The smell of burning fur and flesh clogs my lungs. Pain writhes in my arm like the terrified animals in the cage. And like their howls of agony, my arm screams to the night, the night thick with smoke and sparks and stars. Spells run in the males of her family. When the fit is on me, I do have a hard time telling dream from reality, the edges of my own being from the vastness of creation.
Fire is a friend to men, nestled cozily in the ashes of the hearth on a grey winter's day.
But fire can also be a terror, the wrath of God in the Judgement Day. The hungry tongue of God lapping at sacrifice. Yet even the Christians worship the way their Lord took on the pain of the world. So pain is divine. But in fact, most of the events surrounding my memory of wicker in flames I know because they were told to my childhood ears, over and over.