Burn

Rachel Salguero Kowalsky

Serafina

Serafina has ignited many times in her life. The first time, she was fourteen, angry at a boy in a field. A tiny blue vein, a flickering flower, appeared at the arch of her foot. It did not hurt or burn the grass. It was a continuation, an externalization, of her anger. She ground her foot into the dirt and snuffed it out.

     The next time, she was shouting that she would not come home by 10 p.m. like a good Guatemalan daughter because she’d been born in Boston! Boston! Boston! The flame leaped from instep to hips, shoulders, her black tresses. Her father couldn’t see it, but her mother surely did. What did her mom say? Nothing. Mama just pursed her lips and nodded.

     Over time, Serafina developed a healthy curiosity about her combustible state. Learned that oxygen plus fuel plus heat made fire, excelled in chem lab and physics. She wondered where the spark was situated. Her heart? Her liver? The phosphorus in her blood seemed like a possibility. She researched it for a term paper but was disappointed to learn that the fifteenth and most pyrophoric of elements solidified the human frame—cells, bones, teeth—rather than igniting it.

Faith and Destiny

Serafina is a doctor now, a third-year resident in the Mercy Children’s ER. This evening, her rounds begin with Faith and Destiny, who occupy beds three and four of the Annex, the suite for suicidal teens.

     Why are Faith and Destiny in the Annex? Faith took a trowel to her wrist and spelled U-G-L-Y. Destiny is pregnant and doesn’t want to be; she drank a bottle of Tylenol.

     “I’m here to check on you,” says Serafina.

     Faith rolls her eyes, which are not ugly at all but gray blue and searching, set above freckled cheeks. Yesterday, Faith hid in the meal cart—removing four shelves to squeeze in—rolled down to the hospital kitchen, and climbed out a window. She did not kill herself but walked along the frozen river to clear her head. Who found her? Serafina, out for a run. They walked two and a half miles together in the January wind, out past the barges and the piles of slush and the shabby birds before Faith agreed to return to Mercy. Now she’s drawing something with a red pencil, a flame or flower or maybe pizza.

     Destiny laughs, making a hashtag of her crossed fingers. “Check on me.”

     Both patients wear blue paper jumpsuits that crinkle when they move.

     Faith, Destiny, Mercy. Serafina, a former lit major, sees the irony: the aspirational nouns versus the brush fire of society. In the glare of the Annex lights, she asks each girl in turn: Does anything hurt, do you want earplugs, do you still want to kill yourself? And both say no, no, yes.

Octavio Lima

The new trauma surgeon is two shades darker than Serafina and one shade lighter than her father, with yellow overtones like her brother Jorge. She has met him once before, on York Avenue: a Dominican émigré caught in the snow without a snow brush.

     Now they are together in the trauma bay. Hands behind his back, eyes narrowed, he watches the team as each person takes their designated place and performs their assigned role: airway check, heart sounds, intravenous access. The patient in the gleaming stretcher is six years old. She was in a crosswalk and the oncoming car sped up. This makes Serafina angry, in case you are wondering. She is not immune to the drama, the deep disparities and injustices that play out in this place. She has never walled herself off from it or even tried.

     Serafina threads an intravenous line into the crook of her patient’s elbow. “¡Ay!” cries the child. “Lo siento,” she whispers, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’d like to stab the caca mierda who ran you down with this very same needle. The girl has normal vital signs, and she’s wide awake—all good, she thinks, as she tapes the IV. Did the saints and ancestors intervene in the crosswalk, or was it physics, timing, gravity? What are the relevant forces? Serafina looks up and meets Octavio’s oval eyes.

     A slow burn. It starts at her instep and creeps up her legs to her thighs and hips. She removes her stethoscope, sweating beneath it, and lays it on the counter behind her. Then she bursts into flames.

Outside the Gates

Serafina met Octavio six weeks ago, on York Avenue. Exiting the great iron gates, she stepped beyond Mercy into winter’s first flurry and heard Marc Anthony’s treble rise in Spanish from the blinding white world.

     The gates were perpetually open. Come in, they said, or go out; you decide. As far as Serafina knew, they had been crafted in that position or were stuck in that position by the forces that acted constantly upon them, Manhattan’s snow and rain and street grit collected in their hinges and bolts.

     She localized the music to a silver Jeep. A man bent over its windshield, removing snow with a mittened hand and no brush. She drew close enough to see snowflakes in his dark brows, and surveyed the Jeep: front door ajar, new inside, paper still covering the mats. A Sappho translation lay open in the passenger’s seat.

