Robert Helfst
A Spark to Follow
Once, as a child, you watched a man burn alive. One of Dad’s drunken friends fell face-first into a bonfire and was too slow to push himself up again. You sat on a straw bale, listening to his flesh crack and boil as his shrieking pierced the night, louder than you thought a throat could scream without popping like the burning pile of logs. Grease-black smoke from his body floated over you as your father and the other adults patted out the flames and called an ambulance. There’s no coming back from that, you realized.
You kept that in the back of your mind over the following days as Dad helped arrange the funeral. On the day of the ceremony, he dragged you along. The casket was closed, and you found yourself wondering what he looked like beneath the heavy lid. Whether there was anything recognizable to bury or only the weight of charcoal within. Your dad never spoke of him again, and his name faded, even as his burning lodged itself in your memory, a spark to the kindling of your young mind that stayed lit.
This refrain plays now in your lowest moments. There’s no coming back from this. The matchstick is rough between your fingertips, heavy with the potential to accelerate what’s smoldered in your mind since that night decades earlier.
In your own way, you’ve lived life like the man on fire, throwing yourself headlong and stumbling into that which would consume you. That’s what brought you to this moment.
Your own flesh blisters beneath your sleeves now, your body cooking from within. The air heavy with the sulfur stink of the gas burners you’d turned on without igniting them. The matchbook is your perpetually hedged bet, your failsafe.
He’d almost been beautiful in his own way, despite his screams and stench. A torch in the darkness, a bright spot in the night. A spark to follow. From that day forward, you saw the man on fire each night when you closed your eyes and waited for sleep to take you. Sometimes, you could feel the heat passing to you, like your bedsheets might ignite if you could only concentrate enough, if you could bring your vision to life for only a moment.
You wondered for years what it took in a person to become so blind to the world around them that they’d stumble headfirst into flames. You wondered if it might have been intentional, if there had been some moment of clarity that pushed the man in.
One moment of concentration. Enough focus, and you can burn it all clear.
Robert Helfst’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Illustrated Worlds, Chthonic Matter Quarterly, Saros Speculative Fiction, Gamut Magazine, X-ray Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the editor-in-chief of Fraidy Cat Press. Robert lives in the Midwest with his wife and a menagerie of children, dogs, cats, trees, and jumping spiders. You can find him at www.roberthelfst.com and on Blue Sky at roberthelfst.bsky.social.
Banner Art:
Photo by Adam Wilson, Unsplash, 2019
