Smoking in Bed

    The bedroom was full of smoke. From the doorway I couldn't see the pictures on the walls, couldn't see the bureaus, couldn't see the bed itself. The smoke caught in our lungs. It was impossible to breathe. I closed the door and we stood in the hall. Sarah trembled violently in place pulling on her fingers.
    I hadn't seen her for a month. She looked like she just woke up, eyes swollen from crying. She had never worn flannel pajamas when I lived there, when she and I together made a different kind of dangerous fire in the bed.
    "Why didn't you call Bruce?"
    "Oooooh. . ."
    "Can you wet some towels for me?" She went for the towels in jerky steps, her dancer's grace gone for the moment. I wound a drenched towel around my head leaving slits for my eyes. The end tucked into my collar read, "Siesta Key Motel". The smoke in the room was so thick it dragged on my body. I pushed through it to the window and slammed up on the sash with the heels of my hands three or four times. A small pane of glass cracked, squeaked, then fell and shattered on the floor. With the last hit the window shot up, smoke rushed out into the darkness and I leaned out and breathed the cold air.
    I could hear Sarah's bare heels on the hardwood hallway floor as she fidgeted to and fro. "Are you okay? Is everything alright?" she said.
    It still hurt to breathe in the room but I could see. Smoke poured from an end of the foam mattress. Wherever I poked or lifted little jets of orange flame lapped out. It was like a burning bellows. Puddles of water lay on the floor from where she had tried to drown the fire.
    I breathed easier in the hall. Sarah played with the top buttons of her pajama shirt. There were more freckles on her still tanned sternum than I remembered.
    "I was smoking," she said.
    "I know. Let me call the firehouse. They have extinguishers."
    "No. Please. The neighbors will think I've been drinking or something. Can't you? Can't you just put it out?"
    "What happened to Bruce? Why isn't he ever around when this shit happens?"
    "He's home, at his place I mean. We had a fight, a spat I guess. He has to be fresh for work, he has a lot of responsibility."
    "So you called me."
    "So I called you. You know what to do."
    She got me the long leather gloves she used around the wood stove. We resoaked the towel from the motel in Florida that had the sign in the office that read, "All Linen Theft Will Be Reported To The Police" and swaddled my head with it.
    When I grabbed the mattress little blazes leapt out of it and up my forearms but there was no pain. It was like passing your finger through a candle's soft flame. I folded the thing in half lengthwise and hit the window opening with it like a battering ram and it went through. It unfolded in flight and floated left and right like a coin falling through water. The top was a prairie fire now fringed with smoke. It hit the railing of the balcony I'd built for her the year before, exploded into black and red flame and flopped into the snowdrift below.
    From the hallway she said, "Coffee or anything?" Small chunks of mattress burned on the floor, flickering like sterno.
    "No. But a drink would be nice." Sarah brought the drinks into the bathroom and sat on the tub tinkling her ice cubes while I rinsed off styrofoam soot at the sink. Glass is as hard as porcelain. My cocktail glass made a brittle resonant click when I set it on the back of the toilet.
    "We never really said goodbye," she said.
    We made love in the strange bed in the guest room with the abandon that only happens at-a beginning or an ending. When I left in the morning I wondered which it had been.