Fried Chicken

Smoke seethed out of the crack between his eyelids as he sat in the wreckage of what had once been a moderately sized barn.  He was listening to the sound the charcoal made as it settled, smelling the charred flesh and feathers of the dozens of dead chickens that had hours before been crisped into cinders in the night.  Every so often the skeletal beams that still stood would see one of their number weaken, slump, and then fall crashing into the black and grey muddle that sat in the middle of the farm.  Little fires, spitting out small crackling sparks in the mid-morning light mixed with the silence of the place.  He was naked besides the ashy coating that covered him and the dregs of what had once been his zippers and buttons that still glowed a dull orange from contact with his skin.  It was a tan color, the brown of paper just as it starts to burn, covered with wind-applied streaks and washes of white and grey that burned at the edges with a sharp orange glow that tightened in a ring to turn grey into white.  His hair was still there, shoulder length and a deep, dark black that also played host to the ash.  More smoke billowed out of his eyes and mouth as he looked around, sighing as the scene took its toll on him.  Even though the corpses had burned away almost entirely, the piles of ash that stood, each a point in a triangle, hemmed him in, still trapping him there.  He hadn't hated them, just disliked their style of fun, always putting him down as the days wore on.  Burnt to a crisp, and they didn't even deserve it, and he hadn't deserved to live.  Fleeing might have been an option, at one point, when he didn't really feel the weight of responsibility that his living gave his conscience.  Daniel would have to bury the ashes, or scatter them.  He would have to make up for it.  Exhausted as he was by the ordeal, he still remembered seeing the first spark flit out from between his lips, a firefly darting out into the darkness, preceding the inferno, the storm of flame and spark and smoke that followed it, also bursting out through his ears and eyes and nose.  Steams of intensity that warmed and didn't burn, that burst forth to consume but not consuming him.  Emptiness and smoke filled him now, the smoke leaking out to leave the emptiness alone inside him.  Inside where a part of him felt burned away, cleansed, charred, and oh so dry.  He needed a drink, but he still couldn't move himself to leave.  Shock was what it was, a part of him thought, shock for the death, for the little bit of him that felt relief at the fire, for the beauty of it all when it was a room filled with glowing flames, for the pure unreal quality of it all and the speed it had happened.  A car door, truck door, slammed shut off to his right, toward the road. Out of the hazy detachment he was feeling, Daniel registered a man walking over with a lit cigarette, black trench-coat shifting a bit in the wind as he came closer with a glum, stone-like demeanor.

"Don't s'pose you know what you did here, son?"

Blankly, Daniel stared at the man.  He was speaking with a tinge of sadness in his voice, a disappointment that emanated outward without really pointing at anything in particular.

"No, you wouldn't have, not with how clean you got off.  Prolly don't even know that was magic."

He stopped a good 30 feet away from Daniel, looking all around at the whole area, just taking it all in.

"Folks call it a Phoenix, though it's not anything like the mythos most people hear about.  Inspired by the real beast, yea, but even that critter isn't the flaming chicken that kids hear about today."  The man sniffed at the air, then nodded to himself in satisfaction at something he thought to himself.  "The main similarity is how all the magic inside gets burned up.  When the fire runs out of magic, it moves on out of the body, trying to find suitable things to latch on to.  If there was any magic residue on you it'll catch there, eatin' up skin and bone, stone and wood, water and air.  Then it spreads, fast.  Lucky if you get a full body burn out of this type of thing."  He took a drag on the cigarette as Daniel watched him, not really sure what was going on any more than when the barn had burned down.

"Gettin' out untouched, well, that means you didn't have anything on you for it to catch on, and you got lucky that it all went out and away.  Still, might flare up again and you mightn't be quite so lucky again.  Lightning don't strike twice an' all."  He fished around in the pocket of his coat, eventually pulling a small, leather-bound flask from inside.  Popping the lid off to smell it for a second, the man nodded again, thinking to himself before screwing the lid back on.  "Drink this," he said as he tossed it into Daniel's lap.

He Stared down at it, slowly moving his shaky arms toward the place where it sat in his lap, cool against his legs.  It was letting a little steam off from where it made contact, the leather shrinking in protest.  His fingers closing in around it brought out larger clouds of the stuff, accompanied with a slight burning smell.  It took him a while to unscrew the cap with his fingers, wobbling back and forth as the man stood silently, watching.  With a quick look up, he saw the man nod, slowly and shallowly at his silent question.  As the liquid his his throat, it steamed up, as if he were quenching the mouth and the throat like an iron nail tossed into a bucket of water, but reversed.  It formed into droplets, running down the walls of his trachea in freezing-hot veins.  It hurt, but only for the second where it was at the boundary of fire and water.  Each little coal-hideaway that still smoked inside him felt in its turn a swift demise.  The ashes he was sitting in seemed to ward up, slowly as the process went on, finally to the point where he stood up, uncomfortably, almost falling face first into the ashes in the process.  He staggered over toward the man, out of the ash pile, clutching the bottle and feeling his slowly cooling hands sinking into the leather, searing a print in.  When he reached the grass, he collapsed down, feeling stiff and sore, and finally registering the waves of heat that were still billowing out of the wreckage.  Everywhere inside of him was cooling with the liquid he swallowed, feeling harder and stronger, and down in the bottom of it all was a little puddle of water left.

"Now, Son, let's get ourselves some breakfast, there's a t-shirt and jeans in the back of the truck, and I have a feeling that I've got some stories to tell that you might wanna hear.  There's a Denny's down the road a ways toward town."