[Night, two] Love is What We Were Born With

 I'm burning, but I remember:

On the last day we had I found her standing on the balcony. Ten AM and the sky was gloomy. Gray clouds rolling overhead, rain in the air.

"You aren't going to go." I said.

"I have to. Been agreed to." She said.

She put her arms around me. She smelled like soap. Her shirt was new. I'd never seen it before. I lit a cigarette and for once she didn't join me. Just looked at me with this sad look in her eye and told me I should quit, before it killed me.

---

She grew up in a little town in the mountains. One with a long, sad history. She never told me its name but she told me its history. Virgin land around a lake when it was settled. Paradise on earth. Wealth just waiting under the earth to be dug up. Settlers moved in and kicked the natives out. Not much off a war she said, just whites taking the land and the fish and the trees and the metal buried in the hills.

Prospered for a while. Ripping their living from the earth and the forest.

Then there was a war, she said. The old religion came, and there was blood in the streets. A church proclaiming ancient wisdom making its place in the forest. They fought miners in the hills and burnt down the sawmill. Said the land was sacred. White folk and red united under the same banner.

She told me this story in the booth at our neighborhood bar, the lights dim, both of us sipping whiskey. She'd told it before, always when she was drunk and morose. She never remembered the year, but it was nineteenth century, she was sure.

Things had come to a boiling point when the owner of the mines went to confront the churches leaders. Or maybe it was the other way around. Some say a deal was made and a pact sealed between the town and the church, but the owner disappeared and a fire started at his mine.

A fire that swept through those rich forests and engulfed the town. Fire that moved faster than it ought, jumping from tree to tree like they were bone dry, even in the rain. Surrounded the town. People died running straight into the flames or choking on smoke, killing themselves running like animals looking for safety. Ones that survived the longest were the folk that took refuge in the lake at the center of town.

They boiled.

The fire burnt down to the bedrock. Nobody lived there for twenty years. When folk did move back, her great grandfather wasn't one of them. He was the mine owners son, and he'd never left.

I figured then she was going to leave me to become a nun or something. I thought maybe I could convince her otherwise. Didn't matter in the end.

---

She had until noon. I cooked breakfast but neither of us ate. She sat on the bed and I sat beside her, numb. She'd told me the moment I met her. It didn't stop me from falling for her.

Neither of us said anything. We hardly touched.

At noon thunder rolled. 

"Goodbye." She said. 

The apartment was suddenly hot, like the inside of a furnace. A haze on my vision, and there was a man standing there, with spikes driven through his eyes. Agony marked his face, and molten metal poured from his lips. He reached for her. She wasn't moving. She'd made a deal.

I stepped in front of him. 

"Take me." I said. 

"Yes." It said.

It touched my forehead, and I felt the fire start in me, and he was gone. I blacked out.

When I woke up, she was screaming or laughing. I couldn't tell. Tears marked her cheeks.

"Don't touch me. Run." She said.

So I did. I went out the door and I walked. I ran away from her. I didn't know what I'd done but I knew I'd made a deal and I could feel it watching me, following me, under dark gray sky. My skin hot, burning like fire despite the cold.

I walked for hours. Halfway to midnight I went looking for her.

"Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here." -Marianne Williamson

Listening