The sugar canister is cool to her touch.
She finds it in her mother’s kitchen. The lighter, nested where the sweetness collects in corners. Her fingers know this place. She’s reached here a thousand times for something she didn’t need, just to move through the space where he moves. The metal is still warm. Not from the kitchen. From use.
She lights it.
The flame is blue at the root. Something wrong with the fuel, or something wrong with what burns it. The color holds. Her son is in the living room playing with blocks he’ll abandon in three minutes. He abandons everything. Like his grandfather. Like her.
She puts the lighter back.
She doesn’t tell anyone. The secret sits in her throat like something that needs to stay warm, needs to stay alive. He’s an arsonist. She’s always known this the way you know things that haven’t been named. The burnt smell on his clothes, the way he comes home with his hands smelling like gasoline and regret, the news reports of buildings in neighborhoods he drives through.
She’s known and she’s known and she’s known.
Her apartment has a kitchen that looks like all other kitchens. She buys a lighter at the convenience store. She hides it in her sugar canister the way he hides his in her mother’s. Her hands know the architecture of this without being taught. Muscle memory she hasn’t earned yet.
Her son is at her elbow. He’s four. He asks why she’s sad.
She’s not sad. She’s waiting.
The lighter sits three inches from where she reaches for cinnamon. She could touch it right now. She doesn’t. It stays there. The restraint feels like the only conversation she’s ever had with his grandfather that didn’t require words.
He called yesterday. His voice does something to her body. Makes it smaller, makes it alert, makes it want to prove itself. He asked about her son. She doesn’t know if he asked carefully. She doesn’t know if he asked the way a grandfather asks.
“He sounds smart,” he said.
She held the phone so tight her ear ached. Smart like him. Smart like the way his mind works. Fast, sideways, finding the shape of things others don’t see. Her son has his eyes. Her chest closes. The way he might inherit not just the eyes but what the eyes see.
Her son asks where his grandfather lives.
She tells him far away. She tells him he’s busy. She tells him things that aren’t quite lies but aren’t quite truth. What she doesn’t tell him is that his grandfather is the only person who has ever made her feel like being broken was a way of being alive. What she doesn’t tell him is that she’s already teaching him this. Not in words. In the way she lights the stove. In the way her hands shake sometimes when fire blooms on the burner. In the way she looks at him and sees, for just a moment, something she can’t name and won’t.
Three blocks away there’s an abandoned building. She passes it walking her son to school. The windows are empty. The wood is old. The smoke rising. Heat moving through a space that isn’t ready for it.
Her son tugs her hand.
“Mama, you’re walking too fast.”
She slows down. He has his grandfather’s eyes.
At night she holds the lighter. The metal is warming already. Her son sleeps in the next room.
She watches the blue at the root of the flame.
The lighter is warm. In the next room, her son sleeps.
