"The Fire Keeper"
During this first year of the darkness, all
the kids in our block looked forward to our birthdays even more than we looked
forward to morning. Not every day had a birthday. And despite the little gifts
we were able to make for each other, despite being allowed first choice from
the stew pot at meal times, it was nightfall that the birthday girl – and the
rest of us – really anticipated all day when my father, the Fire Keeper, took
out his magic box, slid it open, and removed one tiny, red-tipped stick,
presented it to the celebrated, and held out the strike pad on the box’s side.
The gift of fire, he would tell us, all sitting in a circle, was what kept us
alive, and birthdays were a celebration of that life; each child on her
birthday received one little flame on its tiny stick, to do with it whatever
she wished. Some held it, felt its warmth in their hands; some carried it
around the circle, letting us all see it up close; others lit candles with it,
to take back to their own shelters.
My father had found the box, he said, the day
the darkness began, dug it out of the rubble. Possessing the firesticks gave
him standing in our little community, but he never used them himself, even as
the Fire Keeper. He was a master, and there had yet to be a day when he
couldn’t light the communal fire at dusk with a flint or with just the wood
itself. I’d watched him toil over the smoking tinder in high winds; I’d watched
him use his own tarp to keep his wood supply
dry while he sat in the rain. But however long he left me alone in our tent, he
always had the fire going by nightfall.
Today is my birthday. When my father presents
me with my firestick, I reach out and take both it and the box, and my father
lets me because I am his. And I strike the red tip on the rough pad and feel
the heat on my fingers, the glow on my face, which I know displays the same awe
I have seen on every other birthday girl’s face. We are sitting around the communal
stew pot, which still sits cold, the wood beneath it still damp from the
morning’s rain, my father looking to have a long, frustrating evening away from
me getting it lit.
Shaking off the spell this tiny flame has cast
over me, I stand up, step forward, and kneel beside the stew cauldron to lower
the flame into the tinder. I have watched my father do this a hundred times
with other wood and other flames, and know where to light. I smile as the fire
takes to the hissing wood, I smile seeing my father smile, knowing that now the
Fire Keeper’s task is finished early, his gift returned and returned again
because tonight I’ll have him to myself.
(c 2012 Matthew Brennan)
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