Cold Hearth

Thom stared into the dying kindling, its heat too weak to light the rain soaked logs lain haphazardly upon the the wooden mound. He’d been left alone at the house by his parents, they had jobs in the city, beyond the pale window. The winter weather was supposed to reach unseen lows by evening and the sun was alreading dimming. That’s what they’d said on TV, February 12th freshly engraved in the lower right hand edge of the only source of illumination in the room. It was one of those days when Thom felt in between dates, he’d awoken late from a hangover, a second attempt at the day since morning, but the clouds of alcoholic afterburn were still in his actions. The static that hangs in the air and makes everything seem dull and dumb, a mold on the grapevine. He felt stupid, throwing the local newspapers at the premature hearth. Thom had taken double his ill-prescribed adhd medication to counter the drudge and was feeling manically hopeless. His thoughts mingling and half seen, like eyes, passing across a page, missing the plot, but catching patches of meaning. Grabbing object after flammable object in chemical hope, his veins electric with still-born potential. An adderall overdose in the absence of college is a marathon held in a one story house without doors, or windows. Thom wished he could throw an axe at the fireplace as it burst into a bush of fire with a satisfying whack. But instead, ash stirred in the pitch of the place in dull tatters, in the likeness, by Tom’s eye, of autumn leaves falling on absent wind.

 In a recurrent memory of himself as a 6 year old, stood stalwart at recess next to a pile of gathered leaves. Of the crying girl, younger than himself sat hiding in the pile and of the teacher on duty calling at him in a hoarse shout with veins down her neck. She’d refused to fetch him for a while, just shouting to come indoors long after the bell had chimed. He stood there as she walked to him across the yellowed grass of the schoolyard in the November chill, spurting swears without breath. Thom had looked to her with frozen eyes as she rushed upon him, and to her gaze as it dawned, then softened at the tip of his gloveless pointer finger, at the dead leaves, to the hidden teary-eyed girl. Mrs Scream was silent as she carolled the two children back to the desaturated schoolhouse, “I apologize Thom” was all she’d said that day. Later in the week Thom, smallest in his grade was standing in front of the school receiving an award for his heroism. An award uniquely conceived for him, the dragon award of bravery. All he kept thinking was, all he’d done was wait. Well now, Thom felt anything but virtuous in his racing misery, his hands clasping at wood shavings to pile on his smouldering defeat. He did wonder however, in his state of infirmament, what had become of that poor, hiding girl? Why had she been crying, he’d never thought to ask and the question had bothered him until the present, his 23rd year. And of the branching questions that oft followed this line of reflection. Had she found a new pile? And if so, was she still hiding from the same thing, from the pressures outside the leaves, or maybe it was beyond its inside, a screw wound so tight in her heart that it was no longer a separate word. Was she alive?. Then, from the embers, an invisible bolt of violet climbed his arm, through its shortest tract of nerve endings, from the finger he’d burnt in a careless grasp, reaching for a box of matches he’d dropped and now lost in the prolonged kindling. The box flared in green ribbons(probably from the scratcher) as Thom sucked his thumb. The kindling was catching and from its tendrils there came a voice. A soft and lilting voice that filled every inch of sound in its fragility. A choral hum in a concert hall with warmth in its wavering flitters.


“I’m sorry”

the fire
bowed and waned

“You should be careful near fire, especially in a hearth.” “

People don’t fear homely danger, even when they ought to.”

Thom sat in a state of fractured confusion.

“I am what many and few have named Hestia”
“Wherever there is shelter and a heart I bring home.”

From the burgeoning fire there reached a luminescent, honey, hand towards Thom. Its blood flickered like a sun beneath the milky skin.

Thom jumped away, reaching backwards for furniture to pull himself away with.