A Big Old Pit of Fire
by Matt Rowan
I think it had been that way for as long as I could remember. There’d been the sweltering heat of my birth, expelled into a world of vapors and vitiation, always with the sense that someone’s warm breath was on my neck.
It’d been getting hotter and hotter for as long as anyone could remember, on account of the fires that circled the entire country. They acted as a kind of barrier, too, but it was not fun having to deal with their heat, let me also say.
Maybe it’s because I work in front of a red hot oven all day, baking burgers, but I don’t know that I can stand the heat very much longer. I’m sweating it constantly, to the point where I’m a perpetual washout who looks like he both needs and just got out of a shower.
Oven roasted burgers are what you can get at the fastfood restaurant I manage, Burgers Can’t Be Cheezers. It’s a fast food franchise exclusive to our small-island-surrounded-by-fire nation. Or that’s, at least as far as I know — anyone knows — since the fire prevents us from going beyond the borders, and so there’s no way of knowing if anything is alive beyond them. There probably isn’t. I doubt there are any fast food restaurants.
A big part of the day, when I’m not feeling like I’m literally melting before my own eyes into a pool of my own self, is arguing with customers who don’t like our gimmick.
“Why can’t I have a cheeseburger?” They don’t ask, they tell me, pointing at the round slab of baked beef on bun w/ a single slice of bright red tomato, condiments located at the condiment table, including mayonnaise packets..
“Why can’t I leave Fireland?” I always respond. “Why can’t I ever feel anything other than the sensory dread that the world is not all it should and is getting less and less so as the heat index rises?”
They’re scowling. They want fries, they tell me. They get them, and they leave for the condiment table.
***
I feel a deep sense of foreboding all the time. I dream about our great walls of flame collapsing on our society and consuming us all, the fires of an oven set too high and rendering beef to charcoal. I picture us all, burning embers, momentarily unaware and walking around cloudy and black like demonic snowmen, as we smolder in the ruins.
Some people don’t want to talk about the cons of being surrounded on all sides by a huge, snaking border pit of fire, affectionately referred to as the Big Old Pit of Fire. Most people, actually, because it is such an unpleasant part of their lives and if they did and the wrong person got wind of it there might be trouble.
In school it was always the same story, those who were safe and wily and avoided being thrown in the flames were the heroes and those who did anything that involved their entering the flame, in any context, were fools at best, and often villains. Anybody who suggested otherwise was no better and risked a lot in so doing.
Take my friend Earle, who had written textbooks for a long time until he got fired for telling what he believed to be the truth about the fire.
He received an predictably vague termination slip stating the following:
“Hello. Authors of textbooks are at fault in placing before immature pupils the blunders, foibles and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of our Nation.”
“It’s just so annoying. They keep asking if they can have a cheeseburger at a restaurant that makes it completely know it only sells hamburgers. What more do they want? It’s in the name,” I said to Earle.
“Why can’t burgers be cheesers, though? What’s stopping them?” Earle said, ever the contrarian.
“What? I dunno. How things are done.” I’d really just wanted assent, or failing that, sympathy.
“I’m a man who wants to be a ghost. That’s not to say I want to die. I’d just like to try something new,” Earle said. “That’s the cheezer on my burger of life.”
It was too hot to be bothering with nonsense but Earle seemed to be speaking his honestly held feelings of the moment. I told him to be quiet. Talk like that was going to get you thrown in a Big Old Pit of Fire. He kept at it, though, implied it might be a good change of pace. I told him it’ll change his pace already, as in his heart’s pace, which will be nil. Nothing for no heart. And how would you like that?
He said he’d like it just fine because at least it would be different and possibly less intensely hot.
I was worried about Earle. What would happen if he “caught the fever” as they called being tossed into the Big Old Pit of Fire as a euphemism?
“There are anthropologists who believe ‘caught the fever’ originally had very little to do with the Big Old Pit of Fire,” Earle put forth, getting very pedantic, as was his custom. “They think it might have referred to some form of mania involving early tribes, who would become rapt, they theorize, as though from some divinely inspired source, and dance for days and sometimes weeks, often culminating with them throwing themselves into the Big Old Pit of Fire. That’s if you take some of the aging scrolls at face value. There is also a plaque existing around somewhere from way back that avows it did happen and no one knew why. Think of the fun everyone is having out there, if the stories are true, though.”
“Yeah?” I said, wanting him to shut up.
“Yeah,’ Earle said, choosing not to take the hint, “Some people think it was caused by the heat, but temperatures have only been rising in the years since so that strikes me as unlikely.”
I left him there, alone with ideas.
***
“We’ve got to keep our food offering choices narrow,” I heard a politician explain on our cable news station. “If we give out too many choices people will do everything they can to get into our country. That’s why I firmly support Taco Tuesdays only selling delicious tacos on Tuesday in perpetuity. Restrict the tacopportunities. You’re free to get a burrito there any other day of the week and including Taco Tuesdays but I recommend having their tacos when you can, only on Tuesdays.” It was another policy commercial.
“What about those who say the Big Old Pit of Fire is inching inland and might one day soon devour the entire nation?” the cable news station host said.
“Sounds a lot like being thrown into the Big Old Pit of Fire talk to me,” the politician said, eyes squinting.
The cable news station host audibly swallowed hard and didn’t say anything else.
“Well now, I almost forgot Taco Tuesdays is having its annual fire sale next Tuesday. All food will be set on fire. Extra char free of charge,” the politician said, cracking his knuckles and galloping back on message.
Were we headed anywhere good, as a society? Were we a society?
Anyway, they threw Earle into the pit. He didn’t seem that upset about it, that put out.
He screamed but they always screamed. His screaming was half-hearted to my ears, but maybe that was just wishful thinking.
Regardless, I felt upset about it, though. I felt responsible for it.
Not wanting to be tossed in there, though, I tried to put it all behind me. I was disturbed by what happened to my friend but I wanted to live. It was very important to me to live, oppressive heat or no oppressive heat. Bake my burgers in peace.
I watched a new politician on the cable news station explain to me why what he did wasn’t a crime and the only real crime was that Solo Prices were dropping their prices again. Someone should contact the authorities.
The cable news station host tried interrupting, asking, “But weren’t the charges serious?” The politician literally growled and the cable news station host whimpered.
Something about that was something I shouldn’t have seen, or one / two / many things I shouldn’t have gotten to know.
I realized you can’t wish the past to be gone. It doesn’t end anything. The fires will just rise higher and the truth will always get you. You can’t growl it away. My temperature cooled.
I began to dance without any sense of the why. I didn’t know for how long, either, just did. Just danced myself into the Big Old Pit of Fire, screamed as one does, landed.
There, on the other side, in the haze of white, I collected myself.
I saw Earle appearing out of the mist. I said, “There is a world beyond the border?”
He said, “Ha, no, we’re dead and in the great wide beyond, but it’s definitely better this way,” and together we drifted off into eternity.
Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Tiny Molecules, LandLocked, BULL, Gigantic Worlds Anthology, Barrelhouse, Moon City Review and Necessary Fiction, among others.
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