Fire

Gabriela woke in the parking deck with her backpack beside her and her trumpet in her hand. A man in a baseball cap that read “Howard's Garage” was standing over her.


“Are you, um, okay?” he asked. She blinked.


“I don't know. Yeah, I guess. Sure,” she said.

“I'm just happy you woke up.” She nodded, trying to make sense of what she heard. She sat up. He stuck out his right hand quickly, as if it was something he had been admonished to remember and almost overlooked.

“I'm Pokey Swain.”


“Oh,” said Gabriela.

“I'm Gabriela, I think.” She shook his hand and stood.


“You mean you don't know?”


“Not really. I've only been Gabriela since, well, I don't know. What's today?”

“Is today something? I guess I thought it was just today.” He stared at his feet.

“No, what's the date?” She had lost a day and a night, and now it was evening again. She left Pokey and walked down Mercy Road.

The trumpet, she remembered. The man gave me the trumpet and he died and there was- she shook her head. Fire, she thought. There was fire. There was fire and- she moaned. There was fire, and it came through my hands like spears and there was light, so much light. She staggered towards the diner. She needed to sit down. Gabriela's memory returned in flashes and fragments. She saw the morning sun on the flesh of a corpse, heard a bird sing outside, and then a flash, a shift, a change.

There was heat behind her temples, heat in her fingertips, on her lips, hot coals in her eyes, and then there was light. There was a curtain, a veil, a nebulous-halo, she thought, of gold. Gabriel, Gabriel. I was Gabriel, archangel, I was, there was fire. There was light on my bell, silver trumpet, light in my hands in my eyes in my, in my-hot silver, light on my bell. It was warm and golden but not nice not tame not human. Judgment. The seals are cracked and the bowls of Heaven's wrath poured out on the heads of the unrighteous. It was a silver trumpet in my hands, Selene, and there was a bluesy, Spanish fanfare, and there was fire.

She could see it in her mind's eye. A glow like hot metal emenated from her bell. It focused on the dead man's forehead like a laser. And there was fire, she thought. She saw it glowing like amber, like a ruby, on his brow. She smelled burning flesh, saw bone blacken and disintegrate. She saw skin melt and eyes boil beneath their lids. Fire, she thought. There was fire.