I started the same as always, breaking the planks into smaller and smaller pieces, bending them with my hands—feeling the wood resist, feeling it bite into my hands as I strained against it, gritting my teeth until the boards snapped with a brutal crack that made Boy Dog yelp. I ignored him; I couldn’t allow myself to laugh at his fear, but I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him, either. He was simply there, and I was simply next to him, and any interaction we had was an illusion, like the puppets on the Mercer boy’s TV. I took deep breaths and stacked the splinters in careful rows, crafting my little log cabin with all the precision of an architect building a world-spanning bridge: piece by piece, bit by bit, this twig here and this wood there and each one exactly where they had to go until I couldn’t take it anymore and scattered them with my hands, screaming in frustration. Boy Dog stood up in his spot under the table, looking around for whatever danger had alarmed the weird human boy. I clenched my hands in fists, breathing deep. I had copies of The Hunter’s letters in my pocket, all three of them, and I pulled them out now and crumpled them into balls, and piled the wood scraps haphazardly on top of them. It wasn’t pretty, but it would burn. I struck a match and lit the paper, watching it turn brown and then black, with a thin line of yellow crackling hot along the edge. A wave of color spreading across the wrinkled surface, leaving a blackened char behind.
The smaller sticks began to smolder, and then to burn with a low, almost invisible flame. I watched the fire carefully, feeding it bigger sticks when it was ready to catch them, and smaller sticks when it just needed fuel. Soon the flames were high, burning hotter than they needed to, so hot they’d burn themselves out before all the fuel was gone, but I didn’t care, and when the heat beat against my face I realized I was smiling, and when Boy Dog barked I realized I was laughing, whooping with joy at the chaotic mass of flame. I needed more; this wasn’t big enough, the fire wanted to get out of its metal box and burn higher. I looked around, but everything was covered in snow. My eyes lit on my cardboard box of firewood, and I placed it carefully in front of the metal grill and then pushed the entire fire into it; dumping the fire had killed it last time, but now I’d been smarter; I’d moved it into fuel and safety, and after a brief lull it caught again, flames licking the cardboard and lighting up the wood until it seemed to glow with an inner power, as if the wood itself was only fire in disguise, trapped in a painful solid form and yearning to burst free. The flames grew higher, climbing and leaping until they rose two feet out of the box. More than three feet off the ground.
Three feet was high enough to reach the picnic table.
I wanted more.
“Out!” I shouted gleefully. “Get out of there!” Boy Dog looked at me dumbly, but when he saw me shoving the fiery box across the ice toward the mouth of his lair he yelped and ran out. With Boy Dog out of the way, the space beneath the picnic table was a perfect cave of snow-covered wood; the box was almost too hot to touch, the flame eating hungrily at the cardboard sides, but I pushed it under the table with my foot and watched with giddy fascination as the fire began clawing at the table itself.
The fire was going to be free.
The poor ventilation made the air roar as the fire sucked it in beneath the table. Melted snow dripped down between the boards. I found the old, charred planks from the last time I was here, and used them as makeshift shovels to push the snow off the top of the table, and suddenly instead of melting, the snow was evaporating completely, rising into the air in visible clouds of steam. The thick, painted wood of the picnic table started to blacken and burn, and I smiled as the orange flames curled up and around each individual board. The fire had grown and swelled and taken over, leaving its tiny box and going not where I wanted, but where it wanted. And it wanted everything.
“That’s right,” I said, watching it, and then shouted at the sky: “That’s right!” I looked at Boy Dog, hoping to share my exultation, but he only stared back morosely, unmoved either way. I thought again about the puppets on the Mercer boy’s TV, and the sudden juxtaposition struck me as so funny I couldn’t help but bring up my hand, flapping the fingers and thumb together like a puppet mouth. “Hey there, Boy Dog, what do you think of this awesome fire?” I made a grumpy face and spoke in a gravelly tone, opening and closing my hand in time with the words: “Well, John, I’m a stupid dog. I have no opinion about anything that isn’t food or Potash’s blankets.” I returned to my normal voice, facing the hand puppet with my most serious expression. “Speaking of Potash, why didn’t he follow me? Too busy murdering innocents to threaten my life today?” Back to the dog voice. “I know, it’s like he doesn’t even care about threatening you anymore. The magic has gone out of your relationship completely. Maybe he’s off growling at some other teenage boy he’s been threatening on the side. You’ll be gone for days before they even … notice.…”
I stopped talking, but kept moving my hand, opening and closing the fake puppet mouth, staring straight into it. It was the same hand motion I’d done in our first viewing of the cannibal’s first victim. I’d been demonstrating the movement of the teeth. I bared my teeth now, clacking them together, and mirrored the motion with my hand.