There is a wire carrying handle, and the entire contraption bears a more than passing resemblance to a teapot,flat bottomed and semi spherical.
Under the oaks, behind the house, it is unlikely you will be seen from the street, and still there is something furtive about the process, something ritualistic. The three of you sit in a rough semicircle; pass the can by the handle, both lids off. Sitting in the grass, you kneel in front of the can; place your mouth in the larger opening, both hands resting on the domed surface, a supplicant. Your own laughter is tinny, your breath quick and strained. The smell of the gas is comforting and repellant at the same time, the laughter of the others distant as you huff. Behind your eyes indistinct purple shapes swell and change, your extremities go cold. The voice of the last person at the can is thick, slow and distorted. Time seems to stretch out thin. There is a kind of effervescence bubbling in the forefront of your brain, a sensation you associate with popping brain cells. If you are lucky, there will be warm cheap beer, or whiskey to wash the taste away, to take away the coldness from your nose and fingertips, the sick unsettled feeling in your stomach. Sometimes, someone will stay too long and aspirate liquid gas and not just vapor, which they will immediately vomit in a strand ropy with saliva, while the others laugh. This is infrequent. The tree frogs in the oaks thrum, a loud, unworldly threnody.
The stars above the oaks are like ice shards, the sky in between indescribably black, sparkling blades of light crackle around your peripheral vision, and the central focus of your gaze has a migraine tinged gravity to it that makes you feel top-heavy, pulled forward by what you look at as the world around focuses tightly. Your own heartbeat is audible, fast, and perhaps arrhythmic. the ground is hard, dry, the grass overlong, interspersed with snowdrops, with wild onion, clover, the paper-thin dead leaves of the oaks.
The stars above the oaks are like ice shards, the sky in between indescribably black, sparkling blades of light crackle around your peripheral vision, and the central focus of your gaze has a migraine tinged gravity to it that makes you feel top-heavy, pulled forward by what you look at as the world around focuses tightly. Your own heartbeat is audible, fast, and perhaps arrhythmic. the ground is hard, dry, the grass overlong, interspersed with snowdrops, with wild onion, clover, the paper-thin dead leaves of the oaks.
The peripheries of the yards are hedgerows of saplings, which catch plastic grocery bags in their branches. Rusted metal of engines and air conditioners, the dull leaden glint of abandoned galvanized fence posts under leaves...under the canopy of the thin growth grow stands of mayapple. the ground here is soft black humus and a wet sodden blanket of oak leaves. parasitic vines climb the trees, poison oak and poison sumac, possum grapes.
Deadfall trees crumble in spongy decay. Death angel, honey,
king's button and sheepshead mushrooms rot in the grass. A bottle of watered down Jack Daniels is passed around, Marlboro red cigarettes are lit amongst much joking of spontaneous combustion. A paper grocery bag is crumpled, placed under a knot of dead willow branches, a rough teepee of midsize oak and maple and set alight. As always, someone suggest the gas, and as always, you say no. You are a purist about fire. They are the ones who carry the cans of Heet lock deicer in the inside pockets of denim jackets, who torch dumpsters, who even now want this small fire to be built too large "we'll just have to stay here all night and watch it if we put that damn tree on" you say. later, you will indulge them, let them draw wavery lined pentagrams and set them alight on the dead ground. "not on the damn grass" you'll say.
king's button and sheepshead mushrooms rot in the grass. A bottle of watered down Jack Daniels is passed around, Marlboro red cigarettes are lit amongst much joking of spontaneous combustion. A paper grocery bag is crumpled, placed under a knot of dead willow branches, a rough teepee of midsize oak and maple and set alight. As always, someone suggest the gas, and as always, you say no. You are a purist about fire. They are the ones who carry the cans of Heet lock deicer in the inside pockets of denim jackets, who torch dumpsters, who even now want this small fire to be built too large "we'll just have to stay here all night and watch it if we put that damn tree on" you say. later, you will indulge them, let them draw wavery lined pentagrams and set them alight on the dead ground. "not on the damn grass" you'll say.
Some inky advertising circulars, and porn are thrown on the fire and burn blue, thin black sheets with glowing edges float upwards into the trees, ghost pussies and 70's nipples curling into black. The gas can is taken out again, and there is some drunken awkwardness in the ritual approach
Within the year, one of these people will be dead and the other half-crazy with it. You will continue as you are, mostly. “Don't sit so close to the damn fire” you say.
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