In a vacant lot behind a Slough City home, a girl watched a green sprout press through the ash of a recent fire. The sprout was green, the color of photosynthesis. It was green from the conversion of solar fire energy into sugar; but the sugars of photosynthesis are merely stored energy. The actual life of a plant is in its processes. Those processes are driven by a botanical internal combustion engine called cellular respiration. This cellular engine burns sugar as its fuel. Hence the green of a plant is a clue that it is alive, but the green itself is merely an indication that solar energy is being stored. Though plants are generally characterized as “producers,” a producer is just a special kind of consumer. To live, after all, is too consume, and as a general rule, to consume is to combust.

There is a purpose to greenery. With all due respect to Darwin, that purpose isn’t evolutionary. Being green is of no significant adaptive advantage, except in the case of a creature that takes on a green color to blend in with greenery. The purpose of the greenery itself is the conversion of solar energy into a combustible form. The purpose of greenery is, hence, to burn.

The point was to burn, from tender shoot to forested mountainside. Every plant burned, and so every animal. Every creature was the Burning Bush.

Thus spoke Miss Adroushan, that is, should anyone bother to ask why she was growing seedlings out of fire scars.

Early in the fall of the year, an interpretive ranger at Yosemite taught a group of park visitors, among them the Adroushans, that the original residents of Yosemite Valley had managed their environment using fire. The Miwok Indians regularly burned back undergrowth to mitigate overgrowth, thus keeping the valley uncluttered and, presumably, more friendly to the kind of plants and animals that the Miwok wanted around them. Once the ranger had covered this crucial talking point, Cindy raised her hand and asked, “Was that before Ben Franklin invented lightning?”

“Well,” the ranger chuckled, “of course lightning existed back then.”

“But—“ Cindy replied with a pause, “it didn’t start fires back then.”

“Of course lightning started fires.”

“But the Indians couldn’t wait for the lightning?,” Cindy asked.

“Right,” the ranger answered uncomfortably. “Clearly, there wasn’t enough lightning to keep the valley clear.”

Cindy smirked. “Or maybe Smokey Bear put all the lightning fires out, so the Indians had to start their own fires when Smokey was hibernating,” she suggested charitably.

Cindy didn’t believe that forests needed Indians to help them catch fire. She had come to suspect that forests wanted to burn, and that they didn’t need any man’s help. She didn’t doubt that Indians used fire to manage their environment—they were of the fire species homo igneus, after all; Cindy just found the lecture tiresome and anthropocentric, and so she failed to restrain her teen sarcasm.

Continue …

Her mother didn’t need to worry about the baking powder going flat. Cindy cooked and baked through cans of the stuff, to say nothing of flour, experimenting with different concentrations of leaven in batters. She looked at the effect of different oven temperatures on foods, paper, and plants. She often burned things to scrutinize the browning and burn patterns that resulted. She started a little plant nursery from which she supplied her experiments. The nursery wasn’t a chore, as she didn’t discriminate against weeds. She used tin cans and old metal tumblers for planters. She would bring a plant into the kitchen, preheat it at a specific temperature for a specific duration, and then she’d light a match under one of its leaves to measure its readiness.

Not always satisfied with the degree of privacy available in her mother’s kitchen, Cindy sometimes did her cooking on the back lot. She was discrete, and it happened that the fires never got out of control, so the adults never heard a word about it.

In the kitchen, Cindy watched the blue flame of a burner transfer its thermodynamic forms into a pot full of ice cubes. First, the ice melted and lost the form that had been imposed upon it by the tray, and then the formless water began to circulate like the fiery gasses beneath it. Cindy dropped grains of polenta into the pot one by one to better observe the aqueous convection. She watched the water transform into vapor. The hot, animated gas pressed upward like a flame.

Where other kids and adults might have summed up the relationship between fire and water with “water kills fire,” Cindy saw the relationship quite differently. To Cindy it seemed that fire brought water to life; that water without fire could only be ice. The only life that Cindy recognized in water was the life of fire temporarily within it.

She could see something very similar happening under the heat of the California sun. The air, heated by the hot surface of the Sink and forced upward as it piled up against the Range, would rise and fall in great convection cells, growing plumes of cloud; in some places bestowing precious water upon the land for fuel production, or ionizing and discharging electric current in sudden eruptions of light, heat, and sound, and igniting the rich stores of fuel in the chaparral and forests of the Range. In such a way, smoke followed the cloud.

