Cemetery in Black and White

Creating the flame was not something that he ever was conscious of. It was an extension of him, just like opening his eyes in the morning and seeing the sun, or tasting the rain on his tongue. The fire was like storm wind on skin, lashing whiplike across his vision.

Sometimes, the fire was orange heat lightning through winter snow. Sometimes the flames were snakes with eyes that watched him, forked tongues flicking flame-red bloodstone crimson across nonexistent lips, smiling. Sometimes, he saw them in his mind before they would burst sizzling from his fingertips and pour in conflagration across the earth and sky like molten air.

And in the seconds before the fire found its target and stone and glass and fragments of man burst in sickening gurgling screams around him, he would see the world as if in black and white: the whites of their eyes, the blackness of his own hands. The scenes were colorless photographs in his mind, and sometimes when everything was over and he was safe in his bed at night, his consciousness would pick itself up restlessly and roam the halls of the echoing mausoleum that housed their galleries.

He remembered all their faces.

It was natural that as time ticked slowly by and the shadows grew longer and the sun set behind the arched windows of the gallery that the pictures would darken, and the crisp, bright lines of photographer's ink would blur. But there were no lights there, and he did not need them. Even if the sun would set and there was no moon, no stars, he would still see them, hanging in perfect frozen order, each with an invisible number, because even the graves of the dead were numbered now, lines and lines of ghostly white tombstones marching down the barren hillside and up toward the horizon.

There was nothing in the world that his fire could not and would not touch if he wished it, but each time he had tried to set them ablaze, to send them up in a massacre of memory, the photographs seemed to creak slightly inside their frames, and the dead and almost-dead would turn their heads, ever-so-slowly roll their eyes toward him, and he could hear them screaming.

And when he woke up shaking in the dark, he would sit up in bed, panting softly, fumble for the white glove that lay on the bedside table. Then there was only the slight pause, the gentle snapping of the fingers, the familiar shadows of his bedroom in the tiny flame that danced along the edges of his hand.

If he could, he would go back, back to all their graves and visit them one by one, place one white-gloved hand on the even whiter tombstones, and give back a little bit of himself into the earth that now housed all that remained of a human life. But there were too many, and he was just one man, and even if he could give up all of himself, it would never be enough.