Alexandra Grese doesn’t talk much and usually has ink on her fingers. Her work has been accepted for publication by The Garfield Lake Review, Jelly Bucket, Superpresent, MUSE Literary Magazine, and others. Her flash fiction collection DREAMSCAPES was published in 2022 by Alien Buddha Press. Find her on Instagram or at alexandragrese.com. 

Pyromaniac

The voices are back, harmonized in their malice. I listen and nervously hum along. By the bridge, I know the chorus, and can practically smell the ashes of the ones I’ve burned.

I don’t have a reliable nose. Most of the time, I can’t smell anything. I think it’s from all the coke. I’m not sure--I’m not a doctor. But that has reasons far beyond just the coke.

Instead, I’m a pyromaniac. I’m drawn to anything incendiary like a moth to a flame. Words are my drug and my matches. People’s insecurities are my kindling. The aftermath is an effective temporary distraction.

When all the bridges are gone and the high’s cleared away with the smoke, I realize I am more than alone: I am ostracized, and through no one’s agency but my own. I can get used to it--I have to, like a flunking college student acquiring the taste for coffee. But that adjustment twists me. Subject to no one else’s perspective, I lose mine. Suddenly, I am the bad thoughts I think and the regrets that make me come undone. I am no longer me. It’s a lot like resigning myself to feeling cold.

When I start a fire, I create the most fearful and respected elemental force. It’s like breathing into the world new life. There’s a feeling like being drunk as I watch it feed and grow and dance. I imagine it’s how parents feel about their kids as they grow and develop and accomplish things other people think matter.

What do other people think matters?

Sometimes, when I’m trying not to think about setting things on fire, I think about birds. I asked a cardinal in a nearby tree once to show me how to fly, and it fluttered away. At first, I was angry and disappointed. Then I realized it’d given a superb demonstration.

In the past, when people had a lot of it, they burned money. I wish I could have been there. I’d roll up a Benjamin like I do before I rail a fat line and inhale its smoke like Jamaican weed.

The great thing about drug dealers is that, as long as they’re still in the game, they’ll always hit you back eventually. It’s street life customer service. My guy’s name is Mel. Mel spends all of his time fucked up because he’s too smart to be sober. It took me a while to figure this out. Mostly because, at first, I couldn’t tell he wasn’t sober. Then I learned about drugs, learned to spot things like pinned or widened pupils, listened to his speech cadence stay soft and even as he methodically went through multiple grams of blow.

“How do you do it?” I asked him once.

He stared at me. “Do what?”

I shook my head. He was on five tabs of acid and it was like we were talking filler, like absolutely nothing was wrong. “Not go crazy?”

His face darkened, and he busied himself with lighting a cigarette. After he inhaled a puff or two, he said flatly, “No one knows unless you tell them.”

And I realized, for that statement to be true, there must be a lot he wasn’t telling me.

Everyone has secrets, and they’re flammable. Holding them in is like drinking gasoline. Anything--a song, a smell, a passing face--can spark a buried memory. You have to learn to hide your knee-jerk fear, to contain it, like Mel does his highs. As the man who unflinchingly held his hand over a candle until he could smell his own burning flesh said, “The trick is not minding.”

Though I have little use for acid anymore, I think everyone should have to try it once. You have to understand that our default reality is nothing more than a state of mind and that other perspectives are valid possibilities. You must learn how to think clearly without the benefit of your sanity.

The first time I tripped, I was a sophomore in high school. The boy with all the answers handed it to me like I’d just asked him to pass the salt. I placed the paper square on my tongue and pretended I didn’t notice his stare.

“Keep it in your mouth for at least five minutes.”

I did, and tumbled into the high thirty minutes later. I watched the objects of his apartment rearrange themselves within the confines of walls that breathed. He played music without lyrics and I somehow sang along. He didn’t try to kiss me, but he put his arm around me, anchored me so I didn’t float away. I could breathe again, because, for at least a little while, none of it was real. By disconnecting from reality, I regained my sanity.

He never made me talk about what happened or why it happened or how I felt now that it had happened, and I never asked him either. It was easier to lock the door and get high.

On his good days, he emanated warmth as infectious as laughter. His smile was hair triggered and his affection for me bulletproof. Those were the days that the real drug was his company and our only concern was, eventually, we’d have to surrender to sleep.

On his bad days, it felt like I was still asleep. He’d never awoken me to the possibility that our shared pain could be temporary. He smoked cigarettes while I burned. It was a gray kind of helpless, a heaviness like humidity, an angry, stormy guilt.

Six months later, he dropped out of college and took a job teaching English in Romania. I Googled it the day he left, as if reading about where he was going could somehow bring me closer to him. Its capital is called Bucharest and everyone speaks a language that sounds like poetry. Time works differently, so people still work as shepherds and weavers and carpenters. To get rich, people cross borders and return smuggling cigarettes. I could see him adopting the practice. He would view it as providing a service for the little man. Really, he’s just addicted to defiance. It’s a compulsion like the urge to smoke. It’s a catharsis like watching a dancing flame.

After he left, I had to try to keep myself company, to manufacture my own distractions. I tried to read, but the words kept going in and out of focus. I tried to listen to music, but the artists got the lyrics all wrong. I thought that maybe not so many people would want to watch the world burn if there was ever something good on television.

