Fiction.

I picked out the ashes from Lauren’s curls as we stood atop the roof of an apartment building on Boulevard and watched Richmond’s oldest movie theater burn to the ground.

Kaiser paced back and forth, looking as if he’d trade clairvoyance a hundred times over for a power that instead made him flame-retardant. I suspected his sister was dead. I think we all did, but no one wanted to tell him. Well, Lauren and I opted to keep quiet, anyway. James had long since departed in the vague direction of Devil’s Triangle. He had said he was going to get Slurpees, and the iciness that this comment produced in Kaiser was most likely the cause for the delay in his return. I’m not an unfeeling person. I know what it’s like to lose a loved one, but the heat and the smoke and the running made Slurpees seem a pretty genius idea.

I hadn’t meant to start a fire at the Byrd Theater. I had meant to throw a little more light from the chandeliers onto the situation at hand, since, from my own vantage point at least, I couldn’t quite tell what was going on with that saw. I’d gathered that my own particular brand of freak had been augmented, just like everyone else’s seemed to be, in the past day or so, but I hadn’t had much time to experiment. So when I nervously added what I thought would be a touch more brightness to the light inside the theater, I was in no way expected for an explosion of sparks so elaborate that Roy Hobbs would have been hard-pressed to match it.

Lauren, with startling presence of mind, kept her eye on that saw. The bum snarled as he found himself holding a swatch of delicate gold filigree as sparks and glass rained down into his matted hair. I yanked Lauren down between two rows of seats in a desperate attempt to save her from the red-hot shrapnel I had inadvertently created, but she never looked away from her target.

“His head!” Kaiser shouted over the din. “He has a metal plate in his head! And another one in his leg – no!” He corrected himself. “A bullet in his leg, that’s it!” I believe only I saw Lauren smile a little smile as the bum then clutched his scalp and howled in the double agony that is caused when your hair has caught on fire at the exact same time that some unidentified metallic horror has begun to take shape within the confines of your skull.

The air was beginning to get thick with smoke, and I could hear the crack of various historic beams giving way. “Come on!” I screamed. “We have to get out of here! Let’s go!”

It took James and I a minute to realize that we were the only ones escaping. Kaiser, of course, was attempting to crawl on all fours through smoke, sparks, debris, and crazy bums in order to pull his sister to safety. Lauren was still at work, and the shrieks of the bum were clearly audible.

“Christ, Sweet Tits is a little too into torture for me,” James yelled to me in the lobby.

And then it came to me. “Get them out of there!”

He looked at me incredulously. “You get them out of there!” He shouted. “What do I look like, an armored tank? The whole place is coming down! Her tits aren’t that great; it’s a death trap in there!”

“No, fuckface, make them want to get out! Do your mind control thing!” For the first time, I saw him look at me with genuine surprise and even a little respect. Then he closed his eyes and clenched his fists. In a moment, Kaiser and Lauren finally emerged from the theater, the latter dragging the former by the back of his orange shirt. Without a word, we pushed them out the door and legged it east down Cary Street as sirens got louder and louder.

A few blocks later, Kaiser looked at James and his face hardened. “I could have gotten her out, James. That was a shitty trick to pull.”

Lauren looked up.  “Wait, that was you? Jeez, you couldn’t have made it a little easier for me? Kaiser almost yanked my shoulder out of my socket when I was pulling him out.”

James stopped running and leaned against a street sign to catch his breath. “It’s not that simple, OK? Not like trying to get a teenage girl to take her shirt off. His desire to save his sister was a little more urgent than your desire to remain chaste.”

“You asshole,” Lauren and I said at the same time.

“Either way, dude,” said James to Kaiser. “You’re not going back there until they put that fire out. No sense in your entire family dying in one night.”

“Fuck off,” said Kaiser. He began to climb the fire escape of the house nearest us. The rest of us followed. What the hell else were we going to do?