     She was coming off the night shift, limbs heavy with fatigue, but the man without knowledge of snow moved her. He was out of context and so was she, perpetually.

     Let it be said here that Octavio was handsome, his skin a deep brassy brown on the back of his neck and on the wrists that emerged from his coat as he worked, shiny black hair peeking from an awkwardly positioned hat, high cheekbones and full lips, lashes long enough to see in profile.

     “No Me Conoces,” she said, surprised to find she was whispering.

     “Hmm?” He turned toward her voice. His eyes were oval and nuanced, shot through with gold and amber and black.

     “The song. It’s Marc Anthony. No Me Conoces.” Her pulse began to rise. It was an uncanny song, listened to by grandparents and teenagers alike, old fashioned and fervent and bursting with unapologetic desire. Women grew restless in rooms where it played.

     He shook the snow from his glove, regarding her. “He will win the Grammy again.”

     Grahhmy. A Spanish speaker. “Where are you from?” she asked.

     “The DR.” He said it carefully, as if he had just learned the term. “You?” Leaning toward her. He found her beautiful; she knew this without vanity. She had beauty because her parents had it.

     “Boston.”

     He laughed, then stopped abruptly. Pointed a mittened finger at her. “No. Your roots.”

     “Guatemala.”

     He introduced himself: Octavio Lima, a trauma surgeon. He had relocated to New York to be closer to his daughter, a freshman at NYU. When he removed his mitten and shook off the snow, there was no ring on his finger.

     “Do you speak Spanish?” he asked. Soft d: Thdo you speak?

     “Not perfectly.”

     “Why not?”

     “Because my parents wanted their kid to speak English. And there’s no time in residency.”

     “You are a resident.” He cooled, put his mittens back on. There were rules about down-the-hierarchy romance. But who cared? His beauty was remarkable, touching everything around them: city buses and telephone poles, the barren trees, even the people on the street, who held it in their gestures and stance; she wasn’t sure where to look.

     “Only one more year,” she said, “of residency. You must have a defroster.” She leaned in the open door of the Jeep, craning her neck to examine the dashboard, pressing the controls at random.

     “No,” he said. “Leave it, please.” He touched her shoulder. She straightened up. The snow had gathered on his long lashes.

     “I love Sappho,” she said, words fast and loud in the thin air, flames beginning at her feet, the snow melting on his windshield and dripping from the trees. A delicate flame runs beneath. She could recite the entire poem, the green grass, the poet’s sweat and shiver.

Liv

“Calm down,” says Liv, “or I’m throwing you in the decon.” She means the decontamination shower in the ambulance bay.

     Liv is Serafina’s best friend. They met three years ago as newly minted doctors, two former lit majors awash in a sea of biologists.

     They have slipped out of the resuscitation bay into an outer hallway, where Serafina continues to combust and cool down by turns, and Liv is coughing and waving her arms.

     Only certain people can see Serafina’s fire—usually those who see clearly in general—and Liv is one such person. So is Serafina’s mom, and in eighth grade, there was Mr. Racanelli, her English teacher. The flames hit some people harder than others, like Liv. Liv is so tuned in that every time Serafina bursts into flames, she nearly dies of smoke inhalation.

     “What does it feel like?” Liv asked her once, on their daily run.

     “What?”

     “Burning up.”

     At that point, Serafina had been flammable for twelve years, so the question was like asking what it felt like to sweat, or shiver, or do anything rooted in the corporeal. She burned. The presence of visible flame was startling but beside the point. People often said, you are going to combust, or girl, you are on fire, or cool down! These were turns of phrase that referred to emotional amplitude: She was too eager, too distressed, consumed by feeling. It made others uncomfortable. But it never hurt her—she just lit.

     Sometimes it was a problem, like when Mama’s eyes ran with tears from the acrid fumes. Those times, she felt guilty and wished to be more normal. But often, igniting was a relief. It was worse for her to burn in secret, illegitimate, unseen.

     “I think Octavio can see,” whispers Serafina to Liv, outside the trauma bay. “When I combust.” The fire snakes up her legs again.

     “Pull-Aim-Squeeze-Sweep,” says Liv, coughing into her elbow. She is quoting the hospital bylaws, section 5.2, How to Extinguish a Fire.

