She sees another fire, in memory: coke glow of a smith's forge, driven by the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. Beside her the old man held the drive chain of some extinct motorcycle, folded neatly into a compact mass and fastened with a twist of rusty wire. To be taken in the smith's tongs and placed within the forge. To be beaten, finally, incandescent, into a billet of their strangely grained Damascus, ghosts of those links emerging as the blade is forged, quenched, shaped, and polished on the wheel.