Remember in grade school how you could make friends with someone just because you wore the same color shirt or because you both chose to pack vanilla instead of chocolate pudding cups for lunch? I miss that. All of my friends are now photographs. Sometimes, when the loneliness feels as thick as smog, I talk to them still. They don't even blink.

Mirrors are tricky, too. My reflection copies my every movement, and it feels like it’s mocking me. No matter how I feel, I always look the same, the way people expect me to look. It’s not a face people connect with arson. It’s not a face people connect with any of the denied realities: pain, loss, a sadness like hunger. I don’t even know what would satisfy the need, but I know the satisfaction of watching something burn.

I remember the first fire I started the way most girls remember their first kiss. It was a few weeks into the new school year. I was a junior now, but nothing had changed.

For English class, we had to write a piece of fiction totaling at least 500 words. I wrote about a Steppe Eagle who died trying to migrate from Romania to Africa. It’d smoked too many cigarettes and just couldn’t fly the way it used to. The teacher gave me an A and praised my creativity.

After school, I went behind the dumpster where most of my classmates made out and smoked shitty weed and tore the paper into careful shreds. I did it slowly, mechanically. I felt both numb and like I needed to scream. When I finished, I arranged the scraps like a centerpiece and used my Bic to start the blaze. I watched it with the same fascination I felt the first time I dropped acid. The heat reached out to me like a steadying hand, and I felt my tension melt away. When the last ember winked out, I realized I’d been crying. I wiped my eyes, pocketed my Bic, and walked the two and a half miles back home.

Ninety percent of all pyromaniacs are male. According to the DSM, it’s a type of Impulse Control Disorder. Females usually display poor impulse control in the form of kleptomania. But I had no desire to take what money could buy. Trinkets are cold and lifeless. Fire is carnal and priceless. Man can’t commercialize or control it. He can only hope to learn from it. That takes practice. That takes a willingness to get burned.

My mom and dad are excellent Catholics, but crap parents. They’ve never missed a day of Church, but never managed to make it to any of my dance recitals. I was a natural ballerina. Catholicism demands a stringent attitude that my parents practiced and accepted like the Gospel. I spent all of my time at home tiptoeing around the morals they imposed, so I danced in pointe the way most women walk in heels.

I quit dancing once it happened. I didn’t tell anyone--not my parents, not my dance teacher--I just stopped going. It felt like someone had a song I hated playing on a loop in my head, and I couldn’t dance if I couldn’t hear the actual music. I traded the dance studio for a college boy’s chaotic apartment. He fed me drugs like melodies and I’d close my eyes like I was dizzy. It was a graceful escape, a perfectly executed pirouette.

I am now a senior, and I’ve lost track of the number of fires I’ve started. Next week, I graduate, and I never have to see the classmates who don’t even pretend not to know me again. I’ve gotten a scholarship to the same college the boy I now know didn’t have all the answers attended. I’ve decided to study English, because words have power, like fire, like drugs. They can create worlds or tear them asunder. They can wound without leaving behind any trace, and they can heal the scars we don’t dare let show. They can preserve our memories so we never have to worry about forgetting them, can allow us to hold on while providing the release of letting go.

His name was Michael. He had the laugh of a child and the touch of a doctor. He always drove with his right hand on the steering wheel and his left hand draped out the window holding a cigarette. He ran the red light because he was busy scanning through the radio stations for a tune the DJ’s hadn’t yet made tired. I remember watching him, his long fingers modulating the dial, when the Pontiac rammed into the driver’s side door.

The funeral was small and closed-casket. Not many people showed up because we’d never realized we’d need anyone besides each other. Halfway through the ceremony, I walked to the corner of the graveyard and smoked until I could breathe again. When I looked up, I realized the college boy with so much still to learn stood beside me.

“You’re Alena.” It wasn’t a question. I nodded anyway.

He let out an exhale like a whistle. Overhead, an eagle circled, riding the air’s thermals the way I used to ride the current of a dance number. “He talked about you all the time. How you’re smart. And warm. And different.”

My throat tightened like a fist. I stayed perfectly still, like one move and I’d shatter. He sighed again, and threw a look over his shoulder at the pathetic party still huddled around the closed coffin. Looking back at me like he could really see me, he asked, “Do you want to get out of here?”

I managed to nod. Not an hour later I’d be settled into his apartment like I lived there and taking acid from him like I was that kind of girl. I never found out how Michael knew this boy because it didn’t matter, no more than it mattered that I never learned his last name. He was just a distraction, a band aid like an excuse, a fire I lit just to watch turn to ash.

Because that’s what we are, right? Ashes and dust made sentient, the result of God’s impulsive genesis? We’re the children He loves enough to discipline, but not enough to attend to. We must show up to our life’s recitals without Him, believe in and honor Him, though he physically manifests as an empty seat.

When I die, and I see Michael again, and this life is no more substantial than cigarette smoke, I will talk to God, and I will tell Him what these voices in my head refuse to stop telling me:

You could have stopped it. You should have saved him. I hate you, and this is all your fault.

I wonder what He’ll say to that. I wonder if He feels guilty for making us suffer, or if knowing He does it out of love and for a purpose we can’t understand saves Him. I wonder if He’s ever watched the world burn and lit up a cigarette.

I wonder if He knows what cold feels like.