Flames

by Robbie Arnott

  Levi is striding through the thistled fields towards a lonely beach. It lies at the edge of their lowest gully, between two tall walls of red-grey rock. It’s the only stretch of sand on their property. It’s where he and Charlotte would come every day of summer, running through the heat to swim and shout, although she did most of the shouting and all of the swimming. It’s where his mother would sit quietly at the end of most days. It’s where his father would not come, not past the gully edge, for he was afraid of the ocean. It’s where Levi has now arrived, out of breath and slightly dizzy, thinking of Charlotte and the water. She’s all he’s thought about for weeks. That’s what’s brought him here: memories of her, and the joy she’d take in those first cold leaps into the deep. Her flinging, shrieking, whirring presence, always vibrating in his peripheries. Always redefining what their father called a commotion. Always urging him to join in.

  Levi is remembering, as these memories lap at his mind: Charlotte is missing. He has been telling himself that she will come back when she’s ready, that she is safe, that she can look after herself. He’s been saying it for so long that these thoughts have become reflexive. But the sun is dropping, the sea is cracking, the memories are lap, lap, lapping, and here on the beach his resolve is beginning to waver. Charlotte could be anywhere, with anyone. She could be sick. She could be dead. She could be fine, but she could have decided to never return. Levi’s breathing has shallowed out. Bile tangs at his tongue. And as the dusk lies down and dread begins gnawing, he is remembering something else: he left the pelt in the house.

  Levi is marching up through the fields, missing steps, growing cold. A light is on in the house; he does not remember leaving one on. Adrenaline stills his shivering arms as he pushes through the door, and for a few moments he forgets about the pelt. Into the house he goes, where it is warmer than it should be. He treads down the hall. The kettle is boiling in the kitchen, a fire is snapping in the lounge, and between these points of heat is their source: his father, sitting at the dining table.

  Levi is staring. His father does not look up. Hello, Levi.

  Levi is spitting. What are you doing here?

  His father is standing up. Saying hello. Where’s your sister? Not here.

  His father is tossing a pinecone into the fire. I know that. I thought you might have spoken to her.

  Levi is trying to stop anger and confusion and other, murkier feelings from chopping his words into harsh little yips as he mutters: I haven’t.

  His father is watching the flames lick and rise. I know things have been…difficult. But you need to—I don’t know. Clear your head.

  Levi is refusing to abandon his manners, even as he wants to roar and curse. Please leave.

  His father is turning to face him. You’re not healthy, son. Ever since your mother died…

  I asked you to leave.

  His father is moving now, coming towards him. You’re not yourself.

  You need to leave, before I call the police.

  His father is still walking, slow and sure, saying: Your sister will come home, eventually, and you need to be reliable. Strong. The brother you normally are.

  Levi is feeling his resolve splinter against his desire to scream and scream, but he stays quiet, because amid his hammering thoughts he has suddenly remembered why he returned from the beach. He walks over to the bench and grabs the pelt. His fingers dive into its thick fibres; heat surges through his arm; his resolve takes back its hardness. Levi takes a deep breath. He looks at his father—right into his ever-shifting eyes—and says: I haven’t seen you since the cremation.

  His father stops. Levi…

  Levi is talking in a louder voice now, louder and more purposeful. The last time I saw you before that was over a year ago.

  His father rubs his eyes. I know. Listen…

  Levi is barking. No.

  His father is exhaling slowly and saying: There are reasons. Not good ones. But your mother—

  Levi is shouting: Get out! His free palm is slamming onto the bench.

  His father is rubbing at his scalp. He is saying: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You know what I’m like…

  No, I don’t.

  Please. Just try to—

  Levi isn’t listening, because if his father won’t leave, Levi will. He is striding outside into the heatless arms of the farm, where in the clean black night he is not cold. A fire is crackling through him. The pelt is in his hand. His father is not following him, and Levi does not care if he does, because he does not care about the man, not about who he is or what he says or where he goes, because at the mention of his mother he has stopped caring about almost everything: he has realised what he needs to do.

