That very minute |
Issue 9
|
|
By 1998, the most recent case of human spontaneous combustion was in 1980. Henry Thomas, sat in his recliner, newspaper in hand. Wales was cold this time of year and South Wales bitterly so still, no snow would fall. It Continued to hold itself stubbornly up in the clouds, waiting on some far-off cue. When Thomas’ lock was cracked and they all shuffled, shoulder-to-shoulder into his home, his body had already been reduced. Skull lay awry in his chair, now prickly and scorched from the flames. The remaining metal mechanism of the chair sprung to life - the recliner’s death rattle, as the witnesses filed in, knocked a detached leg, with a shoe melded to what remained of a foot, over in their direction. This was the most recent case of human spontaneous combustion; that is, before 1998 when the title was usurped, stolen, by him that night.
How was he to realize today was the day he would ignite? There was no indication, but there really needn’t be – knowing would have hardly made a difference and in a way, he wouldn’t really have fought it. Fire was hardly a cause of concern by then. So, at 7:32 that evening when he first felt his atoms begin to quiver then quickly split and engulf themselves, he yelled once – only once, before readjusting himself and sitting quietly – letting the flames creep around his body, exploring him until they eventually held him in a quiet crackling embrace. He breathed out once then died at 7:33 - a minute later, not by burning, nor smoke inhalation, nor a heart attack. But simply by death. Dying solely because he wasn’t alive anymore – folding in on himself until he was simply gone. The combustion was only spontaneous in order to clean up his corpse. Unlike Henry Thomas, there was nothing when witnesses arrived, no skull, no leg, no physical proof that he had died. Regardless, all witnesses would later unanimously state that they had understood him to have been dead upon entering the apartment. |
J.E.M MILLER is currently living, working in Philadelphia. I have had previous pieces published in literary journals such as Night Picnic Press, Short Vine Journal, and Unstamatic Magazine.
|
At 7:32 that evening she was four neighborhoods over, on a walk with her dog. Her and her partner had picked the puppy out a week earlier. Although a staunch supporter of “adopt not shop” she found herself drawn to a particular bright colored beagle from a breeder she knew from a friend. Her partner didn’t mind as long as it wasn’t too big. He had always had a fear for big dogs ever since he was little after watching his older cousin get bit right above the right eye. The scar forever made him nauseous. The puppy had just paused to smell a bottle which lay, uncapped in a storm drain. She opened and closed her hand – she had known him through college, and while they hadn’t kept in-touch as much as she had hoped, 20 years later she couldn’t prevent the thought of him from flittering across her brain; the thought sighed, and its exhalation found its way out from her lips. The puppy looked up at her expectantly and tripped slightly over the bottle.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 that evening the tower in the distance flashed a red light. It did so every few seconds rhythmically, assuredly. He sat on his balcony, the nights had recently become warm enough to do so; his hands unconsciously picked at the rubber on his shoes. The red light flashed again, he used it to focus - really he used it to lose focus and allow himself a chance to breathe and exist. It was almost like meditation. While watching the light blink, he always found himself wondering about the cell tower, was it really a cell tower? He’d never know, he couldn’t even think of a way to go about finding it out. The light flashed again and this time he noticed people lying on the grass in the park below his balcony, looking up at the light as well. Their arms lay, almost touching. His right arm tingled, fresh with the memory of a similar position, a similar connection. Laying in a field years ago, gnats dancing overhead. He wanted to tell him how he felt, how this felt - what he meant to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he lay next to him, watching the trees tremble, inching his arm with the smallest minute movements until the space between them became their flesh. Maybe this is enough. The light lit up, abruptly yanking his attention years forward, to the present moment. It wasn’t enough. The light went out.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 that evening she found herself downtown, doing anything she could to avoid ending up at home. She was living alone; something entirely new to her. She never felt the draw to do so but then all of a sudden it ended, her time with others had come and gone. She had unintentionally reached 40 then paused, looking around her, and found herself alone. It terrified her, living this way; the burden of her life, of this age, all suddenly coming to rest without circumstance or ceremony on her shoulders. She felt both unimaginably human and unimaginably empty. Turning left at a crosswalk she faced a crowded street – faces swam against hers. Her phone began vibrating in her hand. She paused, leaning against the side of a building, neon light artificially warming one side of her face. She answered her phone, only to hear the other end of the receiver drop. She held her pose, letting her gaze wander down the alley to her left, taking in its dark corners, silently wishing she could stop and curl up in one. Her eyes stopped at the end of the alley. Something unimaginable and quiet shuffled there, playing with the lack of light. She continued to watch, unperturbed. This was a shape she knew.