Today, you're going to dance on the ashes.

This morning when you get up you’ll feel a hundred pounds lighter.  You’ll tour the old house, taking time to stop in the dining room where you played trivial pursuit with your daughter at the dining table.  When she was teething she chewed the entire left edge of the table, and you run your fingers along the gnawed flakes of wood and you remember. 

 In the backyard is the tree where you and your fiancé carved your initials inside of a bulbous heart with the sharp spiraled edge of a wine cork.  The wine cork broke near the end and you had nothing to open your last bottle of pinot noir, so you broke it over the railing near the door and watched her for the next hour to make sure she didn’t get any glass in her mouth.  There’s a shard of glass just out of view behind the step as you go back into the house but you don’t notice because you’re remembering.

You go through the kitchen and into the foyer, your nose is crinkling at the smell of kerosene.  There’s some road flares balanced on the umbrella stand.  You pick them up almost as an afterthought, because now you’re thinking of the birthday party where you stumbled home with your future brother in law and he utilized the stand as a receptacle for the violent regurgitation of the eight flaming dr. peppers that he had pounded in the past three hours.  Then you’re out the door and you’re forgetting.

The road flare will come to life with a foopf noise and tiny white spots will obstruct your vision at the sudden burst when the magnesium and strontium nitrate combine to create a chemical reaction in your hand.  You let it roll down your palm and off the edge off the fingers, like you were blowing a kiss.  Watching the flames dance down the sidewalk on its cushion of kerosene and ignite the bushes and the base of your old home is galvanizing, and you taste electricity in your mouth, feel it in your stomach.  You found a way to erase it all, you think.  Looking around you almost feel like someone should say something, but this is not a movie, there is no one there, you’re alone.

The flames chew away for a long time before you hear sirens in the distance.  This makes you think of sirens, and the siren’s song that led you to where you stand now.  I’m sorry I listened, you say to no one as the supports for the porch topple.  The windows burst one by one, and through them you can see furniture, your furniture, left to burn like forgotten guests.  

The sirens are getting closer now.  You close your eyes for a second, then open them and see what you once had is as good as dead, the cinders and smoke the only evidence it ever was something to begin with.  Red and blue lights begin to play along the shadows of the trees down the street and you start walking, but you don’t look behind you to see how bad it got.  You already know that you’ll be back sometime, because you’re going to dance on the ashes.