skonen_blades

Fires can start in the rain.
They can go on to rage as the water comes down.
Fires can start in the winter as well.
It’s easy to forget those two things.
When it’s been raining in your life for years.
Or cold for much longer than a season.
You start to think the state is unchangeable.
That fire is only in the past.
That it can’t ever be here now.
Even that it won’t ever exist in the future.
But most importantly, that you can’t start a fire.
You can.
You can.
It’s the oldest trick we humans can do.
We rub together to ignite.
Burning down houses is what we do best.
Fire is a catalyst for change.
A critical mass that chains exploding molecules.
And creates a different state.
What’s burnt can’t be unburnt.
And burning only needs a spark to start.
So if your life needs burning down.
Or if a little fire could cauterize a wound.
Or if a little heat could fix something.
It’s possible.
Do you need to get rid of some flammable relationships
That have been pretending to not be paper?
Have you been on a bridge in need of destruction by fire
For years?
Break out the marshmallows.
Let the air in.
And dance around the fire with your shadow flickering behind you.
You might get a little burnt yourself.
So be careful.
But just remember:
Just because it’s cold.
Just because it’s raining.
Doesn’t mean that a fire can’t happen.



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The horses were screaming as they ran through the burning underbrush. It was night so they acted as torches lighting the devastation around us. I’ve heard that most animals smell like pork when they burn but these horses smelled didn’t. There was a smell to their crisping flesh that was very much equine. I can’t describe it.

I huddled in the darkness, letting waves of orange light and the acrid smoke flow around me. My hands burned for release. The pent up energy, dammed into my fingertips, waiting for the right key words to let them out.

All these defenses. I had no idea there’d be so many. The idea was to torch the barn to bring the emergency services and maybe distract the owners into running outside to fight the blaze themselves, leaving the house open to attack.

No such luck. As soon as I cast the first flame ward to the base of the barn, blue light sparkled up both sides of the house. A protection spell tinged with ice magic to protect it from the flames. It’s complicated to mix spells and even more complicated to store them, let alone set them into the bricks of your house with an automated trigger. That takes constant mage monitoring.

Who was I attacking? I’d been given this job as an in-between contracts sort of thing. The money seemed a little too good for the simplicity of the task but I was starting to think that I’d never see the paycheque.

My long hair dangled down out of my hood. I brought it back into a ponytail inside my cloak to stop it from singing. I cast a dampening spell around me but it made a lot of steam when the fire got close, making me an easy target.

The team was supposed to storm the house after I’d started the fire. I remember hearing battle cries cut short by a loud series of booms and a lot of brilliant flashes lighting up the clouds in front of the house. I was crouched by the back so I couldn’t see exactly what happened but I did recognize one or two of the glyphs that splintered up into my magician’s vision over the roof of the house.

Glenwyld’s Sword Form, if I wasn’t mistaken. That’d be Flendolyn. A shield of Hacksorrow. A protection spell from Willend. But the fact they were sharded was deeply worrying. This team wasn’t upper level but they had some clout. We were overqualified for this smash-and-grab mission and they were getting beaten if not torn to pieces out there. I should have seen some of Regalla’s flame work and Ouwatty’s lightning demon but I didn’t.

And there were nearly 8 spells I didn’t recognize.

Had we attacked a magician’s meeting? A cabal of the country’s best casters?

All I knew was that my job was over and I appeared to be extremely unsuited for rescue or combat
going by the evidence at hand.

Fleeing was my only option.

I washed a passing horse in my dampening aura and calmed him with sugar cube dreams. I hopped up on his back and spurred him, steaming forward into the darkness and away from the light.

The barn burned merrily behind me. The horses screamed.

I never saw my friends again. No one spoke of them at the usual meeting tavern and the rendezvous points remained untouched. Acquaintances we had in common claimed to have no knowledge of them anymore. Whether it was induced by sorcery or just regular thief prudency, I couldn’t tell.

I counted myself lucky to have survived and didn’t press the issue. I didn’t seek payment.
That’s why I moved to Overdale. It’s quiet here and I like it.



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It’s not that the underground rose up to swallow everyone in a worm mouth warehouse entrance air hangar disappearing trench.
It’s not that microphones everywhere became lightning rods.
It isn’t even that bleached hair burst into flame, turning every activist into a small nuke.
It’s more like a horse became a secretary.
It’s more like the Titanic and the Hindenberg had a baby who grew up to pretend to be Santa Claus to kids and God to adults.
The rescue isn’t coming.
The parachute isn’t packed.
There are no air bags and the car is swerving out of control on the wet road.
There is a future coming that will make us nostalgic for brush fires, for a time when we’d only had two nuclear wars, for a time when cannibalism was rare.
I’m no electric guitar but I can hear the writing on the wall.
Pure jelly beans.
My understoodness has not been ratified.
But I can kill a zebra with my right wing and a statue with my left.
Both wings flapping is the bird version of applause.
Dive into my ice cream.
And rot.



