The Burning — Claire Kotecki

It was in the first year of fires that she met him. She remembered the news stories, embers drifting on the searing winds. In Greece, a whole village burned. Children were carbonised in the arms of their grandparents, while she longed for the cool of autumn and some measure of relief from a summer that seemed endless. She always told people that she met him in fire. At the end, it was hard to imagine that possibility but the year that the world started burning, it was a fitting beginning.

He appeared through the smoke, not of a wildfire but in a bar just off campus. She hung out there with the other research students. They considered themselves more serious than the youngsters protected by the university limits. Night after night, they took their places by the bar, ordered sour-mash and bourbon and planned to fix the broken world. He was different. He reeked of wealth and privilege.

“Come ride with me,” he said. It wasn’t a question. If she had known how it would end, would she still have agreed? She wished she could say no but even standing in the ruins, a small part of her thought it was worth it. He drove opulence. Rich red and throaty with fuel that, more than anything, told her how different they were.

“These cars are immoral.” She had a note of Puritanism in her voice. He sneered and raised an eyebrow and she couldn’t look away. He accelerated, laughing. She inhaled him.

They rode to the coast and parked on a promontory, the lights of the container ships a ley line across the water disappearing into a midnight world. She watched the offshore wind farm, red light illuminating the edges of the blades slicing a bloody trail in the night sky. They didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. Instead, he explored her and she gave herself to him.

Returning to the city at dawn, the sky tinged with the smutty atmosphere of that summer’s burning, he dropped her by the house she shared.

“Tomorrow?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he replied.

She crawled beneath the covers and cried herself to sleep.

By the second year of the burning, she knew she couldn’t leave him. They were entwined. She didn’t drink with her colleagues at the end of the day now. They had stopped asking her at the same time the ground had frozen. She had already hardened to them. It was a relief. She had tired of the endless debate and while they railed at the politicians and the laws they refused to enact, she had always found herself longing for the touch of his heated leather seats on her legs and the artificial warmth of their home.

“Don’t you care anymore?” her friend had asked that last night.

“There’s more to life than this. You think you can make a difference? It’s a joke. What good is talk anyway. We’re all hypocrites,” she had replied. They were his words. She had known it as she uttered them.

“I don’t know you anymore,” her friend had said.

She had remained silent. I don’t know myself. The thought had spun through her head, uninvited.

That first winter, the snow hit hard and didn’t leave. It shocked her. She had become used to the dry heat. It dampened the fires but the damage was done. Large swathes of Europe had fallen to the flames, old growth forest that couldn’t be replaced. The memory of trees. Gone in a moment. Not even the ghost of it left in the rings of growth that circled their trunks. Razed. A blackened sea with scorched ribs rising jagged from the land, a brutally torn horizon.

His car no longer shocked her. Instead, she realised she was beginning to look with scorn on those who chose something less visible. She started to choose her clothes by the name on the label. The first time she spent more on an outfit than food, she shrunk into herself. She stood self-consciously by the kerb, waiting for him.

“That’s more like it,” he said. “Now you look like you belong with me.”

Those words undid her and remade her in his image. That evening, they ate foie gras and she felt special. He touched her hand and she imagined that he was gentle. That he loved her. That she loved him.

They spent Christmas in the mountains, the cold weather a gift. He taught her to ski and they spent the evenings wrapped in each other in front of a fire, burning old wood, in a cabin on the slope. She agreed with him when he said the old trees made the best fuel. He bought her expensive gifts and she began to believe that she deserved them. She didn’t notice that he was parading her through the bars. Or she chose not to understand it. There were protesters outside the airport when they arrived home. Brutal, angry faces. Throwing words at them flecked with spittle and bile. She tried not to look at their eyes, worried she might recognise a part of a life she had left behind.

That was the first year of the crop failures although they didn’t yet know it wasn’t the last. She scoffed with him at the simplicity of a country that could become so impassioned about brassicas and potatoes. It was all her colleagues could talk about when the university opened again. Long, involved diatribes. Furious exchanges. She kept her eyes on her work.

“Why do you stay?” he asked that evening. “You don’t need to work. I have money. It’s embarrassing to watch my woman working. People will think we need it.”

She never went back.

Winter ended with equally abrupt finality. There was no spring. The snow melted and at once the sun burned through the cloud cover and stole the rain. She moved into his house and relished the lush, green lawn that set them apart from the straw-like, tinder-dry patches of their neighbours. She told herself it was envy when they stared at her on the street each day with ill-concealed disgust.

