Do you remember the time we built a fire on the roof? We lived in some huge short fat apartment crowded in with a hundred others. Right where the buildings met the highway. We found a way to the roof one day. There was a thin stairway through a nearly fallopian hallway to a tiny door. It opened to the roof. A microscopic undiscovered country. No one had been there for years you could tell. We ran from corner to corner in silence, we didn’t want to alert anyone. We leaned over the sides and peered into windows, watched people fighting and sleeping. And behind the stairway entrance we found newspapers. Stacks and stack of bundled newspapers.
Do you remember the look on your face?
You wanted them to burn. You couldn’t wait.
You ran back downstairs, took the matches from the kitchen and rocketed back up again. By the time you got back up I had assembled the stack into a pyramid in the center of the roof. We looked at it like two children looking at a wedding cake. Dying to know what’s inside.
The flame was enormous. It curled into the sky reaching for the stars that we couldn’t see. A glowing red corkscrew twelve feet high. And then it died down just as soon as it began, and the stack of newspaper became smoldering lumps of coal. And one by one the burnt sheets of paper flaked off with the wind and sailed into the air like pixies covered with soot. The air was filled with them. They danced around us.
