Free The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass

accelerates inside a burning house, and the blood heats, as if in a purge. The mind fills with a strange music. Sense of feel, and memory of how things
ought
to be, becomes everything; it seems that even through the ponderous, fire-resistant gloves the firefighters could read Braille if they had to. As if the essence of all objects exudes a certain clarity, just before igniting.
    Everything in its place;
the threads, the grain of the canvas weave of the fire hoses tapers back toward the male nipples; if lost in a house fire, you can crouch on the floor and with your bare hand—or perhaps even through the thickness of your glove, in that hyper-tactile state—follow the hose back to its source, back outside, to the beginning.
    The ears—the lobes of the ear, specifically—are the most temperature-sensitive part of the body. Many times the heat is so intense that the firefighters’ suits begin smoking and their helmets begin melting, while deep within the firefighters are still insulated and protected: but they are taught that if the lobes of their ears begin to feel hot, they are to get out of the building immediately, that they themselves may be about to ignite.
    It’s intoxicating; it’s addictive as hell.
    ***
    The fire does strange things to people. Kirby tells Mary Ann that it’s usually the men who melt down first—they seem to lose their reason sooner than the women. That particular fire in which they sank all the man’s prize antiques in the swimming pool, after the man was released from the tree (the top of which was flaming, dropping ember-leaves into the yard, and even onto his shoulders, like fiery moths), he walked around into the back yard and stood next to his pool, with his back turned toward the burning house, and began busying himself with his long-handled dip net, laboriously skimming—or endeavoring to skim—the ashes from the pool’s surface.
    Another time—a fire in broad daylight—a man walked out of his burning house and went straight to his greenhouse, which he kept filled with flowering plants for his twenty or more hummingbirds of various species. He was afraid that the fire would spread to the greenhouse and burn up the birds, so he closed himself in there and began spraying the birds down with the hose, as they flitted and whirled from him, and he kept spraying them, trying to keep their brightly colored wings wet so they would not catch fire.
    ***
    Kirby tells Mary Ann all of these stories—a new one each time he returns—and they lie together on the couch until dawn. The youngest baby, the boy, has just given up nursing; Kirby and Mary Ann are just beginning to earn back moments of time together—little five- and ten-minute wedges of time—and Mary Ann naps with her head on his fresh-showered shoulder, though in close like that, at the skin level, she can still smell the charcoal, can taste it. Kirby has scars across his neck and back, pockmarks where embers have landed and burned through his suit, and she, like the children, likes to touch these; the small, slick feel of them is like smooth stones from a river. Kirby earns several each year, and he says that before it is over he will look like a Dalmatian. She does not ask him what he means by “when it is all over,” and she holds back, reins herself back, to keep from asking the question, “When will you stop?”
    Everyone has fire stories. Mary Ann’s is that when she was a child she went into the bathroom at her grandmother’s house, took off her robe, laid it over the plug-in portable electric heater, and sat on the commode. The robe quickly leapt into flame, and the peeling old wallpaper caught on fire, too—so much flame that she could not get past—and she remembers even now, twenty-five years later, how her father had had to come in and lift her up and carry her back out—and how that fire was quickly, easily extinguished.
    But