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 he ducked back through the side door. His break technically ended at 7:30 but he remained, squatting on a crate out back, watching as two people kicked the shit out of a third further up the street. Typically he wasn’t prone to this kind of spectacle, this sort of over-the-top violence made him feel ill. But tonight he stayed and stared, the thought of helping never crossed his mind. There was something painfully familiar about the two aggressors. The longer he stared the more certain he became that he was now looking at himself, some projected, reflected version. He didn’t know how it was happening, just that it was. Intrinsically he knew who the person on the ground was, who it had always been. He hadn’t thought about him since that day. He thought he had been fully removed, like a cancer. He believed no part of that man remained; but something inside him was cracking and he was scrambling for something to puncture this welling emotion and lodge itself instead in its place. Nothing came. Back inside the kitchen, he rinsed his hands, hardly attempting to remove a dark line of grime that had hardened itself onto the heel of his left hand. A figure flew past him, lunging towards the back-house, serving trays and utensils landed hard in the empty sink to his right. He was working for three more hours that night before he’d be home. He leaned over the sink, pressing his hands down on the rim of the cold metal basin. Damnit. A face glanced up at him from the smudged bottom, emotionless, there were no pupils in the face’s overly-rounded eyes. There was nothing he could do to stop the tears that came next, and nothing he could do to stop them from falling - hissing as they evaporated on the trays below.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 she was halfway across the street. He watched her as she walked, the only person in the flow of human traffic wearing any sort of color. Bright and iridescent; she stood out and seemed to be unaffected, doing so. Glancing around him he searched to see if anyone else was paying her any attention. No one, save for a small child being carried over-the-shoulder, seemed to even be looking in her direction. When she reached his side of the street she stopped, looked to her right, then her left – where he was seated. Her gaze swept past everyone on the street, her eyes were disinterested as she turned right and was carried north-bound bobbing over a sea of heads. He had sat here for as long as he could remember. Watching people walk was a full-time hobby of his. Flânerie, the French called it – he knew of this term but felt it too constraining. When he watched the street, the people were only part of the world he saw before him. The street itself was a physical place with its own movement. Each of these people as well were homes to themselves and he knew that – each containing infinite streets, crisscrossing. Each were constantly walking streets which he, constantly watching, would never get to see. The women who has crossed the street interested him so, because of a man he had seen earlier. A man who crossed this same street but turned left – southbound. Like that woman there was something about him. The way he carried himself almost entirely inverted from the way she did. But at the same time their actions felt strikingly similar. Connected somehow. He carried a newspaper under his arm as he had passed. He could tell that even as he walked his arms twitched. Nervousness? Anticipation? That, he wouldn’t and couldn’t know. Much like the woman, that internal street lay noiselessly tucked away. Just then, a new batch of people began crossing the street, his attention haphazardly turned back as the timer above the crosswalk counted down from 8.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32, her day had finished. So she sat. Contended on a cool metal chair her daughter had brought back from her work at the factory. The chair had been considered scrap, coming in to be processed but thinking of her mother, she had taken it, hidden it away and at the end of the day, carried it as well as her 2-year-old home just as a present for her. Her daughter knew that the cool metal would help comfort her inflammation at the end of her shifts. She was a wonderful daughter like that. She lifted her face and breathed out, letting the air around her fill her. Allowing her to, for a blissful second, take on more of the world than she was. The sky appeared as if it was changing colors as she watched it. Aurora borealis – she knew this term, although never having seen it herself. It applied to some faraway place that she never gave much thought to envisioning, regardless, she thought this must be a similar vision to what lay before her tonight. Try as she might, she couldn’t remember all the meanings of the colored sky which her father, a man of the sea, had taught to her as a child. Without note, each passing month more and more of these memories, these parts of her unceremoniously ceased to exist. There was a cigarette between her lips, and she wasn’t sure why. She thought about what she must look like sitting