Paul Pickering

naked

I am free. The words rolled through him like thunder as naked and dark blue with dust he fled from his own all-consuming yellow fire.

He emerged from a ruined building a human flame and with one long scream ran up a mountain of rubble and destruction, the small arms fire chattering to a stop under clouds blackened with smoke and by the light of a strange and pale red sun.

There was an immense battle and he was not clear, his mind and memory gone, what he was doing there, or who the sides were. Or who he was. The hot dust stung his lungs.

The man tried to beat out the fire on his legs and chest and on the back of his left hand and stared up at the sky in a halo of his own flames and pain. His nakedness brought an intimacy to his inevitable death on a day when tens of thousands died.