Dancing with Fire

Editor’s Note: Keeka May is one of the three winners of the RCWMS 2024 Essay contest, selected for her compelling reflection on the theme of darkness and night, inspired by the photography of 2024 Artist-in-Residence, MJ Sharp.

The sweltering Texas nights of my childhood were warm and sticky. Strangely, despite the suffocating temperatures, summer nights felt refreshing in contrast to the oppressive heat and humidity of the daylight hours.   As a child, I remember the “cool” of those warm summer nights. Nightfall became prime summer play time, with fireflies twinkling in the clear night air. 

Late one night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I was staring out my bedroom window at the twinkling stars in pitch black skies. My brother snuck into my room and whispered, “Let’s go watch fireworks.”

I scrambled out of bed, down the dark hall and quietly out the front door.  I wondered where we were going, but it didn’t matter.  I was five and my brother was eight. I was his admiring shadow. He knew that fireworks enticed me like nothing else.   If a complete stranger had said to me, “Come here little girl. Have some candy,” I knew to run the other way. I was taught never to take candy from strangers. But had anyone thought to say to me, “Come here, little girl. Let’s go watch fireworks,” I would have happily run after them.  

When we snuck outside, my brother handed me my first sparkler. Staring at the sparks exploding like enchanted fireflies, I was in awe.  In my short, thin nightshirt, I laughed and danced. My thick blonde curls were dancing all too close to the sparks shooting from the stick. I wildly swung the sparkler in leaps and swooshes, laughing as the sparks sprayed around me. Dancing with fire, in the dark, under the stars, could not last long enough. I smile as I remember the sheer joy and beauty of that moment. 

Sadly, all too soon, the sparklers began dying out. Like glowing red coals igniting dry tinder, the final few sparks ignited my frizzy, unkempt curls. I remember nothing of the tiny blue flames around my face, only my mother’s calm, loving face as she firmly wrapped her hands around my hair. “Hold still,” she said. When did my mother get there? Why did my head feel so hot? She suffocated the flames with her bare hands as they tried to dance off my smoldering head to ignite my nightshirt. My head was fine: a few blackened, singed curls. A few tiny blackened holes adorned my nightshirt. The palms on both my mother’s hands were singed a fiery, bright red. She kept her burned palms coated with butter from the olive green butterdish that she kept in the refrigerator door. 

My brother took pride in his great care of me, his little sister.  He was magical in the ways he fostered my wildest dreams to come true.  He had allowed me to play with my first fireworks.  I loved him more than anyone. “Your hair smelled like burned toast,” he said.  

I laughed. “I like burned toast.” 

Soon after, I refused to eat toast anymore, of any kind. And I became afraid of dying. Perhaps I overheard my mother fussing at my brother for our nighttime adventure, “She could have died!”  My mother was furious at my brother, who was appropriately punished. Detailed memories of her fury, or of his punishment, are long gone. I only remember worrying about death after the night of sparklers. After all, my mother had said that I “could have died!”. I couldn’t sleep knowing that my life could end. I had nightmares about dying. I felt unable to breathe, as if I must gasp to hold onto every breath. I feared I might forget to breathe and die in my sleep.  

I tried asking adults about death and dying, but asking did not seem to help me. 

“I don’t want to die. Do you?” I would say. 

The adult’s response was typically a confused silence. 

I probed further, “How can I be happy to die?”

Silence. 

“When do you think I will die?”

I tried permutations of my questions to many strangers, in many places: while riding next to them on a city bus, while shopping in the produce section of the grocery store, when in the pew of my family church. No one could satisfy my growing fear. 

I may have gotten, “God will take care of it, little girl,” but an imaginary playground in the sky didn’t cut it with me. I imagine that my mother must have winked to the strangers, defusing the awkward situation. She would have been holding my hand, by my side, where she usually was during those days of my childhood. Maybe she tried to address my questions, though I do not remember. 

Likely she was seeking the proper library book for a scientifically researched, culturally sensitive, and age-appropriate presentation about death and dying. Or perhaps she was bone-tired of the barrage of questions from her precociously curious children.  I remember my mother was a master at changing the subject, deflecting my inquiries.  Unfortunately for her, I was not easily distracted from my obsessive curiosity.  An unusually quiet child, I became persistent when my mind hit a roadblock like, “I do not want to die,” after which, there was no shutting me up.

I began chanting a mantra to myself, “Life is like a colorful fireworks show that has to end.  I don’t want my colorful fireworks show to end. Life is like a colorful fireworks show that has to end.  I don’t want my colorful fireworks show to end.”

I was obsessed with fireworks. I was obsessed with no longer being alive. Adults were of little comfort.

My brother John, eight years old, understood my thinking and needs, as perhaps only another child could. He knew that I needed psychological comfort as much as I needed answers. When my brother had no data, he made up ‘facts’ to suit the situation. 

John convinced me that by the time I was old enough to die, “…medical advances will have figured out how to keep people alive forever.” 

He explained that technological breakthroughs wouldn’t allow people to die, so humans would be able live forever. I trusted my brother as my idolized source of wisdom. I could sleep peacefully again, and dream of fireworks, and eternal life.  Technological breakthroughs! Of course. This explained why adults acted so complacent about dying. Not from their religious belief in imaginary heavens, but from perpetual life on earth.

Living was fun again. Every fourth of July I stared at the exploding lights thinking I would live forever. I thought of my life as a colorful fireworks show that would continue year after year, forever, as my wise older brother predicted life would continue.

Unfortunately, I am no longer five, but in my sixties.  

A couple of years ago, one cold, snowy day in January, my brother was diagnosed with liver bile duct cancer. Medical advances had no ‘technological breakthroughs’ for him. He passed away within weeks, well before the Fourth of July.   I went to see the fireworks without him that year. It was a spectacular show, perhaps the best I had ever seen. Unfortunately, the glorious fireworks show ended all too soon. I have no interest in going to watch fireworks again.