The smoke comes into the subway station like solid city perfume. No barbecue harmony to it. I can tell this blaze roasts no meat. I climb the stairs hesitantly, imagining apocalypse maundering on my street corner. And I had to pay to get here.
Up top I can see from where the fire stems. It’s opening a tunnel through a cardboard mountain. Acrid embers shoot out from the nexus of paper fed flame. Cool ash disseminates through the neighborhood. The fire builds.
I think of all the lit cigarettes slipped out of my fingers. The apathy to search the ground and stomp.
A metal walker idles at the box flap foothills. My mind moves rapidly over my options, one of which is to just walk away. I can’t stand the stink. I hobble the walker over to the seething orange puddle; stamp the legs into the pooling flame. I throw my understated weight into the walker.
A man with a fake diamond earring and a Yankees cap watches me from a pay phone cubicle. He’s trying not to look at me but his eyes instinctively angle toward the glow.
I tap the edges of the cardboard into muddled ash. I neglect the center. One flame ascends serpentine to my hand. I crush it like a tyrant crushes an uprising. With all the willful arrogance of the one who holds the power. I hold a filthy walker. I grind the coals into the cement until the street is as black as the sky.
I walk away from the heap of ash and the burnt walker, feeling a little like drunk, being very much like drunk. As I turn the corner, I realize that the fire could’ve been lit to warm up the homeless and out of doors. But all the heat you need is in the air tonight. I’ll come to consider the cardboard lightning-struck. Though there is no rain or thunder. I’ll want to think of it as the rare boost of fate that turns tiny women into heroes. Like the city’s invisible savior. Funny how quickly that feeling evaporated. And putting out a random fire on First Avenue at four in the morning becomes a joke.