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Angry stairs claim the ankles of children to teach them lessons. Dictionaries with broken backs teach the vocabulary of victims to willing ears. Motel room infants and alley kids vie for the attention of roulette tables. Every path has a beginning. This is where Darlene came from. It was hot, even in the night time. She didn’t see snow until her thirteenth birthday.

Thirteen, for her, became a lucky number. That was the year she moved to a part of the world with a winter season. It was like being transplanted into a dream. The first snowfall she saw was like water on a fire. She felt like she was being extinguished, made into steam, and cooled. The fight felt over. The hard life seemed like it was softening.

Work was hard to get but she got something. Rooms were hard to find but she found one. Friends were difficult to come by but she managed to snag a few. A life of sorts started to develop in the cracks between the bricks of her life.

I met her when she was twenty-six. I would never have guessed she was that young. She was working part-time at the library. She was putting books back on shelves. As meetings go, it wasn’t Hollywood. It was clumsy. I think I was entertaining but I have nothing to base that on other than the fact that she said yes.

That was four months ago. I can still see the revolutions and the death in her eyes but I can see the glimmer of this new life glittering there as well. It’s like she’s pregnant with the idea that she might be able to relax and it’s growing month by month.

Calm ladders embrace the wings of angels to let them rest for a while. Thesauruses with strong arms give other words to use in place of bad ones. Mansion brats and million dollar babies grow bored with comfort. Every path has an end. This is where I came from. It was a museum, even during parties. I didn’t see fire until I saw Darlene.




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To see my way through dancers in the night, I hold aloft a fuse. A roadside flare that marks off the time I have left, acting as a warning to the nocturnal insects that balk at brightness. This is danger at the roadside marking off the paces to the pirated treasure waiting at the foot of the hill. I dream of candle wax and strangers. I dream of probing eyes and the poison that drips off of the word ‘appointment’.

In twelve weeks, my memory of the future goes cold. After that, it’s the leap of hang-gliding wizards taking shots at dragons in summer skies. After that, it’s necessary bereavement and an amputee race of forgotten hopes against wished-for wishes granted much too late up a hill of happy memories. After that, it’s a dark return to love. Heave against the alarm clock and push it off the cliff.

We will gather together in Calcutta. We will gather together in Rome. We will gather together around the largest volcanic fissure on the bottom of the ocean. We will experience life in the slums of our own hearts and we will experience history in the cobwebbed libraries of our own minds. We will take swimming lessons from bad teachers and forge our own stories across the ocean.

I warm my hands beside your fire, humming a tune to keep myself from remembering how good I feel around you. I have a drawer full of stamps at home, envelopes and paper, but they mystify me. I picture the Earth hurtling through time like a bowling ball and I wonder how it’s possible to not feel it. I think that this, right here, is the granted gift unraveling around us in a celebration of life.

If this is a recipe, then we need more salt. Tears, sweat, and blood. If this is a recipe, then we need more time. Centuries. If this is a recipe, then we need more sugar. Love, hugs, and the end of being hunted.

I’m a tent-pole and it’s raining. Help me be a lightning rod.




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I weigh six tons and my back is on fire. Walking on these streets brings back a memory.

I remember walking on the thick crust of snow in the arctic. I remember that as a child, I could run across the top of the frozen snow with no worries. As I got older and heavier, I had to walk more carefully in case I broke through the top layer and struggled through the waist-deep powder underneath.

Back when I was human.

I’m in a downtown core now. One foot busts through the deserted street asphalt and punches down into the sewer underneath. I pull it out and step gingerly up onto the street again.

I remember that when I was a teenager in the snow, they gave me snowshoes to stop me from falling through the snow.

I look around at the fires and the bodies and the melting glass of the buildings. There are a couple of cars near to me. I tear their roofs off and step on them. They immediately melt from the heat of my huge feet, attaching themselves to me. Presto. Urban snowshoes.

If my new face would allow it, I would smile.

I’m not responsible for this carnage, I’m just reporting on it. The corporation acted while the governments toppled and stood scared. They grabbed people off the streets and strapped them to beds. The experiments were started.

I’m a firekiln. I’m a walking two-story monster made of brick. I have super-hydrated cameras strapped to me and a transmitter buried in the rock of my forehead to receive directions and relay information back.

I’m like one of those remote control submarines except for radioactive pits instead of the ocean.

I remember paper burning in the fireplace when I was growing up. I remember the paper turning black and then flying up the chimney, red-edged and victim to the thermals.

I’m watching human bodies do that now every time I turn something over or a storefront collapses when I walk past.

The world wavers in a heat haze around me like one giant mirage. This is an oven.

I’ve absorbed too much radiation to go back amongst unaugmented humans but I knew this was a one way trip. There are others like me here reporting back as well and they’ll send more once our cameras dry out and break.

I’ll have friends. We’ll hang out here and see how many years it takes for us to melt.


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