Since that fateful trip to the Range that summer, she’d been seeing the fire in more and more of the world. What started with ostensibly unrelated phenomena such as smog, the mountain sun, and chaparral—the distant forest fire, and the lightning strike, now seemed to merge into a common fabric of life on earth. She saw it in the sunlight. She saw it in light, whether refracted or reflected. She saw it in the outlines of shadows. She saw it in the green of plants and tasted it the sweetness of fruit. She continued to smell it in the exhaust of cars and trucks. She could feel it in her own heat. Deep within her, a smoldering fire was inhaling the oxygen in her red blood cells and eating the sugar floating among them. She could feel her fire in the warm exhaust that she exhaled. As it saturated her senses, the fire began to occupy her thoughts and her imagination, whether she was in the backyard, the back lot, the kitchen, the city library, or in her dreams.

Cindy grabbed a book of matches and an old edition of the Slough City Sentinel and stepped out the back door. She walked to the back lot, drew several sticks from her pile of scrap wood, and she lit a small fire.

She felt the little fire’s ambition. She could feel its hunger as she watched it reach out for more food. In her own lungs she felt its need to breathe. She watched it spawn embers like seed. She gazed upon its mesmerizing dance. She listened to it inhale and exhale as it piped out its crackling song. She let the dance, the song, and the hot caress soak deep into her consciousness, and deeper still.

Continue …

Cindy did not approach the ruins of the fire for days, but spent hours in front of her own house keeping an eye on the wreckage, as if to make sure the fire didn’t come back to life. She got precious little sleep over those days. Finally, Armen talked her into getting a closer look so that she’d know that the fire was truly dead.

Once Cindy gained the courage to approach the ruin, she would walk by it often, over and over again, looking into the black, soggy corpse. Neighbors, kids at school, and shoppers in the supermarket checkout line all wondered aloud about the cause: Arson? A short circuit? A casually discarded cigarette? A gas leak? A grease fire? Cindy listened, and she silently inspected each suspect that had been named.

“How could grease start a fire?” she asked herself, and then she asked her mother and father. She tried asking a librarian. She was given a book that gave an explanation, but she needed help understanding the explanation. She figured that a firefighter might know, so she dropped by the fire station that was a block out of her way on her way home from school. One of the giants—not coated yellow now but dressed in blue—took time to explain to her how water can expand quickly when heated, and how steam could blast out of a pan like steam from a kettle or even an old locomotive.

a kitchen fire simulation

The explosion of steam, he explained, would carry the grease with it while the grease continued to burn. Charmed by the inquisitive girl, he invited her to drop by the next day and he’d give her a demonstration if she brought permission in writing—work permitting.

Cindy appeared punctually on the next day with proper documentation. Several days later, the firefighter introduced Cindy to his chief, and the three proceeded back to the station’s drill yard. Her firefighter friend superheated some grease in a pan. The chief checked the setup. The pan sat under a suspended hose he’d rigged to spray water onto the grease. He lit the grease and opened the water valve, and the hose sprayed water through an attachment onto the fire. In a burst of steam, burning grease shot skyward. Cindy trembled, awestruck, as the firemen nodded and grinned to each other.

Though fire seemed to be a ubiquitous hazard, it was in the kitchen that fire threatened the most.

One evening, Cindy stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her mother cook. Siran eventually turned and replied “Yes?” to Cindy’s tireless watch.

Cindy asked, “Why do you cook so much?”

“So you can eat.”

“I don’t have to eat cooked food. You don’t have to cook for me.”

Siran chuckled. “Well, I’ve got to cook anyway.”

“That’s okay. But I want you to know: I can eat raw food instead.”

“Really! Well I think that would be a fine thing to try.” Siran encouraged her with a challenge.

“Okay,” the girl acknowledged, and at that moment, Cindy chose to eat only raw foods. She stubbornly accepted the challenge, hoping to convince her mother that cooking was unnecessary. At first, she’d simply avoid cooked meals, but she discovered over time that cooked foods were everywhere. Her mother saved a knowing grin for every time a cooked food was stripped of its disguise. After a while, Cindy would not permit herself processed foods that had been cooked in a factory, including, bread, oats, cold cereal, and pasteurized milk. The raw food project turned out to be a Spartan, lonely, and labor-intensive experience for Cindy, but Cindy was naturally Spartan. She was up to the challenge, for a while.

