Fire is a brief, temporary thing---the very definition of impermanence. It comes suddenly, roaring into life when heat and fuel come together and ignite, and dances hungrily while everything around it blackens and curls. When there is nothing left to consume, it disappears, leaving nothing behind but the ash of its unused fuel---those bits of wood and leaf and paper that were too impure to burn, too unworthy to join the fire in its dance. It seems to me that fire leaves nothing behind at all---the ash isn't part of the flame, it's part of the fuel. Fire changes it from one thing to another, drawing off its energy and turning it into...well, into more fire. Fire doesn't create anything new, it simply is. If other things must be destroyed in order for fire to exist, that's all right with fire. As far as fire is concerned, that's what those thing are there for in the first place. When they're gone, the fire goes, too, and though you may find evidence of its passing you'll find nothing of the fire itself---no light, no heat, no tiny red fragments of cast-off flame. It disappears back to wherever it came from, and if it feels or remembers, we have no way of knowing if it feels or remembers us. Sometimes, peering into the bright blue heart of a dancing flame, I ask if it remembers me. "We've seen each other before. We know each other. Remember me when I'm gone."

-John Wayne Cleaver

Dan Wells

i am not a serial killer