Jed Wolf

I lay on an examination table using a Bic lighter to ignite the white sheet I’d covered myself with, then quickly lay back down. The fire licking my ankles felt like a warm foot bath and when the flames dripped to the floor, the gasoline I’d apparently poured there, ignited far more gently than I would’ve expected.

I’d always revered the smell of gas. Reminiscent of my father’s garage,, small engines and running on empty, as a child it’s power was like the blood of God or Satan, depending on who I’d been running on.

The warm exploding fumes didn’t steal oxygen or adversely affect me or my dream in any way. In a lovely puff, flames spread like knifed butter onto the cabin’s walls. I held my nose as my smoldering Levi’s released Indonesian chemical fumes from my legs. “Now there’s an odor, I won’t miss,” I thought bunching the sheet around my nostrils.

The fireball had extinguished flames from the sheet’s edges. The remaining piece covered my torso, “like a smoking shroud of Turin,” I thought. Chilly between two worlds, I turned on my side into the fetal position, pulled the sheet over my shoulders and enjoyed my pillow as the inferno dug deeper into my flimsy cabin’s walls. It had always been a fire trap, I remembered.

I’d had no idea how to build it. I’d slapped together a basic box from eight-foot lumber and plywood back in boarding school when I was fourteen. I’d never wanted to write about what really happened there, and now I was being incinerated because I dared pray for help before falling asleep. “Fancy that, “ I heard. “You can’t handle writing about it and no one would want to read it.”

I first learned about trusting Angels through writing songs. Angels, spirits, muses – whatever they’re called, wrote songs, not me. The best songs emerged when I stepped aside and wrote without second guessing them. It was hard to be their scribe. At times I had to walk away from the dung they dumped on me to start with. Incomprehensible at first, clichéd lyrics and sentimental melodies like ugly ducklings, blossomed into swans, if I didn’t strangle them first.

Now after many years, I’d prayed for support and wound up in flames. Apparently, I needed incineration.

Upon waking, I’d made a choice.

I could lie there trying to fall back to sleep, thinking I’d be a basket case in the morning without rest. I’d been telling myself, “if only I could remain asleep forever,” for years. Too much time in bed made me sleepless. I’d walked my yard during Covid like a zombie, napping between cocktails and needed an alternative so I prayed for guidance. “I’ll write what I’m given,” I’d said out loud staring at a heaping basket of dirty laundry before turning out the light.

When I woke in flames, rather than distracting myself with a podcast, I sat up and grabbed my MacBook.

As obediently as possible, I remembered hard, listened, and wrote, “like a frigging disciple,” my cynicism chimed in. “Best nip that in the bud,” I thought. “Here we go,” I heard, unable to tell which voice was fueling the fire.

Some say the muse would be the still one amid the flames, but I thought I heard the still one order me to write about the other, so I wrote,

“Help glistened like a patch of late March sun on perpetual snow.” “Really? Did it?” I heard. “Ewe. Wishful thinking much?”

I wasn’t surprised by cynical clouds of doubt trying to keep creativity locked in ice. “So be it,” I thought. “So be it? You really wanna’ type that?” I wondered recollecting the smell of burning hair.

“So be it!” I pronounced, like Moses. “Moses never said that,” I heard sneered. I pronounced, “sounding Biblical. Is that better?” I said, stranglingly.

Then I heard, “How’s this gonna’ work? Between the two of us, who will you listen to? Go ahead, kick me to the curb,” one voice said. “Time to shave your head and chant Hare Krishna in Jax airport,” said another. “I am you,” I swear heard another whisper, like Cybil staring at a mirror.

I expected demons to mock an angelic platitude or two, but this was all chaos. Perhaps they thought they’d won, and were enraged at my prayers or that I’d dared to write about what happened at the cabin. Maybe my muses, suspicious at being awakened were testing my faith in them.

I didn’t know and was about to yell, “Stop!” when suddenly I realized, something must really be worth fighting for here, and just like that; silence.

I quickly prayed to all sides during the brief armistice and immediately heard, “without destruction, fitful rages, hopelessness and help, there’d be no story.”

Burning to tell mine, I shut my MacBook, closed my eyes, returned to the fetal position, and summoned the firebomb.