  Levi is wandering over to the ute. He peers into the tray at the half-finished coffin. The grey snowgum planks are splashed with the twirling patterns of the highlands. They will take his sister’s body and turn it cold and hard as dolerite, forever preserved beneath the soil, and they are not right; they will not do; they aren’t what Charlotte needs. No—her wooden jacket will be crafted out of something much more personal. And he will build it himself.

  COAL

  He was born in the instant a woman, crouching by the curl of a cold river, smacked two smooth stones together. From that crash of rock flew a spark, and in that spark there was heat, light…and him. Somewhere inside that tiny flick of fire he began to exist, first as a hot thought, then as a proto-mind. There were no words or emotions; there was just life. His life. All he knew was that he existed, that he burned and that he was falling.

  But he was lucky: the spark fell not onto wet dirt or frosted meadow but into a cradle of dry leaves that the woman had prepared. He smouldered, bright and impotent, until he followed an instinctive urge to suck himself into the dead vegetation. Here, in a hot spurt of physicality, he began to glow. The grass blackened, pale smoke plumed and in a bursting lick of brightness, he was not a spark but a flame, a tongue of yellow-orange fire that grew and danced and rose, chewing up the leaf nest and spitting out black char.

  As the flame expanded, so did his mind. A greater depth of thought blew out of him—thoughts with edges, curves and the early spikes of emotion—as well as an expanded field of orange-tinged vision. He began to see that around him there was dead fuel, yes, but there was also sharp life. Gold-black bees tumbled through the green grass beyond his reach. White specks of birds hung against the blue dome above him. Yabbies clicked on the riverbank. And the most obvious and important life in his new world was now feeding him, her creased brown fingers poking dry sticks into his dancing maw, causing him to sputter, fizzle and grow even taller.

  Under her tender ministrations he leaped upwards, taking on new colours and shapes, learning the distinctive tastes of twig and branch and grass without ever feeling satisfied—his hunger, he discovered, was without end. But as much as he wanted to feast, he wanted even more to please his creator. With his hungry yellow tongues he helped her harden a branch, shaping its end into a charred point. He took a wallaby she dropped in his coals and singed off its fur, melted its tendons and burned its flesh. He spat ash into her palms, which she mixed with water and applied to her face in a slick slurry. And as he did all this he realised he had a purpose; that she had called him into life for a specific set of reasons; that he could do so much more than eat and grow.

  And then his mother taught him fear. Without warning she gathered scoops of water from the river and splashed out his eyes, his tongues, his limbs, and as he sizzled under the drenching wetness he learned a new taste: horror. In a swift moment he changed from a crackling god into a blinking, dying ember, spewing out his final breaths in a thin strand of smoke. The woman stood up, gathered her possessions, and walked away. His mind had turned woozy and weak. From his little coal he couldn’t see much more than clumps of wet grey ash, and beyond them her naked retreating feet. In such a short time he had lived, learned, grown and died. A cold wind streaked across his face. The ember glowed hard, bright, and out.


  But he did not die; he merely slept. Sometime later—hours, days, weeks—a crooked stick of lightning lanced a dead paperbark at the back of a white beach. There was an explosion of woodchips, sparks, fire, and in the midst of all this mayhem his mind roared back to consciousness. He surged up through the flames, looking around, feeding on the paperbark, and saw that his mother and the river were gone. Instead he was surrounded by a scraggly forest, gritty sand, great orange rocks, and beyond all that: endless, hateful water. At the sight of the sea he flickered with fear, but the water stayed where it was, and after a while he discovered that as long as nobody introduced them to each other he was safe.

