Ten Important Facts About Fire
by Damian Dressick
Fire is often used as a metaphor — generally suggesting creativity, passion and occasionally, insanity.
Fire consumes irrevocably what it burns.
The implications of Fact Two should always be kept in mind whenever one states, regarding feelings for a new lover, words to the effect of, "I'm burning for you." This is particularly true when addressing a woman one will later think of as "my ex-wife" and later yet, "my first wife."
Fire is self-replicating.
A long-winded interrogation of the ramifications of Fact One in a doctoral dissertation on Nabokov will not be regarded as a coup-and may play a substantial part in one's ending up teaching a 5 and 5 load of composition courses at a junior college in an especially unglamorous city in the middle west.
Fire is almost without fail accompanied by smoke.
If the smoke happens to be the result of burning marijuana which your teenage son has rolled into Zig-Zag cigarette papers and set ablaze and the state police are the ones doing the smelling following a traffic stop, they will not care that Fact Six is a rather clever qualification of a well-recognized proverb coined by said teenage son the night before the SAT to defuse household tension after the smoke detector has once again functioned as the family dinner bell.
"Fire!" was the main catch-phrase employed by a character named Beavis on animator Mike Judge's popular, satirical, early-to-mid-nineties cartoon "Beavis and Butthead."
When your eldest daughter's shouting of this catchphrase during an experiment in a high school chemistry class results in a classmate's broken arm as the students flee the smoke-filled lab and Laura's subsequent suspension adds, slightly but critically, to the household's already untenable amount of tension, you may noticeably hesitate — just a crucial once — when continually asked by said daughter, "Is it my fault you're fighting?"
When it is your house going up in a wall of blistering orange flame and you can do nothing but stand outside after the divorce in the swirling red glow of the light from the trucks and smell the smoke coming off your bathrobe and give thanks your dog is still alive and your kids weren't home, Fact Four and Fact Two gain nearly unimaginable weight and currency while Fact One becomes almost instantly less relevant than a distant star gone dark right around the time dinosaurs, unchallenged, ruled the earth.
Damian Dressick lives and writes in Pittsburgh, PA. His fiction has appeared in The Aroostook Review and is scheduled to appear in The Worcester Review in Fall of 2007. He holds an M.F.A from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently shopping his first novel, a coming-of-age story set during Pennsylvania's 1922 coal strike.