The Burning Man

My father and I have a Masonry and Plastering business. One slow cold day, we were looking at jobs and went back to my place to take lunch. I noticed a man in the driveway some distance away. Upon seeing us, the man quickly left and moved out of view through an empty lot. I paid it no mind. Many people would use that lot for a shortcut. My father and I went inside my place and ate our lunch. We watched a little bit of a the matrix after lunch then decided to head back out and do more estimates. When we got outside, we saw something burning in the driveway. My father was angry. He said, "I knew somebody was going to do something like this, setting trash on fire up here." I looked a little harder. "dad," I said. "Those are legs sticking out of the flames."

The man was too far away from my house to use the hose, it wouldn’t reach. Filling a bucket of water would have taken too long. So I ran down to him and started knocking his burning crumbling clothes off him with my jacket. It was working. I put everything out but his synthetic sneakers. He was laying there now naked with his feet still burning. The firemen had arrived when I was about to go get some water for the sneakers. They sprayed water on his feet. Unfortunately I was too late. Even though he didn't look horribly disfigured at all, the flames had shocked his system and stopped his heart. he looked to be about 45 years old. Turns out, he was 72. The heat had caused his skin to shrink and smooth out making him look younger than he was. He was on his back, arms and legs bent from the tightening skin pulling his limbs toward his center. Later on, when he made the news we found out a little about the man. He was mentally disturbed and had tried different suicide attempts in the past. This one worked. He had children who hadn't known his whereabouts for years. His wallet had survived the fired and the authorities notified his family, so when they were reunited with their father, it was only to bury him.

I had dreams about the burning man for only about two weeks after that. They were never nightmares. I dreamed I had reached him just as the flames had started and put them out. I dreamed that he was walking around engulfed in flames but remained unharmed like the burning bush in the bible. And I dreamed that I saw him burning just as I did in my waking life. In that dream, I went to get water and when I turned to help, he was gone. No trace of him there. I don't know what the dreams meant. I guess my mind was trying to make sense of the senseless, of something I would have only read about in fiction.