Fire Flickering

FIRE FLICKERING

The first time that he saw her, he must have been six years old. She was swaying with the dancing light around her, a playful smile on her lips. Her figure was lithe, and each step she took caught another shaft of flickering light. Crimson would caress her hair, gold would flit across her skin, and ash red would surround her as clothes. Yet her eyes, revealed through lashes as dark as soot, held blood-red rubies within their hue. They captured their prey through the guile of an innocent smile.

Of course at six years old though, this notion of danger barely existed, wiped away by the fascination a child holds of the world. He moved in closer, mindless of the heat, trying to capture the endless flaming colours that shifted over her. Then suddenly she turned in her steps to face him, burning and etching her image into his mind forever. Her dance seem to have reached a pause, and there was a quirk in her smile as her eyes met his. He realised that her clothes were merely numerous long strips of ever changing colours of the evening sky, floating around her in rhythm to the environment encompassing her. Later on in his life, he would think of her image and parallel it to the proverb 'Red sky at night, sailors' delight; Red sky in the morning, sailors' warning.' Yet for now, with a child's intensity, he watched her, delight filling him as he saw her rouge lips being to form words. 

Daniel . . .

Her voice was like silk floating on the wind. The sound echoed through the flitting flames, with its teasing tone vibrating through the dancing light. Her voice transferred to tendrils of soft smoke, pulling him forward to her outstretched hand and gleaming eyes. His mind eagerly moved forward, hoping to hear her voice again.

His body, however, was abruptly snapped back. As his eyes lost sight of her, he could hear her light laughter fade away.

"Dan! What the hell do you think you were doing!?" a harsh voice barked at him. A dull thud of pain resonated as he was cuffed on the side of his head. With quiet eyes he glanced at the one called 'father.' His small hands tried to awkwardly rub the side of his head to numb the pain. However, he felt a greater pain in losing the image of her, the fire dancer. He looked back at the fire hopefully, but everything had been snapped back into perspective. The fire was empty and normal again, crackling and hungrily gnawing away at the wood embers whom in turn, protested with bright red flecks of pain. Smoke billowed out of the fire and trailed away into the air.

"Bruce! Don't yell at our son that way!" his mother's voice called out in irritation. Gentle and reassuring fingers closed over his shoulder.

"He was going to lean right into the fire Marion! What the hell else was I supposed to do!?" There was exasperation in his father's voice.

"Oh boys will be boys! Don't you remember being curious about campfires when you were a kid?" She didn't wait for a response. Instead, he found gentle brown eyes smiling into his, as she fussed with his face and hair. In a motherly tone, as if he couldn't have possibly understood the conversation between the parents beforehand, she told him "Now Danny, listen carefully sweetheart. I know the fire is very pretty, but you mustn't touch it okay?" He looked up to the face of his mother, recognizing that sense of home and kinship one has between mother and child. He glanced once more to his father, also recognizing a kinship between them, but it was more ragged, as if the father still was learning about how to handle the connection. "Danny? Do you understand?" his mother's voice reached his ears once again. This time the tone held some impatience behind it. He supposed he should answer.

"Yes mother."

A satisfied smile broke out on her face, and she glanced up to his father as if to say See? My way always works. His father merely scowled, a show which Daniel had come to realise was a defensive response.

"Now Danny, sweetie, here are some marshmallows and a stick. Try to roast them to a golden brown okay?" She moved away from him to go something that was deemed unimportant in his mind. He set himself to the task of marshmallows, placing them on the stick and shoving them into the fire. He had no intention of eating them though, letting the white puffs of spun sugar burn to a crisp. He wanted to see the fire dancer again. He even tried to pull out the burning embers, to look into the flames engulfing the once fluffy marshmallow, to see if she was somehow hiding there instead. She was not.

After fifteen husks of marshmallows had crumbled to dust in his lap, his father finally intervened. With a sheepish yet stern parental face, his father came over to try to show him how to roast a marshmallow correctly. Unfortunately, his father pulled the stick too quickly out of his hand, causing the flaming marshmallow to catapult off the end. The burning husk bounced and shattered apart across the grass, spewing tiny flames almost symmetrically across the ground. The flames quickly grew larger, snaking across the ground like a hungry dragon. And above the scrambling noises his father made looking for water, the screaming and yelling from his mother, and the fire roaring with such glee, was another sound. Daniel sat quietly in the chaos, listening to a soft laugh intertwined with the weaving smoke.

Oddly enough, his family never had a campfire again.