Burning the Girl Down

She was sitting on the couch when the world burned down. She had no more put on her sweats and dragged out the laundry to fold when all of the fire in the universe came home to roost. Of course, no one called 911. It really wasn't that kind of fire. That fact did little, however, towards reducing the amount of ash.

Morgan hadn't seen it coming. The sound of the flames roared in her head, and the smell of her own skin cooking invaded her nose. All she could see was smoke and her eyes stung and dripped. How could she breathe, be, in this god-damned inferno? It did not make sense. Nor did the lack of approaching sirens.

But the world was ablaze, even if she was the only one who realized it.

What the hell was burning? She wondered aloud if she was crazy; the lack of an answer was reassuring. The smoke was starting to clear a bit when she saw that her hands were not ash and bone. What the hell? The acrid smell stayed put in her nasal cavities. The fire was gone, though, presumably back to wherever it had erupted from. It had to be some kind of hallucination. The hope in her heart that she had just lost her mind a little was disconcerting in its desperation.

Now that the sudden flames had died back to where they came from, Morgan realized that something had burnt up in the fire. Something nameless, elusive. My soul? My conscience? She grasped for straws, but nothing so fairy-tale seemed likely. But she felt an itchy place inside where whatever-it-was had lived. She picked at the laundry that she'd meant to worked on. The television was playing Oprah, and she would not remember what she had wanted to change the channel to.

The day went on, and the night too, with no major aftershocks. The morning after, the sunrise, now that turned our to be another story entirely. Morgan woke in the almost dark with the fire back, only this time it was not worried about the world, only her. Her toenails were embers, her eyes melting and boiling of their own accord. Her screams came out of her blazing throat strangled, gurgling. Every bone was molten, each muscle a screaming writhing thing. The sun brightened the sky and she burned, not making so much as a single smudge of ash on the sheets.

A miracle, she supposed, as her mind began to emerge from a haze of smoke.

She lay and sweated and felt a paralysis over take her limbs. She lay frozen and on fire in the darkness behind her eyelids as the sun rose by degrees. It was then, when the sun topped the horizon, that the flames went out like before.

And then she opened her eyes.

And the fire was all gone.

And the world had changed forever.

Colors without names twisted in the early morning light. She knew again. Morgan remembered. her feet only grazing the floor, she ran to the back door, flinging it open and running out onto the damp grass. Naked under the still just starlit sky, Morgan knelt and wept into the Earth. Her tears mingled with the dew and the sweet dirt muffled her deep-throated cries.

How had she forgotten? This mundane shell of a life -- friends, yes, lovers too, all now dull and lifeless in the shadow of the alien brightness of a beetle beneath her face. The universe had set her on fire to jar her awake again. The pain and anger at both forgetfulness and remembering faded into the indifference that only belongs to the divine. Then, the goddess rolled over to examine the sky with eyes that had been closed too long. Each movement of the wind swirled the reality that had seemed so finite just a day before, She saw. She felt. The dew on her skin was a baptism in silk, and she touched her hair and licked lips that felt like velvet.

Alive again. Breathing the air. The shell cracked just enough to let the light shine through. Morgan smiled at the days to come. The world and all its inhabitants remembered her bright face and dark eyes, whether they knew it or not. She was She beyond name and time and law and man. Shew was the sea and the arrow and the coyote. They would call her true name again, likely in relief.

Slowly, she rose. Back in the tiny house with its tiny rooms she covered her body, throwing on the first thing she saw. Somewhere her phone was ringing. The Cubs T-shirt and faded jeans could not begin tho hid the glory that now sprang from each of her pores.

No matter. There was no desire to hide anymore. No reason, either. There was a world to make again in her image as it had been (Centuries? Decades? Millennia?) before.

There was much work to do.