Then the fires began again. First the remaining forests and scrublands, never really free of the acrid stench of smoke from the last year’s burning. Not unexpected. Fire brings renewal anyway. She agreed with him when he said this, ignoring what her accumulated knowledge told her. Then, the first city started to burn. At first, the fires took the homes of the poor, stacked on each other in concrete boxes coated in plastic. A modern fire-lighter.

“It’s one way to clear the outskirts.” He spoke with an edge of satisfaction but she could understand. They were a blight, the edges of the city. It was fine while they kept to their own ground but more and more, people were leaching inwards, bringing with them the stench of poverty. He was right. They didn’t pay their way. Why should he spend his taxes on people who wouldn’t help themselves? They weren’t alone in thinking this. Simply braver about voicing it. The fires spread inwards too, fuelled by anger. One week, a bank burnt. The next, a private school. The police couldn’t keep order. When the military set up checkpoints around the centre, he applauded them. It’s not like the people they were keeping outside brought anything to the city. Better we stick to our own kind. So, they retreated into concrete and called the wall protection. The government said it was temporary. Just until they rooted out the troublemakers.

The second year of the burning was the first time he hit her. It was her fault. Their neighbourhood was having a fundraising drive. Collecting for the homeless shelter just outside the checkpoint. She sorted through his clothing and threw in a few things that had gone out of fashion two seasons ago. She felt she needed to do something. Her days were filled with inactivity. If she had been more honest with herself, she would have admitted she missed the camaraderie of the university, the discussion. Now she stayed at home in her box and dyed her hair, polished her nails and kept herself tidy. It was her responsibility. He didn’t ask for much from her. Simply this. It was a small thing really, considering how much he gave her. He came home that evening and saw the bags by the door.

“What’s that?”

“Just a few things we don’t need anymore,” she replied. “I thought we could give them to the shelter collection. Do some good with them’”

He hit her with a closed fist. She didn’t see it coming and she staggered. Tears filled her eyes but she forced them to remain unshed.

“Don’t touch my things again. Ever. I don’t want that vermin touching something that belonged to me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d mind.” He touched her reddened cheek, stroking it as he replied.

“Don’t make me do this again, OK? I don’t like having to do this.”

That night, she waited until his breathing was deep and regular before looking at herself in the bathroom mirror. Beneath the bruises, she didn’t recognise the woman who stared back at her.

The floods came later. When everything that could be burnt had been reduced to ash. She had begun to believe that the world was going to be forever fire or ice. This was the year of dusk. They said it was the ash that filled the atmosphere that turned the sky into day-long sunsets, reds and oranges merging together at the edges. It looked like an oil painting. Added a sense of unreality. She’d long since lost any tangible contact with her own life. It ran its own course. She watched it from the sidelines. Then the rain started. The ground had been starved for so long, raped of trees, that the floods carried a torrent of soil with them, obliterating anything of value in their wake.

The waters flushed out the lies she told herself. She no longer loved him. She knew now that she never had. She had loved the idea of him. He had given her the liberty to live without consequences. It was obvious now that there were always consequences. The floods made that clear. Instead of waiting for him to come home saturated with grain alcohol and bitterness, she took to the streets. Night after night, she wandered among the boarded up buildings outside the cordon. Without intention, one night she ended up outside the bar where they first met. The windows were smashed now and the walls were covered in slogans from the environmental anarchists. She closed her eyes and pretended that the years in between had melted away. Tried to remember the smoky flavour of whisky and the sense of camaraderie. It was lost. She had become something else. A creature of the asphalt. The cordon caged her. She had forgotten what it felt like to be free. Still, she flowed back to him. Out of habit not obligation. He hadn’t hit her in years. Now, they drifted around each other carving channels in the silence. The car stood outside his house, long ago robbed of its power. It simply rusted by increments, its solidity melting into the acrid rain that flushed their old pretensions away.

She returned to his house one more time.

“I’m leaving.” She said it aloud even though there was no-one there to hear it. He was still drinking with the others. The choking remnants of a fossil life. They drank fuelled by hatred but they had long since forgotten the faces of those they thought were to blame for this life they were living. She wanted to explain to them that all they needed was a mirror. She took nothing. It was never really hers in the first place. The lawn they were once so proud of was nothing more than a sodden mess. She crossed it without looking back.

She left the city that night. The guards on the perimeter paid no mind to anyone leaving. If you were mad enough to go, then they believed the city was better off without you. The mud caked her feet, pulling her back towards a life she no longer called living. What was there outside the city? He had asked her that. Answered his own question. Nothing. Nothing but dirt and squalor. She knew better though and with each footstep, it became easier to extract herself.

What was there outside the city?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t this.

First published Dream Catcher (Issue 39)