Quitting smoking was killing her. It had been years, decades, since she'd been able to travel by airline. In fact, the incessant modernization of the world around her had been an endless series of slights. Where the hearth had once been the blazing focus of every family's life, now heat was provided by the tame blue burn of gas in a furnace, or worse yet electricity; and all eyes were upon the flickering blasphemy of television rather than searching for answers in the moving pictures of open flame. No longer did candles leap and gutter their dances in every room. They had been replaced by the glow of molten metal, locked away in vacuums cased in glass.
Fewer and fewer factories were built around the fierce hearts of furnaces and the riotous arteries of liquid steel. Only internal combustion engines were still ubiquitous; and though they were everywhere, she could take precious little strength from their mannerly rhythms of spark and explosion.
Of all these insults, however, the loss of the armies of smokers nettled her worst. It was almost as if she had learned to crave the swamp stink of butane as it accepted the spark, the sulfuric orgasm of a struck match, and the sweet brushfire smell of ignited tobacco; as much an addict as those who once puffed happily away in every home and office, on every street and sidewalk, in planes and trains and automobiles.
They, by the millions, had conquered their cravings, and left her hooked.
She had once been a giant among her kind, fierce and blazing. Now she envied those she had once lavished pity upon; her siblings in the third world where firewood was still as precious as water, and even those in old Europe, where the funk of tobacco clinging to clothing was not yet considered the stink of the outcast.
Open fire was her sustenance, the very wings upon which she travelled.
Now she was crippled, but she fed on the anger that medicates all wounded things, and she planned.
She was, after all, not entirely without resources. Though unable, in her weakened state, to enter a society’s collective dreams as she had once done, she could under the right circumstances manifest in human form; and fire, though somewhat stained with the stigma of the antique, still winked in slumbering coals in the human subconscious and waited only for a breath to revive.
* * *
A congregation that has lost its passion is a poor thing; a gathering of strangers each plotting his or her own exit. Week by week, the dissolution proceeds, inevitable as cancer, and the shepherd of such a flock can only stand by helplessly, without crook or bellwether to hold or lead them. Lester Good (he counted his refusal to change that name a sin of pride, one of many chains that weighed upon his tattered soul) had once dreamed of establishing a mega-church, whole city blocks of buildings in which to shape the faithful, even a television show that would expand his ministry geometrically and place his guiding hands on the shoulders of those in the seats of power. A series of missteps, each at the time seeming forgivable but the result of which, looked at in retrospect, was as inevitable as an avalanche when new snow falls cold and deep atop an older base, had brought him to a crisis of faith, left him unable to kindle the sort of fire in his sermons that can light the way for the lost.
Hell itself seemed had shrunk for him. “Damnation” had become no more than a word that he keyed onto his laptop out of habit, a familiar color in yet another sermon-by-numbers that he rattled away at more out of inertia than conviction. Where he had once conjured up pitchfork wielding imps and rivers of flame vivid enough to bring any Saturday night sinner to Sunday repentance, such visions now carried no more weight than the most familiar of fairy tales; and no imagined perdition appeared half so terrible to him as the little room behind a faded worship hall, as sour as a cubicle in a struggling motel, where he sat in sweats and stocking feet, penning the script for another Sabbath sham.
