Slurps
He took a sip of coffee, despite the coffee being awful, he gulped it down anyways, once again for the kind reminder, the taste spread over his tongue. Absolute shit.
But it was the heat that mattered. Indeed, a good heat, a clean heat, passing through the glazed surface and into the flesh of his palms.
He loved the heat. He brought the mug back to his lips and the coffee touched his tongue.
Synthetic Arabica, the data-tag on the canister had said. It tasted intensely of burnt bitterness, yet was somehow also bland and flat, like watery ash.
A fitting taste for the man he'd been. Ordinary, forgettable, unambiguous, and selfish he lacked the words to describe just how much of the man he was. Who was rotting in the corner of the room.
A man who died in a cheap apartment because of a faulty fridge coil and a landlord who ignored six tenant complaints.
'No,' a voice, his voice but also not, whispered in the back of his mind. 'Not a fault, Something else... that is fate.'
The voice almost made him laugh.
But it wasn't the coffee or the voice that did it.
It was the warmth. Always the warmth. Nothing like the other heat. It was the Real heat.
Back to the bone. Back to where it began.
Yes. With warmth brought by that goddamn fire.
It began, as all third-act tragedies do, with cheap whiskey and a heavy-handed plot device.
Someone at 'The Rusty Keg,' a man with a face he'd already forgotten but whose role was as obvious as a villain in a cheap play, bought him the last drink.
Tasted a bit off, but hey, free is free! Thinking about it now, it was indeed suspicious.
All he could remember was stumbling home, and the world being a funhouse mirror.
Next thing he knew, he was on his couch for a nice, long nap.
That was when it began, The catalyst.
Then, something hit him that wasn't a headache, no. Not the pounding in the skull.
Just a smell. Sweet and rotten, chemical and heavy, like chemicals and candy had made a baby in his apartment and then let it die.
Someone or something vast and unseen had exhaled through his apartment.
His chest felt weighted with pudding, arms like damp clay, legs like sacks of sand. He tried to rise, maybe to crack a window, maybe to live.
But he couldn't.
He tried to laugh. He did laugh, "KheKheKhe" a short bark that hurt his chest.
Maybe it was panic. Maybe it was funny. He lacked the word in his mind to describe what it was.
Dull and slow, he tried to wake up to see clearly through the haze in his brain.
And then! Click! Ordinary sound. He'd heard it a thousand times.
But tonight it was different, it was the opening note of a song he didn't know the words of.
Hissss—pop! Then, light. Firework.
It had started. A firework, only bigger, brighter. The greatest show of his life, except he wasn't in the crowd.
He was sitting right there, front row—no, inside it.
It crawled up from the carpet, orange teeth biting, and for a second… For just a second, he thought he should be afraid.
But the heat… ah, the heat was something else.
"It started with a kiss," He murmured to his reflection in the black glass of the window. His new voice was soft, like a new higher-pitched instrument, still strange to his ears.
"That's all. A kiss goodbye."
But that was a lie he told the pretty boy in the glass. It wasn't a kiss. It was an embrace.
The heat didn't attack; it invited itself in.
It slid over his skin like a lover's eager hands, curious, intimate. It wasn't cruel.
No, it was warm. It was intimate. It pressed into him, arms of smoke and flame wrapping around his chest.
'Too close, too close,' he thought but he leaned into it anyway, until his lips almost brushed the golden flames.
It was interested. It bends, it bows, the flames dance just for him. The light glaces off the walls, always reaching, always teasing, never still.
He imagined, letting it climb him, crawl over him, straddle him, its hands, its tongue, tearing his clothes, biting his flesh, branding him as its own.
It never asked. It takes.
The fire was restless, so was he. He breathed it in, until his lungs turned seared, until heat painted his skin with its jealous touch.
He remembered the first wave, a blistering caress that pebbled his skin and made his hair curl and singe.
Fwoosh. A sound like a marshmallow held too close to a campfire. His marshmallow.
It didn't just burn, the heat gave him a big, warm hug that just kept squeezing. As if she had taken him too, and made him a part of the endless hunger.
The pain was like a million little needles all telling him the same joke at once, over and over, until he was screaming with laughter.
"AAAAAAAAA~~~" A sound had torn from his throat then, a raw, ragged thing. He'd thought it was a scream. It might have been laughter. In the heart of that cleansing agony, the two had become indistinguishable.
He loved it. The Fire, it was affectionate.
It held him like a mother too proud to let go, a lover who wanted to see everything under his skin.
The fire whispered, "Show me what you're made of," and peeled him carefully, reverently, layer by layer.
The fire crept deeper, patient and curious. It wasn't in a hurry.
No, it took its time. Blister by blister, it searched, whispering 'not this…' 'not this…' 'ah, this.' Every nerve became a mouth, patiently.
The fire turned pain not a single note but a symphony, each nerve ending a violin string played by a bow of flame.
It was the most excruciating, as it shrieked its own punchline, and he laughed along because it tickled.
He screamed because it hurt.
The flames burned away everything that was boring and left only the good stuff. It was the ultimate makeover before the final act.
Each wave of flame felt novel, leaving a fresh and terrible discovery that fizzed across the skin with an energy that was horribly, undeniably alive.
It was the final moment of his life, finally feeling everything, all at once, just before he became nothing at all.
The fire stripped him bare. When he watched the flames, he felt more alive than any prayer, any kiss, any lie of human tenderness has ever made him feel.
In a way, it was the most alive he could ever be.
Fire does not lie. Fire does not forgive. It only takes, and he gives himself willingly.
He could feel the moisture boiling on his eyeballs, his vision blurring into a watercolor of orange and black.
The fire calls him.
He heard the sizzle, a sound like bacon in a pan, a truly ridiculous sound and knew it was the fat in his own thighs rendering.
'Ridiculous,' he thought. Absolutely ridiculous.
And in that ridiculousness, he found it, the punchline of his entire life.
The agony wasn't cruelty. It was intimacy. It stripped away the dullness, the ordinary, the wasted years.
It burned everything unimportant until all that was left was him, and only him. For the first time, he was alive. For the last time, he was alive.
It was perfect.
The world dissolved into a white-hot roar, a static that was the sound of himself being unmade.
It was a five-star, immersive experience. A full-body exfoliation via immolation. And in the heart of that cleansing agony, he finally felt like the main character of his own damn story.
The funny thing wasn't that he died. Everyone dies.
The funny thing was that he smelled.
'Bacon,' he'd thought, and the thought was so absurd, so utterly hilarious, that the laughter won out, bubbling through the searing of his trachea.
The smell~ Oh, the smell! Fat sizzling in the pan, toast just a shade too black. He kept expecting someone to slap a plate in front of him and tell him it was "the special."
'No, I'm the morning special.' He was breakfast, the morning special, served up on a platter of flame. He would have clapped if his hands hadn't already been curling into claws. He would have bowed if his legs hadn't puddled beneath him.
How ridiculous, how unfair. A man can't even get a standing ovation at his own cremation.
The world went white, then orange, then nothing at all. A static roar, a curtain falling. And in that last instant, stripped raw and blazing, he had never felt more alive.
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