IT WAS A HOT SUMMER. It was a hot summer and my house burned down with the showmanship expected in a building being consumed by flames, so I put down the flamethrower I had used to torch the air conditioner that wasn’t working when it should have been, when I had gotten angry at the unbearable heat and accidentally started the inferno that mimicked the one raging ambiguously in my head, not considering that setting ablaze an indoor cooling appliance in sudden outrage would not do much to abate the source of my irritation. So I abandoned the trench warfare weapon, put on a bathing suit, and ran into the burning kitchen to grab an ice pop from the freezer and altogether stop-drop-and-rolled out to the street in a performance not unlike a rock practicing sphericality in an avalanche, the neighbors and even the firemen just arriving at the scene stopping what they were doing to applaud.
I got up and licked at my ice pop and said cherry and bowed in gratitude until my back creaked. Then I watched them fight the fire until I was overtaken with boredom, at which point I trudged away singing arson arson with operatic passion and glanced behind myself at the blaze to mourn the fates of the termites living under my floorboards and to worry about the dirty laundry in the hamper. When I had finished exercising my empathy, I walked twenty miles to her place. I told her to please open up, but she said no, to which I said why, to which she replied because I’m stark naked head to toe, save for a nose ring I’ve put on for your entertainment, the mindless cattle that I am in your presence. She opened the door spinning her underwear above her head in unprovoked celebration, the flag of nether-regions pirouetting on her finger.
The underwear-twirler demanded an explanation for my presence at her doorstep with a dessert in my yap so I tell her how my house burned down, how flamethrowers are not good solutions to combat seasonably high temperatures and she says how she wants to go see it, the results of my handiwork, and she drags me to the site, me trailing behind with the freezie still cold in my mouth. So we bumble back. When we get there, we stop and stare at the embers, shoulder to shoulder, together, and we don't say a thing, so I take the chance to promise her things, pretty things, a big house that won’t smolder and puff away like factory smokestacks, to reach for high-placed objects in the cabinets, to open jars that won’t open, and whatever else it is that two people madly in the throes of companionship swear to impart on each other and she says yes so I look at her standing there in her dress, that dress with the black polka dots so much like a ladybug, and I finally say okay.
Subject: About House Fires and Ladybugs 
Fri Jan 09, 2009 3:32 pm
