Once, there were students.
I waited for them in a small schoolhouse each morning, stoking the stone hearth, tidying tomes, readying lunch. They filed in politely with hair slicked back from parents’ spit, and left rowdy, disheveled. Between sunup and sundown, we split open the universe like a grapefruit, gnashing juicy sections between our teeth.
Some bites were sour. The students would rage, drag their nails through the wood of their desktops. And the oak recorded rage, like rings in a tree. Decades of painful education etched deep.
Other bites were so sweet that the students wept, salty tears dripping from their noses, healing the wounds their nails had carved with a compassionate caulk. The wood absorbed, remembering the feeling of being rooted to the ground, fat with all the soil’s rich secrets.
Each new phenomenon lit the students’ faces like candles, and they rushed to me, tripping over one another. Spilling their secrets like dripping wax across my desk. They’d press their fingertips, leaving impressions. Like the trees, I remembered all their rich secrets.
Once, there was a fire.
The students escaped, thank god, one by one using my spine as stairs. Stepping onto my back towards the shattered stained-glass window. They tumbled out, faces painted in ash. Their parents caught them. The blaze raged, and I was blamed for lighting the fire in the first place. For luring them in. The parents nailed the door shut, letting me burn. Each howl coaxed them to hold their children tighter, to exterminate danger.
I’d been called many things in my short life, but nothing as powerful as danger.
Fire births knowledge. We know this. At least we suspect it, only the parents lost their heads in a cloud of vengeance. They reclaimed their children, replanting them in fields, rebirthing them in barns. A few fell into wells, but no matter. The fire had been extinguished for the rest.
No one checked the next morning to recover the bones, either of the schoolhouse or me. The building fared better than I did, a solid frame ready to be dressed. Remade. I only wore a bit of skin, my bones charred black. My heart and brain though, perpetual machines, deviously continued. They ticked and turned long enough for one of the children to return, drip water between my parted lips.
She asked me to tell her what was happening, and I flamed the embers one last time.