Having sworn off fire as a digestive aid, Cindy lost weight. Eating raw food meant a lot of chopping, pounding, and chewing, Cindy made extensive use of mallet, knife and blender, but then, one morning her eyes followed the power cord that snaked from the blender to the wall outlet. She knew that somewhere there was a gas-fired or coal-fired power plant generating the electricity that powered the blender. Maybe some of the electricity was hydroelectricity, but not all of it. What was the difference, she thought, between eating bread that was baked over a gas flame and veggies that were juiced by a gas flame? The bread tasted better, she interrupted—that was the difference. She didn’t entertain notions about life forces and living enzymes; she just wanted to live without fire. She stopped using the blender, and she grew thinner. She grew tired. She couldn’t escape the flame. She humbly returned to the kitchen table to taste the hot porridge of defeat.

Continue …

Continue …

The whole thing started somewhat innocuously with a minor burn. At the time, her parents were amused at how well she learned the lesson of the stovetop. Her brother Armen, they’d recalled, had forgotten the lesson by suppertime; in fact, they weren’t sure that he’d learned the lesson yet. Cindy didn’t forget. She thought about it. She internalized the lesson, a lesson that might have been better left forgotten.

After being bitten by the stovetop, Cindy watched every fire attentively, but always from a safe distance. That distance grew over time. She watched the gas burners on the kitchen stove, and she followed the gas line from the back of the stove to the wall. Later, she discovered that a similar line fed the clothes dryer. She dropped down to the laundry room floor and saw the reflected blue light of the burners. When she later discovered the water heater and the furnace, she began to envision streams of blue fire flowing throughout the walls of the house, and she wondered what stopped the fire from escaping to consume her home. Her trepidation was only exacerbated when she heard a warning about gas leaks after earthquakes.

The fire did not rest. Throughout the house there were tiny blue flames that burned at all hours, night and day. Silently they breathed under the furnace, the stovetop, the oven, the clothes dryer, and the water heater, like the imperishable flames of so many secret fire temples.

Cindy would sometimes watch the hot dryer exhaust blow out of the house. When she felt the hot air blow out of the furnace registers, it seemed to Cindy that the blue fire was exhaling. She began to wake from bad dreams about the blue fire. She would wear warm clothes around the house so that she could better avoid the breath of the fire, and she spent more and more time outdoors. She didn’t fail to notice the smoke blowing out of the back of the family car, and she realized the fire must have been burning in the engine of the car. Of course she saw all the cars that exploded and burned on TV. It seemed so spontaneous, as though cars were just waiting for an opportunity to explode into flames.

Cindy would angrily reject the very mention of approaching a flame that another child might wave her hand through. If pressed or cornered, she was quite capable of violence, and attempts at humor did not relieve her anxiety.

Cindy’s phobia was no mere inconvenience; it was a source of embarrassment for the Adroushans, particularly when among some of their more fire-infatuated Armenian cousins. Armenians are known for their affection for the flame. The roots of their pyrophilia run deep—though thin and brittle from eons of neglect—into a distant past when fire was worshiped in Armenia, in the days of the Magi and Mihr. Armenia has been a Christian nation longer than any other, but before Armenia knelt before the Crucifix, Armenia leapt across the Fire.

In the month of Mihr, Armenians celebrate a holy feast that they call the Presentation of the Lord, or Dyarnuntarach. After services, some more traditional Armenians build a bonfire in the churchyard, dance around it, and even leap over it. It’s an ancient practice that goes back to Pagan times, that is, Magian times, when Armenians and Persians both leapt over the bonfire in honor of Mihr, alias Mithra, the sun god to some and to others the god of fire.

It didn’t surprise anyone that a little girl such as Cindy didn’t exhibit the slightest interest in approaching a bonfire, but Cindy refused to even watch. It was as though the fire was a personal affront to her.

Continue …

Burning Bush, DmitriFreund.com

Chainsaw gardeners everywhere
believe gardening to be
the practice of keeping
the greenery away
from the path,
while deadwood
accumulates within,
where gardener and pedestrian
dare not stray,
the garden itself
slowly aging
into a woodpile,
waiting not for spring
but for fire.

He met her again and again in that same place. Sometimes, upon escaping the vision, pressed by panic, he would leap to his feet and run, Seemo hurrying to catch up to him and run by his side.

