The Day Hades Laughed

One second. That's all it took for my timer to start running out. The raging torrent of fire overtook my face, my chest, and my legs. One second: any and all sound hid itself from my ears. Two seconds: my flesh shrank around my bones. Three seconds: my skin ruptured and started to separate. Four seconds: my skin fell off in large partitions. Five seconds: my mind kicked in and mapped out where water might be. Six seconds: I dropped.

I frantically rolled around, as had been ingrained in my mind since grade school, but to no avail. The fire of hell itself had enveloped me and was gnawing away at my very being. There was no smothering this, no smart technique that could save me — only the fire and the seconds it was taking from me, one by one. I used the last bit of adrenaline left to half crawl, half gallop toward the shower, where I doused myself in what should have been life-giving water. But as I looked down, all I saw was skin falling off and blood seeping through my burned clothes, the water running pink and then red around the drain.

Was I crying? No. The only thing that came from my eyes was blood. I fell to the floor of the shower, defeated, unable to stand or walk, naked, vulnerable, and empty. The water kept falling on me, indifferent, as if it didn't know it had failed at the one job I'd asked of it. I tried to open my phone, but my fingertips fell off. I tried to unlock it with my thumb, but it too had burned away, a print of skin and nothing else left smeared across the glass. I punched in the pin with my nose and dialed the emergency number the same way, pressing my face against the screen like a man trying to kiss his way out of dying.

"This is Smithson County Emergency Services, what seems to be the problem?"

I screamed: "MY FUCKING SKIN IS FALLING OFF. THE FIRE — IT ALMOST KILLED ME."

The dispatcher said, "Okay, sir, I'm going to need you to calm down and tell me what happened."

Calm down? How about you try being seconds away from death as you bleed out from walking through Hell itself, I thought. As I told the dispatcher what had happened, I gave muddled responses broken up by screaming from the pain, the kind of pain that didn't let you finish a sentence before it reminded you it was still there, still working, still taking.

The police arrived first. They cleared the house with guns blazing, as if I were some kind of criminal in a syndicate, kicking in doors that didn't need kicking, shouting at rooms that held nothing but smoke and the smell of myself burning. Once they finished, I asked them to shoot me, to get it over with. But the police officers gave me a look that sent a clear message: Begging for death? You're pathetic. One of them radioed something I couldn't make out. None of them came closer than they had to.

Next, the firemen came and extinguished the scraps of clothes and dry grass that had caught fire along with me. They moved with a kind of practiced calm that almost looked like care, until you realized it was just procedure. They brought along a medic who sat in front of me, unable to do anything because of a lack of supplies and training for something like this. He just watched, his hands open and empty in his lap, like he was waiting for someone else to show up and tell him what to do with me.

Finally, the paramedics came and strapped me onto a stretcher. By this point I had passed out, but not for long. I was set out in the front yard on a sunny, hot day that seared my burns all over again, sunlight finding every raw place the fire had already opened. I woke up convulsing from the pain, my body trying to fold in on itself and finding no skin left to fold. The first responders looked at me with pity, even though the ambulance doors stood open and ready, a few feet away, waiting for someone to carry me the rest of the distance. I don't know why they waited. Maybe they thought moving me too fast would do more damage than the fire already had. Maybe they just didn't know how to touch something that looked like me.

After a while, I was lifted into the ambulance and asked questions like "What's today's date?" "What's your dog's name?" and "What year is it?" — none of which I could answer, because I was passing back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness like a radio losing signal on a long drive. Every time I surfaced, the questions were waiting for me again, patient and useless, while the world outside the ambulance windows blurred into smears of light.

I don't remember the siren. I don't remember the turns we took or how long the drive was. I remember the ceiling of the ambulance, white and close, and a paramedic's voice telling me to stay with her, stay with her, as if staying were a choice I still had any say in. Somewhere underneath the pain, a small, distant part of my mind was still counting. Seven seconds. Eight. Nine. As if the timer that started the moment the fire reached my face had never actually stopped, and never would, not even now, not even here, strapped down and bleeding and alive only because some stubborn animal part of me refused to let six seconds be the last number it ever counted to.

This, is my very real story, this is where I spun the devil's roulette wheel and my bet didn't land, This is where I grew, and yet was destroyed, this is where my time was very quickly running out, Like a stopwatch that had betrayed me.