Really

The six-year-old’s name is Felicidad, by the way—Happiness. If I tell you that a child named Happiness was injured in a hit and run, you’ll say NO WAY, too much, un-jump that gratuitous shark. But I am telling you that life is stranger than fiction. In the same spirit, I submit that Serafina Aricela de León Fernández, all metaphor aside, did, and does still, constantly burst into actual flames.

Ay

Serafina came from Guatemala and books. She was far from both. True, she had been born in the US, but in her house, they got off the car instead of out of it, they ate frijoles and plátanos dulces, and they listened to Marc Anthony in Spanish, never English. Her father read Borges, Asturias, Rey Rosa. He said ay instead of ouch. When she placed that intravenous line and Felicidad said ay, a swell of recognition pulsed beside her sympathy.

     Ay, Guatemala. Nobody really knew where it was, what it bordered. Those who knew loved its language schools and colorful bags, reviled its narcotics trade, and were uncomfortably conflicted about its refugees.

Eff This

Destiny shouts: Eff, eff, eff! Eff the ER for being slow, the women’s clinic for not fitting her in, the Tylenol for not killing her, insurance and the Supreme Court for trying to kill her.

     Serafina shifts from one foot to the other, figuring out how to say, Neither of us is in control here. Not you, not me.

     Every year, the teens in blue jumpsuits increase in number. They outnumber the patients with traffic accidents, asthma, fevers, and strep. They are girls, boys, nonbinary, and undeclared; black, brown, and beige. They are all on fire, each one. Metaphorically.

     What’s more, the supply chain never really recovered from the pandemic. Years later, Mercy still runs out of Zofran, Zosyn, Z-Paks, bottled water, blankets, pillows, baby formula, and diapers. There are not enough nurses, clerks, or social workers, not enough admin types, who would know what to do about running out of things. There are not enough techs to keep Faith from a joyride in the meal cart.

     One time, as a child, Serafina went to a carnival with her father. She kept trying to throw a ball into a cup so that she could win a bear, but every time, she missed. Eventually, she cried in frustration. Those were the days before she burned, when she simply cried, and her father could see what she felt. “You cannot get the bear, my love,” he said. “The game is made that way.”

Homeland

Serafina takes five in the ambulance bay. It’s a cold night, with heavy stars. Ambulances crusted with powder come and go, their sides slick with ice. There’s snow in Guatemala too, but you’d have to climb a volcano to reach it, or hike the Cuchumatanes.

     She rarely visits. Her mother’s siblings are awful to her father, who is always the darkest man at the table, darker than even the gardener and maids. He is a soccer player turned literature professor turned political refugee, who fled with his light-skinned socialite girlfriend and, in her belly, Serafina. He teaches Asturias, although Serafina prefers Ovid. She loves the classics, especially Metamorphoses, with its libidinous gods and ravished nymphs, its vengeful Medusa.

     She loves Asturias too, but his dense prose is slow going.

     The ER is the perfect place for this child of the Americas. A place populated by hopefuls and desperadoes, people from all points on the map and the color line. At times, she has felt that this liminal place is her actual country. Not Guatemala, nor the US, but a pulse at the intersection of poetry and physics, exile and homeland.

Running

The day after Octavio’s Jeep and the snow, Liv and Serafina went running. “Did he see it, or not?” asked Liv.

     “The fire? No,” said Serafina, turning into the park at 72nd. “I combusted and he was like, I’ve gotta go to clinic.”

     “Maybe he sees but ignores?”

     “Nope. Cannot see.” The frozen reservoir sparkled up ahead.

     During their first year of residency, Serafina and Liv had spent countless post-call days reviewing the science of spontaneous combustion with the diligence and scope of good doctors. There were multiple hypotheses about its cause—high alcohol levels, fat deposits, enzymes in the intestines—but none satisfied.

     It was Liv’s suggestion that when science failed, one should revert to literature, which they did with equal dedication. Most fictional characters who spontaneously combusted were men, destroyed for their immorality as seen through a Calvinist or similarly stodgy lens: Melville’s drunken sailor, destroyed by two threads of greenish fire, Dickens’ junk-shop owner in Bleak House, or Gogol’s intemperate blacksmith.

     In contrast, women rarely self-immolated. They were typically lit on fire by other people: Joan of Arc, Salem’s witches, Queen Guinevere (close call). Society strikes the match.

     This, the two concluded, forever running, forever returning to work, pushing through the hospital door dripping sweat, is because of things that women carry folded inside. Words, desire, a secret. A blue lick of flame.