Between dreams, Zal would walk and stop and wonder about the girl. He wondered who this girl was and what she was doing in his parents’ house and in his eyes, and he wondered what she might do the next time that they met.

Continue …

I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared

The flame flashed through the heavy night air. It leapt out of the coffee can and reached out to the tall and yellow grass. It devoured the standing hay in big mouthfuls, sucking in the air and exhaling heat and smoke, sending a sandy haired boy, a yellow dog, and a swarm of yellow jackets flying in a whirling, stinging flurry through the combusting night. Zal heard the distant sirens, and he ran before the wasp swarm, desperate to be far gone before the arrival of the yellow-jacketed giants in their gigantic red trucks. He remembered how the giants rivaled the height of houses, and he ran harder still.

Zal and Seemo crossed the field, stopped, and turned to see the dragon from a safer distance. It had reached the house and the fumes of his father, devouring one as it inhaled the other. Zal turned again to run, and Seemo followed.

The companions ran across the Bakersfield gridiron until Zal succumbed to exhaustion and collapsed under the cover of a dusty, roadside oleander. They remained there until Zal’s fugitive paranoia would not let him hide there any longer. On the run, he felt exposed. In hiding, he felt trapped. After a day and night of flight and hiding, Zal grew hungry, and he looked at Seemo and knew the poor dog was doing no better.

Zal took to rummaging through garbage cans by night and sleeping by day. He followed Seemo’s deft nose, hoping the dog would lead him to something palatable. What passed for palatable often depended on how hungry Zal was. The dumpsters and bins of the city were bountiful beyond measure for anyone who’d grown hungry enough.

Zal knew that he and Seemo would soon need to move on. As plentiful as this paradise city was, it had too many eyes—eyes that might recognize and indict a young arsonist, and Zal could only imagine the most terrible of punishments might be reserved for the likes of him.

He trimmed and devoured the remains of a discarded sandwich, passing the trimmings to Seemo. He rubbed Seemo’s scalp and neck, stood up, and walked.

Continue …

On many a hot summer night, Deena would open Zal’s bedroom window for air, sit on the edge of Zal’s bed, and read The Call of the Wild or the Shahnameh. One she chose for Zal because she’d heard it was about a dog; the other she’d received from her father. He’d read her stories from the Shahnameh when she was a girl. When reading to Zal, she was careful to avoid the story of Zal and the Seemorgh. She read to Zal until she could hear from his breathing that he was asleep. She kissed him, petted Seemo goodnight, and switched off the bedroom light. She sometimes paused there in the dark and listened to the dragon breathe through the open window.

Deeper into the night, Zal wrestled with discomfort and insomnia for what seemed like hours, and he finally got up to stand by his window to catch more air. The tobacco and alcohol fumes of his home mingled with the exhaust of produce trucks, cattle, and refineries. He stood by the window and waited for the return of daylight or even sleep. He didn’t seek companionship from the grim spirit that breathed through his bedroom window. It offered no comfort in its company, not even relief from the sun. Zal would rather have been left alone.

As Zal stood facing the night, the dragon breathed in its sleep, at once grotesque and beautiful, placid and swarming, never sleeping too soundly upon its trove of fields, dairies, orchards, refineries, and pump jacks. The ag burns and refinery flames, the electric fires that lit roads, feedlots, prisons, combines, and cotton trailers flared across the flat expanse like the lights of boats on a great, placid sea with a seafloor as solid as concrete, an impermeable hardpan just beneath the surface, like an expansive parking lot buried by the alluvium of a few quick centuries.

Above the yellow haze of pre-dawn lights, a blue glow appeared above the serrated silhouette of the Range. The glow grew imperceptibly brighter until spears of white light shot skyward, trumpeting the impending arrival of the sun. Once the sun appeared, everything was blinded, and the soft hues of darkness were trampled by the glare and deep shadows of the day.

Zal spent his days around his new home however he could with whomever he could. He made toys of whatever he could get his hands on: utensils, household chemicals, tampons, pipe cleaners, ashtrays, an odd match, a discarded cigarette lighter, or even a shot of his father’s liquor. He would watch the different ways that different objects would take to burning. A fire could be born from the deadest of stuff, and it seemed so alive, hungry, and free. Never in the same way, though. Each fire was a distinct individual. Zal could watch one for hours; how this newfound friend could lift his spirits when all else seemed smothered in dark, sour smoke. But his companion could surprise him with its appetite and its cunning.

Continue …