quietly outside her front door on a folding chair. Alone, save for the skinks moving breathless, through the piles of chipped and broken concrete – rubble, cast off from the road, a road that if she really stretched, she could poke with her toes. She could feel the chair pressed against her tailbone, aching slightly – she chose to ignore it. She pictured herself for a moment, in the body of a man – a stranger, a total foreigner. Someone she would never meet and in her entire life never had met. Sitting like her, but unlike her, he leaned back, a large leathery recliner framed his head. Hair, almost the same color as the chair thinned atop his scalp. His grey eyes moved, twitching across the page of a similarly colored newspaper he held, hovering just inches above his lap. Eyes that were her own felt so strange when placed in the skull of this man. He glanced up, she felt herself both looking at him and from him. Her mind had ironed out the features of his face, smile lines rippled in multiple directions from the corners of his eyes - a jovial stranger. Just as her gaze shifted back up his face, his body erupted into flame. The fire both blocked her view of his head as well as her view from his head. She continued to watch the flames from both positions, her own chair growing steadily warmer until the metal felt as if it had been set out, hours before on a warm June afternoon. The flames died down, revealing a burned and bristling recliner, ash lay covering springs which poked through a decrepit frame. “Oh” she said, quietly and chuckled to herself.
It was 7:33.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 that evening the tower in the distance flashed a red light. It did so every few seconds rhythmically, assuredly. He sat on his balcony, the nights had recently become warm enough to do so; his hands unconsciously picked at the rubber on his shoes. The red light flashed again, he used it to focus - really he used it to lose focus and allow himself a chance to breathe and exist. It was almost like meditation. While watching the light blink, he always found himself wondering about the cell tower, was it really a cell tower? He’d never know, he couldn’t even think of a way to go about finding it out. The light flashed again and this time he noticed people lying on the grass in the park below his balcony, looking up at the light as well. Their arms lay, almost touching. His right arm tingled, fresh with the memory of a similar position, a similar connection. Laying in a field years ago, gnats dancing overhead. He wanted to tell him how he felt, how this felt - what he meant to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he lay next to him, watching the trees tremble, inching his arm with the smallest minute movements until the space between them became their flesh. Maybe this is enough. The light lit up, abruptly yanking his attention years forward, to the present moment. It wasn’t enough. The light went out.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 that evening she found herself downtown, doing anything she could to avoid ending up at home. She was living alone; something entirely new to her. She never felt the draw to do so but then all of a sudden it ended, her time with others had come and gone. She had unintentionally reached 40 then paused, looking around her, and found herself alone. It terrified her, living this way; the burden of her life, of this age, all suddenly coming to rest without circumstance or ceremony on her shoulders. She felt both unimaginably human and unimaginably empty. Turning left at a crosswalk she faced a crowded street – faces swam against hers. Her phone began vibrating in her hand. She paused, leaning against the side of a building, neon light artificially warming one side of her face. She answered her phone, only to hear the other end of the receiver drop. She held her pose, letting her gaze wander down the alley to her left, taking in its dark corners, silently wishing she could stop and curl up in one. Her eyes stopped at the end of the alley. Something unimaginable and quiet shuffled there, playing with the lack of light. She continued to watch, unperturbed. This was a shape she knew.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 he ducked back through the side door. His break technically ended at 7:30 but he remained, squatting on a crate out back, watching as two people kicked the shit out of a third further up the street. Typically he wasn’t prone to this kind of spectacle, this sort of over-the-top violence made him feel ill. But tonight he stayed and stared, the thought of helping never crossed his mind. There was something painfully familiar about the two aggressors. The longer he stared the more certain he became that he was now looking at himself, some projected, reflected version. He didn’t know how it was happening, just that it was. Intrinsically he knew who the person on the ground was, who it had always been. He hadn’t thought about him since that day. He thought he had been fully removed, like a cancer. He believed no part of that man remained; but something inside him was cracking and he was scrambling for something to puncture this welling emotion and lodge itself instead in its place. Nothing came. Back inside the kitchen, he rinsed his hands, hardly attempting to remove a dark line of grime that had hardened itself onto the heel of his left hand. A figure flew past him, lunging towards the back-house, serving trays and utensils landed hard in the empty sink to his right. He was working for three more hours that night before he’d be home. He leaned over the sink, pressing his hands down on the rim of the cold metal basin. Damnit. A face glanced up at him from the smudged bottom, emotionless, there were no pupils in the face’s overly-rounded eyes. There was nothing he could do to stop the tears that came next, and nothing he could do to stop them from falling - hissing as they evaporated on the trays below.