We Blazed

Amethyst Loscocco

The last time I saw my brother, Jay, a comet seared the night sky. I’m not saying the two things are connected, that the shit we did that night was cosmically important. But sometimes I wonder.

     That night, we met in the skatepark after dark. Johnny lugged bags bulging with bottles of lighter fluid, pants sliding down his thighs. Dominic arrived with weed and torch lighters stolen from 7-Eleven. I supplied a forty, also stolen from 7-Eleven. Kim and Amy brought Cheetos. Jay arrived last with a quilt.

     “What the hell, bro?” I punched his shoulder.

     “Just in case,” he said. “To smother or…”

     “Ok, Mom,” Dominic said. I snorted.

     “Fuck off,” Jay said. He looked away and then nervously up at the comet.

     We all did, unusually quiet, as we passed the malt liquor around, hiding the burn.

Billions of eyes tracked that comet across the sky for eighteen months. It was the one that birthed a generation of astronomers, that inspired awe and fear and longing. The one that prompted our dad to buy a telescope before he left our mom with nothing. The one we looked up at when we snuck out into the back yard to smoke weed. The one that jammed the budding Internet. That prompted a cult in California to commit suicide, hoping to hitch a ride off this dying planet. The end of the world was on everyone’s minds at the close of the millennium. We had been talking about fire for weeks. A wild pack on the hunt, we were primed by the crackle and fizz of the comet.

***

Johnny pulled a mini vodka from his pocket, took a gulp, lit a torch, and blew a spray of fire.

     I tripped as I side-stepped the plume that lit up our faces. “Shit, dude.”

     The girls shrieked and laughed.

     Jay brushed his spiked tips. “Dude, you singed my hair.”

     Johnny was coughing, doubled over, hands on his knees. Then he was laughing, loud and ferocious. “I think I scorched my tongue. Is it black?” He stuck it out, wriggled it in the comet-light.

     We should have stopped then. Called it and gone home.

     “Let’s light shit up!” I said. I sprayed lighter fluid onto the bottom of my skateboard, torched it, and dipped into the pit. Flames darted up around my sneakers. Gaining speed, I flew up the other side, spun an airborne 360, and hit the downslope in a shower of flame and sparks. Dominic hollered. Jay grinned. Shadow and light flickered across his face as he lit a cigarette clenched in his teeth.

     “Fuck yeah!” Johnny yelled, sweeping past me on his flaming board.

     I did a crooked grind on a curb, whizzing close to the girls who had retreated to sit on a pile of wood chips beside the ramps. They licked Cheeto-slicked fingers and shivered in tank tops. Their glinting eyes and bare shoulders emboldened us.

     “Dom, Jay, c’mon!” I called.

     “Alright, alright,” Jay said, touching his cigarette to the bottom of his lighter fluid-soaked board.

     We soared through the night like demons. Our feet had wings of fire. Flames grazed our ankles and rolled in hungry swirls beneath our boards. 

     High above us, somewhere in the cold void of space, ice fractured and splintered, falling, streaming, steaming behind the comet speeding at 100,000 miles per hour toward the sun. Separated by 120 million miles, we were connected by speed, by gravity.

     We lit the entire rim of the half pipe and bet on who could grind the farthest. We jumped on flaming rails. Frayed hems were scorched. Rubber soles singed. We crisscrossed, jumped fire, rolled through fire, sped up seared ramps and along hot pipes. We drank, we smoked, we hollered. Fire burned in our eyes. 

     Between one backflip and the downslope, sparks must have soared into a low branch of the eucalyptus trees along the skatepark’s edge. The girls stood and were shouting something I couldn’t hear over the crunch of grinding skateboards and our feral laughter. Between one scorched grind and the next kick-flip, I saw the wood chips flare. Between one sharp breath and the next, we sobered on the choke of acrid smoke. I skidded to a stop and grabbed my skateboard from under my feet as we began to scatter.

     The sound of sirens rose behind the crackle of flames. The girls were gone. Johnny disappeared over a fence. Dominic headed up North Street and down an alley. At the edge of the park, I turned back to look for Jay.

     He was still on the ramp, caught between the flaming wood chips and the trees that stretched toward the sky like torches.

     Fuck.

     “Jay!” I yelled above the snapping fire. “C’mon!”

     He looked at me across the wall of flame. His eyes were frantic and glowing. 

     “Run! You can make it!”

     A burning eucalyptus branch snapped and crashed onto the ramp. Jay stilled as fire circled him. He pulled the quilt around himself like a cape and looked up, up, up at the cold burn of the comet. At his feet, a tongue of fire and sparks leapt high as a lighter fluid can exploded. I shielded my face. When I looked again, Jay was gone. 

     Sirens wailed closer. The blaze reached skyward.

     I yelled Jay’s name again and again and again. I choked. Heat seared my lungs, sharp, deep, like something was being excised.

     Blue and red lights mixed with the orange glow.

     I ran.

The police never found him, never found a body, never found the quilt. They told my parents he probably ran away. Were there problems at home? Was he depressed? Did he do drugs? Teenagers run away all the time, they said. He’ll come back, they said. 

     He didn’t come back.

     The comet disappeared shortly after. It sped past the sun, which flung it deep into space.

     Our wildfire pack splintered, drifted apart. My dad signed divorce papers and moved to California. Mom moved us to Colorado for a job or an aunt or a new start. I didn’t care. There’s always risk in caring.

Now, decades later, on another night, with another comet streaming above, green-hued and sharp, I stand beside the rebuilt skate ramp. Successive generations of teenagers have etched it with scrapes, skid marks, and graffiti, but no scorch marks. I kneel on the ground, brushing aside sharp-smelling wood chips and dirt, looking for a buried layer of ash. But time erased all evidence of fire here. My knees ache. I’ve been pulled back here by a longing as relentless as gravity.

     I look up. 

     “Bring him back,” I say to the comet. It’s the wrong comet, I know. The right comet, Jay’s comet, won’t return until the year 4385.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023