juncture but, sensing somewhat astutely that the barometer of his mother’s mood was suggestive of a narrowing proximity to storminess, he refrained. Instead, he kept his eyes forward, piercing through the now emptied shell of what had been the space of the downstairs toilet. Nothing was sacred where fire was concerned, it seemed.     

 ‘Go on then,’ he said after a moment, ‘what did this fortune teller say exactly?’

 ‘Oh, she said many things,’ his mother began with song like fancy, ‘told me about you and that you’d be born in the winter. That your father wasn’t to be trusted. That I would only marry the once. That my sister would move abroad. All of that turned out very true, didn’t it?’

  It was hard to argue. It seemed that the mystic had indeed nailed a forecast of the biography of his mother’s epoch of matrimony and motherhood, albeit for the fact that he, Alex, had been born at the start of November which he, and the calendar itself, would consider to be an Autumnal month. His mother’s sister, his one aunt, had, in a turn considered very ‘queer’ in its bucking of historical, familial trend, upped and moved to Cuba some ten years prior. By all accounts she was doing well. She was consuming a lot of omega 3 rich foods. Her tan had never been stronger.

  ‘I suppose it did,’ he reasoned as the wind dared a fresh arm of smoke to reach out and give his face a little slap, causing him to splutter, ‘what else did she say, then? About the house burning down, I mean.’

 ‘I wrote it all down, just in case I should forget,’ she paused, stopping short of clearing her throat, ‘She said –

‘You will know fire,

It will consume your home, in its very essence,

It will leave you with nothing but a name,

But through it, you will know a peace unbound,’ 

 Typical, Alex thought. Some hooky, mumbo jumbo, sold for a pound a pop by some travelling fair worker with a bit of makeup and some jangling jewellery. She’d been right that it had left her, left them, with nothing. They’d have to go live with relatives now, he supposed, reach out through the now non-existent phonebook to one of his cousins and hope they’d take them in. He didn’t have any friends to speak of, though he occasionally talked to the friendly man who delivered the milk and eggs about the weather and the likely creaminess of said milk. That didn’t seem enough to reasonably expect him to accept them into his home, though it would be fascinating to know what a milkman’s house looked like.

 ‘And do you feel a ‘peace unbound?’ He posed, cynically, sourcing a cigarette from a pack miraculously left in the pocket of his, now singular, pair of intact trousers. The temptation to take a few steps forwards and light it off of the remains of the hallway pricked at him for a moment. He thought better of it.

 ‘As it goes…’ she mused, taking a second to assess, ‘I would say I do, actually.’

 ‘Well, that’s something, at least.’

 The cigarette lit, he took a few strides around to the side of the house to see exactly how bad it looked from another angle, somehow hoping to find it unspoiled. It was, unsurprisingly, as bad as the front, given that the whole thing had burnt down. A solitary rake leant proudly against what was left of the wall, looking entirely unphased by the whole episode save for the slight warping of the plastic at the tip of the handle. He could always take up temporary residence in the garden shed, he thought, that being far away enough from the house to have escaped unscathed. He’d have to move the lawnmower out, exposing it to the elements somewhat, and find it within himself to embrace a harmonious existence with the intense breed of rural spiders that had always given him the frights whenever he’d had to venture in there. It was an option, nevertheless, he concluded.

 Traipsing back around to the front of the house he was surprised to see his mother no longer standing there. She was not spritely for her age and had relied on a cane for walking for as long as his recent memory had cared to make record of, a cane which, on reflection, must have succumbed to the fire also. It was a wooden stick, after all. A veritable tasty morsel to a fire. She’d not been leaning on it when he’d found her out here a few hours earlier which was also odd but, thinking back, she’d been stood in the same spot almost the entire time, keeping her solemn vigil, barefoot, in front of the pyre of their material possessions.

 ‘Alex,’ she said suddenly from over his shoulder, startling him into a jump.

 ‘Yes, mother?’ He didn’t bother to turn around, the puzzle of her having rounded him swiftly and silently much less appealing to his senses in the moment than the slow, arcing break of a ground floor ceiling beam.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not in any pain.’

  ‘Ok,’ he answered, confused, not taking his eyes off of the beam, ‘that’s…good.’

 ‘Yes. There’s no pain at all.’

  His eyes stayed forwards, his focus fixed on the scanning of his back for the measure of his own discomfort. It did hurt now that he noticed it, pretty terribly in fact. His mother had always tended to any wounds he’d acquired, disarming their potential for infection with a strong, stinging fluid, and dressing them with heavy plasters. He’d have to ask the milkman for a plaster this time, he supposed.

  ‘Alex?’

 ‘Yes, mother?’

 ‘Do take care of yourself, won’t you?’

 'I will,' he said, as the beam broke away, joining the detritus of the former living room below with a thud. All at once he understood.

 ‘Promise me?’

 ‘I promise, mother.’

*