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32 she was halfway across the street. He watched her as she walked, the only person in the flow of human traffic wearing any sort of color. Bright and iridescent; she stood out and seemed to be unaffected, doing so. Glancing around him he searched to see if anyone else was paying her any attention. No one, save for a small child being carried over-the-shoulder, seemed to even be looking in her direction. When she reached his side of the street she stopped, looked to her right, then her left – where he was seated. Her gaze swept past everyone on the street, her eyes were disinterested as she turned right and was carried north-bound bobbing over a sea of heads. He had sat here for as long as he could remember. Watching people walk was a full-time hobby of his. Flânerie, the French called it – he knew of this term but felt it too constraining. When he watched the street, the people were only part of the world he saw before him. The street itself was a physical place with its own movement. Each of these people as well were homes to themselves and he knew that – each containing infinite streets, crisscrossing. Each were constantly walking streets which he, constantly watching, would never get to see. The women who has crossed the street interested him so, because of a man he had seen earlier. A man who crossed this same street but turned left – southbound. Like that woman there was something about him. The way he carried himself almost entirely inverted from the way she did. But at the same time their actions felt strikingly similar. Connected somehow. He carried a newspaper under his arm as he had passed. He could tell that even as he walked his arms twitched. Nervousness? Anticipation? That, he wouldn’t and couldn’t know. Much like the woman, that internal street lay noiselessly tucked away. Just then, a new batch of people began crossing the street, his attention haphazardly turned back as the timer above the crosswalk counted down from 8.
It was 7:33.
At 7:32, her day had finished. So she sat. Contended on a cool metal chair her daughter had brought back from her work at the factory. The chair had been considered scrap, coming in to be processed but thinking of her mother, she had taken it, hidden it away and at the end of the day, carried it as well as her 2-year-old home just as a present for her. Her daughter knew that the cool metal would help comfort her inflammation at the end of her shifts. She was a wonderful daughter like that. She lifted her face and breathed out, letting the air around her fill her. Allowing her to, for a blissful second, take on more of the world than she was. The sky appeared as if it was changing colors as she watched it. Aurora borealis – she knew this term, although never having seen it herself. It applied to some faraway place that she never gave much thought to envisioning, regardless, she thought this must be a similar vision to what lay before her tonight. Try as she might, she couldn’t remember all the meanings of the colored sky which her father, a man of the sea, had taught to her as a child. Without note, each passing month more and more of these memories, these parts of her unceremoniously ceased to exist. There was a cigarette between her lips, and she wasn’t sure why. She thought about what she must look like sitting quietly outside her front door on a folding chair. Alone, save for the skinks moving breathless, through the piles of chipped and broken concrete – rubble, cast off from the road, a road that if she really stretched, she could poke with her toes. She could feel the chair pressed against her tailbone, aching slightly – she chose to ignore it. She pictured herself for a moment, in the body of a man – a stranger, a total foreigner. Someone she would never meet and in her entire life never had met. Sitting like her, but unlike her, he leaned back, a large leathery recliner framed his head. Hair, almost the same color as the chair thinned atop his scalp. His grey eyes moved, twitching across the page of a similarly colored newspaper he held, hovering just inches above his lap. Eyes that were her own felt so strange when placed in the skull of this man. He glanced up, she felt herself both looking at him and from him. Her mind had ironed out the features of his face, smile lines rippled in multiple directions from the corners of his eyes - a jovial stranger. Just as her gaze shifted back up his face, his body erupted into flame. The fire both blocked her view of his head as well as her view from his head. She continued to watch the flames from both positions, her own chair growing steadily warmer until the metal felt as if it had been set out, hours before on a warm June afternoon. The flames died down, revealing a burned and bristling recliner, ash lay covering springs which poked through a decrepit frame. “Oh” she said, quietly and chuckled to herself.
It was 7:33.