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Sport 34: Winter 2006

Firestarters

page 114

Firestarters

Riding into town, Janine stops to roll a smoke, talks with the filter on her lips. Her voice rough in her throat like salt. Hey look. Beside them a long wooden factory, unlit. There's the bin where they throw out all the mistints. He goes to ask what she means, but she's dumped her bike and is halfway over the diamond fence.

They sit in the steel container. She's found the paint she likes and she peers into a can with a lighter. Do you want to see? He shakes his head. Her eyes make glossy night ponds over the lighter. She flicks it off. He can feel her shivering beside him.

He jumps out of the bin onto the dusty ground. Alive, untouched by frost or frost-bitten stars, he gathers twigs and dirty newspaper. He loves the way his mind will clear a space for fire. You've got to organise it in your head, imagine how easily a spark will catch. He climbs back up and builds it without fuss. It lights immediately. She watches him. He's confident now, like he might win a race. Holding her hands over it she says, My fires always go out.

She's a movie he wants to be in. Her cheek pressed close to the screen in black and white, turning her head toward him. That's what he loves about her, something in her face cool, untouchable. Then she speaks and a hot knife makes tiny cuts in him. He's as big as the sky.

He stands, opens the lid of a paint tin, looks at her, then pours it on the fire. For a few seconds there's nothing. There's a crash and they both jump from the container. A fireball blows into the air under the overhang of roof above.

What the fuck was that? she shouts.

Then he's back in his small, earthly body. Flames flap against the walls of the building. Far away he can hear her yelling at him. Fire ripping through the container, up the walls. She's pulling on his arm. He's surprised by the flame's speed. She stops tugging at him, watches him watching the fire. She reaches for his hand and pulls him to the fence.

Once Bea took him to Swan Lake. People dressed as birds, beaks and terrible limbs waving, he tried to recreate their leaps and balances at home, wanted to fly like them.

She jumped so fast from the container. Like a dancer.

page 115

As they cycle, strands of hair fall out of her ponytail. They ride and fire spills up through the roof of the paint factory; heat reflects off the ceiling onto the pack-house floor. Paint swelling in neatly stacked cans. She stops to roll a smoke, but her hands shake tobacco, dead leaves over her knees. Lids on the cans pop off, paint spreads a loose circle over the floor, colours swirl into each other like oil softening in a pan, burst into blue, then orange. They ride to the river.

He delivers water to her in cupped hands. Back and forth he travels, washes the dark from her hair. Silver dawn glows. What was bubbling is now burnt away, scorched to ground level.

Birds on the river-bank chatter, they puncture the air and the sky deflates. He gathers a fistful of stones and throws them hard at the talking birds.

Stop it stop it!

He hears her but won't stop. His fingers claw the wet bank, feet slipping under him, his bare knee gashes on the shingle. Good pain in his knee. Sky turning with birds.