  He left the blackened remains of the paperbark behind and moved among the trees, feeding on leaf, branch, frond and flower, savouring the range of flavours (zingy she-oak, oversweet wattle, the umami tang of banksia sap) growing his body into a swollen beast and turning the scrubland into a smoking field of ash. No amount of water could stop him now; he was too huge, too strong, too hell-hot to be halted. So when the rain first began falling he laughed, crackling out his humour as the droplets turned to steam as soon as they met his blazing extremities. Yet into the roar of his laughter they continued to fall, and eventually they were so numerous he could not evaporate them all. His immense frame was gradually beaten down by the rain, reshaped into an angry crouch. And when the rain found his many hearts, glowing in the embers of his many coals, he again began to feel woozy. Under the stinging water they fizzled out, one by one. The high-climbing flames disappeared, replaced by gasping smoke. His mind slipped with each lost coal, tumbling back to sleep. This time he did not feel fear, for he knew that he would be summoned again soon.

  The next time, he awoke in a bushland clearing, surrounded by men and women and children who looked like his mother. They fed him on a modest diet of twigs and sticks until he grew into a creature of slow, stable flames. He yearned to keep feeding, to surge larger, but with practised care they confined him to a ring of smooth river rocks. Here he first learned frustration and, when his annoyance ebbed away, patience. He also learned that his heat not only ended life: moderated carefully, it could nourish it. Blue day flowed into black night and the people moved in close to him, reaching out towards his flames. They slept with their backs to him, warmed through the winds and ice of the night, right up until the moment the yellow sun dragged itself through the trees and his final coal blinked out.

  In his next life he was whipped by clashing rocks into the sticky, bitter flavour of a resin-dipped branch. After an initial burst of growth he was again contained, this time by the long-burning nature of the resin, but he did not mind or even really notice—he was being carried through a low forest by another person, among a group of people with other burning sticks. He was not used to moving like this: slow, careful, bobbing up and down with each light footstep. He knew only how to rush and devour as fast as his flames could leap, so here there was another lesson—a lesson in pacing. The people were picking through the bracken, looking for something he could not see. After a short time they found it: dry grass. He and the other flames were lowered to the ground where they could kiss the green blades, and in an instant he was chewing through the grass, stalk and seed, smoke and flame. Soon he joined with the fires set by the other torches and his body doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size. But as great as he grew, this time his volume was measured by girth, not height—the people had chosen a meadow that held, along with the grass, only low trees and scrappy ferns. He churned through this meagre vegetation until he reached the edge of the plain, where he teetered on the edge of a rocky beach. Beyond that was a huge bay of navy-brown water, thick with tannins and salt and a death-wet greeting. Behind him was a field of char and, standing on it, the people who had herded him there. They watched him flutter with canny satisfaction. On the shore of the harbour, as he sputtered into sleep, he was taught yet another lesson: that even in the spread of his power, he could still serve a purpose.

  Lessons, always lessons, strange ideas and stony truths taught to a simple being of flame and hunger. Yet soon after he scorched the green meadow he made his greatest discovery of all: he did not need to wait for someone to summon him to life. With a simple act of will he could transfer himself into any fire across the island. All he needed to do was reach out with his mind—concentrating in a singular, precise kind of way—and flick himself into any naked flame or glowing coal that retained even the smallest dreg of heat. In this way he could move from a campsite on a beach to a heath fire in the highlands, on to a burning stump in a bog, to a copse of flaming ferns, then back to the reeking fibres of a wallaby’s fur back on the coast, all in the blink of a human’s eye.

  Now he roamed the land faster than he could consume it. His lives lengthened from hours to weeks to months, and within a few years he had been across the entire island while consuming only tiny parts of it. He had danced along the edge of every deathly coastline. He had glimpsed the peaks of all the great mountains. He had met moss and lichen, rock and crayfish, possum and parrot, banksia and wattle, and every branch of gum that sprouted from the deep, brown earth. He even met others like him—beings of rock, of sand, of earth and ice, that lived in much the same way he did, although they weren’t the same, not really. Some wore fur and feathers and watched over the creatures they resembled. Some floated high in the sky and released rain, on a whim, to extinguish him. Some swam through rivers and called themselves gods. Some were kind. Some, like a blood-hungry bird spirit he encountered deep in the southwest, were cruel. Most were calm, seeking only to care for the creatures and land that they felt drawn closest to.

