The Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper

spiralling off the grass. The kid’s effort to see the sense in what Miles has done plays visibly over his face. His throat seared shut, leaving all his questions to sit, heavy as marble, in his chest.
    The kid is so close that Miles could grab him and try to pull him in. If the kid resisted, both of them would be caught outside the good black as the main fire hit. Still, if he holds on to the kid’s wrist and falls back, it might be enough for them both to tumble down into the smoking ash and breathe. That’s what Miles would tell the kid if he was lying next to where he is now. Breathe andstay low and bury your face in the charred soil where the pockets of oxygen might be and wait—
    Behind them, the fire screams.
    A shattering, human sound that sends the young firefighter scrambling a few feet higher up the slope. Though his voice doesn’t reach his own ears, Miles can feel his shouts splitting his throat open.
    He lifts his head from the ground to plead with the kid to come back and feels the first swipe of fire across the side of his face, tearing the shirt from his side.
    I’m burning , Miles thinks.
    A realization so simple it precedes understanding, precedes pain. But he doesn’t lie down. Opens his mouth again to utter another wordless command and hears only the plasticky pop of his own skin.
    He can only watch as the boy runs on. That, and make one last attempt to be heard. But before Miles can close his lips around his name, the kid is consumed by the rushing curtain of fire.
    They keep him away from mirrors. Anything that can cast a reflection is hidden by the nurses. The chrome kettle in his room is removed, the curtains drawn at twilight when the glass surface begins to send back images of whoever may be trying to look outside. Even his cutlery is replaced with plastic knives, forks and especially the spoons, which, depending on the side turned to him, threaten to balloon or collapse the already distorted features of his new face.
    For the first several days, the drugs keep him from knowing when they’re taking off his bandages or peeling away dead layers of his skin. Morphine delivers him to a place well beyond the hospital room’s beeping, bleach-reeking reminders that he is on a bad-news ward. The drip into his arm prevents him from caring about his injuries, how he might look if he ever gets out, about anything. Yet he remains aware of the events around him. The terrible food. A distressedlooking Alex with her hair tied in a bun (he hates it that way and thinks of asking her to let it down, but doesn’t want to trouble her). His wish for something better to be on TV. Even the fire. He remembers trying to pull himself up the slowmotion slope, the unfamiliar sound of his own screams, the sight of the kid sucked back into the furious waves. He remembers it all, but it nevertheless feels second-hand, fictional, like the memory of a film seen years before.
    The morphine leads him to a beautiful indifference. He loves the morphine. The days pass in rolls of gauze. Delicately applied and removed, the nurses forcing smiles, nearly constantly asking him Are you okay? He has no idea what okay would be under the circumstances, or what it ever was. Yup , he says. The last thing he wants is to hurt anybody’s feelings. He just yups his way through his first three weeks in the burn ward, and holds Alex’s hand with the one he can still move, all without a clue as to what might follow from here.
    They pull back the sheet and leave him bare between dressings for a while now, to ‘get a little air on the business,’ as one of the nurses puts it. Although he’s told not to, it allows him to feel the shape of the burn. From beneath his skin a shell emerges, rough as the edge of an empty tin. Not all of him, though. He has been split in two. The left side of his face is as he remembers it, but the right is a Halloween mask, all hardened latex and stray, unconvincing hairs. His hand continues down his neck, and he