3 A.M.

Waiting for CT results, Serafina scrolls endlessly to find his sparse posts. Touches the pixels. His lips. His eyes. He sees me, he sees me not. Across the workroom, the charge nurse shrugs off her cardigan. The housekeeper rolls up his sleeves. Serafina will have to stop scrolling or chew on ice.

     She has made love twice in the past, with skilled and generous lovers; she is no wide-eyed ingenue. But every time she thinks of Octavio, her biology revolts and dysautonomia dispels her intelligence.

     This is desire. Its fast heart and slow wicking.

Damage

Faith has done serious damage, jabbing her red pencil into her wrist while the tech was off doing an EKG. A security guard wrestles it away from her, and immediately she digs into her flesh with her own fingernails. “Please stop,” pleads Serafina, but she has no idea what else to say, and anyway, Faith ignores her.

     Serafina thinks back hours to her evening rounds. It is clear as day what her patient was drawing: a landscape of blood. Bloody boats, crimson snow, dripping birds.

Trauma Bay

Give thanks to the saints and ancestors—Felicidad’s CT scans are normal! Serafina enters the trauma bay to share the good news, but it’s empty. The patient has been moved to a less acute area.

     Now Octavio steps through the opposite door into the yellow light. They are alone together finally, only the gurney between them, with its new white sheet.

     He casts about with his unusual eyes, he of the shining skin and Latiné elocution. “I forgot something here.”

     Serafina laughs at this. “Sure.”

     But then he reaches for a pair of trauma shears left open on the countertop, as if poised to cut.

     It’s painful, isn’t it? Octavio freshly divorced, his mother furious about it, his daughter dyeing her hair green and consuming edibles; Serafina smoking hot and poised to blast off.

     Octavio speaks. “I looked through that book. The one in my car.”

     “Sappho?”

     “Yes. It is my daughter’s.”

     “Do you love it?”

     His oval eyes are exhausted, as if he is tired of being told what to do, what to feel. “No, I do not.”

     “Oh.” With that, Serafina bursts into tears. Not the tears of an ingenue, but the tears of a third-year resident working the night shift who has understood what she can and cannot have.

     He stares at her, dismayed. But her eyes are enormous, lashes wet—he is lost. He pulls her toward him and tilts her chin with his hands.

     Let us stop here, as they are poised to kiss, and savor the moment. The proximity of one to the other, the gurney and the gleaming floor, the shining instruments on the walls, the institutional light that holds their beauty fast in its grip. Let us live here for a moment, because shortly, he will pull away without touching her. “No me busques,” he will say. Don’t look for me.

Burn

This time, the fire will kill her; she is sure of it. A wild thing, it flows up, reaches up, an extension of her longing, in perpetual motion, a swell, a flowering.

     Octavio has left the room with halting steps, so tortured, leaving her to burn. She pulls the fire alarm and throws open the emergency exit in the south wall of the trauma bay. The siren roars; people file into the bay and, assuming it’s a false alarm, wait patiently to exit.

     Outside, she flails through snow drifts that she can barely see in the dark. At a safe distance from Mercy, she throws herself down and rolls. A few people draw close and watch her with concern. Who knows whether they see the licks of flame fanning out from her body in the powder and chill.

     From where she lies, Serafina sees two figures appear at the emergency exit in blue paper scrubs. Faith and Destiny. They streak through the drifts like two nymphs before some vengeful god. Their lack of shoes is no hindrance. The pink-scrubbed tech races behind, floundering in the white expanse.

     A few feet from Serafina, Destiny stops dead and looks around with enormous eyes. If you were as close as Serafina, you would see: The respiratory muscles don’t move beneath her shirt; her chin holds firm; her eyes blink, but their way is of stillness. Her hair is soft and sleek against her neck, and the wind doesn’t touch it. She looks up. In the next moment, she explodes into flames.

     Faith keeps on running, perhaps thinking that she’ll find a sharper knife, dig harder, get to the real stuff, the great vessels, the bones. Her flames, when they come, are white hot, nothing but an impulse, a lift and glow.

     It is only as the tech, too, bursts into flames—and then the housekeeper, who barely makes it through the doors, and Liv, with a billow of flame at her back, and Felicidad, hand in her mother’s, blue flame rising from her instep—that Serafina finally understands. She can see, eyes fixed on Faith (who keeps on running and never stops, who’s probably still out there, far beyond the hallowed gates of Mercy), that this is how it works, being alive: They’ll all just go on burning.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023