  But what about him: what did he care for? What part of the world had thrown hooks into his soul? The answer, he had learned early in his life, lay in the hands that had clashed two stones together to create him. It was people, always people; only people that he really cared for. He had helped them cook, create, shape and heat themselves, and had come to think of them as not so much a family but as part of himself. For of all the shapes of life he had encountered, they were the only ones who had shown him that he had a purpose in this water-edged world.

  He made another discovery too, one that the humans would have found astonishing if he had ever told them, but to him was merely a curious trick: he could walk among them, as one of them. It happened one cool night under a cloudless, moon-bright sky. He was dozing in a clump of coals as a tall man used a sharp rock to skin a wallaby. The man’s hands were moving smoothly and methodically, running the rock up and down the animal, grasping the fur, realigning the edge of his tool, flexing and twisting and fidgeting fingers; and he wondered what it would feel like to have hands, not fiery tendrils, but fleshy, bony, human hands. His mind followed that thought, and without intention or design, his body did as well. Slowly, hesitantly, a plume of fire stretched out of the coals, gradually wavering into four fingers and a thumb. He wiggled these fingers, amused, but not satisfied. The fire-hand began extending from a fire-arm, which was joined to a fiery shoulder. The coal glowed hotter, his mind kept chasing the thought of the rock-skinned wallaby, and soon a torso, and legs, and corresponding arm were also appearing, finally joined by a protruding neck and fiery orb of a skull.

  He stepped out of the coals and immediately teetered back onto his burning heels, almost falling over. Walking wasn’t as easy as the humans made it look—especially when your feet set ablaze the leaves lying on the dirt. He tried kicking the tiny flames out, as he’d seen the humans do, but that only made them bigger. He imagined what he’d look like if his body wasn’t made of flames—in his mind he saw a man who could’ve been the brother of the man who’d been skinning the wallaby—and on this image he concentrated with precision and intensity, in much the same way he did when he wanted to transport himself to another fire. Thoughts of flesh and hair and watery eyes thrummed through him; a vision of walking placidly through the forest came next; and then he looked down to see brown virgin skin covering his flames in a carpet of perfectly human hide
. He blinked, not as a flickering wick of fire but as a person, with eyelids over eyes, and lifted a fleshy hand to his face. Skin scraped skin. Breath fell from above a bony jaw. Night wind rustled over dark hair. Nubs of raised flesh popped up all over him, and he turned to the fire he’d left behind with outstretched hands: for the first time in his life, he was cold.

  As he warmed himself—an odd, pleasing sensation that felt deliciously alien—he looked around. The skinner was lying down, asleep, as were the other members of his tribe. Nobody had seen him emerge and transform. He spent the night stretching, limbering and walking around, testing out the capabilities of his fleshy cocoon. As the sun began to rise he slunk off into the bush, and when the humans started waking up he re-emerged, telling them he was a lost traveller, in a language he had listened to for years but never before used.

  These people accepted him—although the skinner, seeing a face so similar to his own, never gazed into the reflective surface of a still lake again—as did the next group, and the next ones, and nearly all of the people he chose to walk among over the next few decades. He enjoyed it, for a while, but he didn’t feel compelled to do it often. Though he liked people, talking to them and being among them only heightened the truth that he was not one of them. He couldn’t relate to their problems. He couldn’t know their love and pain and hate and joy. And he couldn’t stay with any group of them for a long time, because he did not age. They stooped and withered around him as he remained unchanged, burning bright beneath his false skin, and after a while they realised he was not really the lost traveller he claimed to be. No—living with humans did not work. It was far easier to watch from the coals, to help them with his flames, and be around them but not with them. And besides: it was more fun to be fire.