She couldn’t get the images out of her head. The towering flames encircling her brother, the charred skin of his face, his blackened skeleton crumpling in the grass while Jonah’s security doused it with pitchers of water and screamed at the rest of the guests to stay back. When the fire extinguisher was finally located, Adam was already reduced to a smoldering mound of ash, bone, and smoking flesh.
It's not as if Adam hadn’t warned her. She had read his online screed about how his brother-in-law to be, the newly minted senator from Arkansas and progeny of a coal baron, was actively setting the world on fire and there was nothing to do but burn along with Mother Gaya. He had always been like that though, getting into social media skirmishes with strangers and chaining himself to things. It wasn’t his first manifesto by a long shot, and she brushed it off as merely venting.
She had spoken with him before the wedding and he seemed fine, even better than usual. He had started a new job at an environmental advocacy group and was taking his meds regularly. Serene and clear eyed, he’d embraced her the morning of her big day and whispered in her ear, “I’ll always love you, no matter how far away we are or how different we may seem to each other.” Tears had rolled down her cheeks as she held her baby brother close and thought maybe, just maybe, they could begin to forge a normal sibling relationship.
It was during the first dance that he had done it, when everyone was the most distracted. She hadn’t even noticed the roaring bonfire in the back of the tent until it was too late. After the fire had been doused, they had found a note at his dinner place that read “I’m just getting it over with sooner than later. You’ll all be following in my footsteps soon enough.”
Jonah barely hid his fury. He feigned shock and sadness around the guests, but he blew his lid after they’d climbed into his Porsche.
“Sick fucking exhibitionist. Selfish prick. If he thinks this changes anything…He probably thinks he’s some kind of martyr,” he muttered under his breath as they drove home. Delilah pretended not to hear him.
When they turned left on the corner of Longmeadow Lane and Casper Ave, she began to smell smoke. She figured it was a sense memory of that day’s events, but the air grew thick and heavy with fumes. Please don’t let the car explode, she thought to herself. That’s when she glimpsed an orange glow in the rearview mirror and glanced over her shoulder, gazing straight into her deceased brother’s eyes. His body was engulfed in flame, his skin was sizzling, but his eyes locked with hers, smiling as if to say I got the last laugh, didn’t I?
She shoved her fist in her mouth to stifle a scream, but Jonah was so wrapped up in mentally rehearsing his lacerating speech to her dead brother that he didn’t even notice the apparition burning in the back seat. Adam continued to smolder all the way home, and Delilah realized that Jonah’s complete obliviousness to Adam likely meant she was the only one able to see him. They parked in the driveway and Jonah charged into the house. Delilah remained in the car, as Adam was now sitting in the front yard burning like a pyre and she couldn’t bear to walk past him.
Adam’s funeral was a week after the wedding, and Delilah had to practically beg Jonah to go. He took Adam’s suicide as a personal attack, despite her insisting that it wasn’t about him.
“My family works in coal, he’s an ecoterrorists,” he snarled. “Of course it was about me.”
“Your family doesn’t work in coal, you own a fucking mine,” Delilah muttered too inaudibly for Jonah to hear. She was getting good at saying the things she knew would set Jonah off at the perfect volume too soft for him to hear but loud enough for her to still feel like she stood up to him. The two weeks they had been married felt like two decades. She still loved Jonah of course, or at least she loved the version of him he displayed when they were dating and engaged. She loved his gallant gestures of romance from another era – his surprise getaways, the poems he hid around the house professing his love, the way he would spend all day cooking a banquet for just the two of them when he had a day off from campaigning, which was rare. She loved his intellect, his many talents and his sense of humor when he was in a silly mood. And his fortune and political prestige didn’t hurt of course. But in the days since their wedding, he had shown a side of himself she hadn’t seen before. Dripping with sarcasm and self-pity. Interpreting everything as a personal attack.
She didn’t know if his personality transformation was due to the stress and trauma of what had happened that night, or if the fact that Adam’s burning ghost was constantly following Jonah around the house had anything to do with it. Making coffee in the morning, her brother burned on the counter beside him. Dressing for work, her brother burned in his closet. And now he burned in the open seat across from them in the private jet that flew them to Bora Bora for their much-delayed honeymoon. Jonah scrolled through his phone as Delilah sipped on her chardonnay and tried to avoid Adam’s piercing gaze. She was wondering if she would have to ignore Adam for the rest of their marriage, and whether she would have the strength to.
The weight from Jonah’s shoulders seemed to lift as soon as they touched down on the landing strip, emerging from the plane into a limousine that whisked them to their beach bungalow. He sang along to the reggaeton blasting through the speakers and poured himself a healthy rum and coke after they dropped their luggage in the hall. “I want us to forget about all the shit we’ve been through and just enjoy this week. God knows we deserve to,” he roared, giving Delilah an amateur shoulder rub as Adam sat engulfed in flame on the couch. “I’m going to take a nap, and then we’re going dancing.”
Jonah reclined in a cushy day bed on the porch and drained the last of his rum, his straw hat pulled low over his eyes. Delilah tried to distract herself from Adam, initiating a game of Words with Friends with her coworker Tabatha, when her brother’s voice rung in her ears. “Deserve,” it muttered.
She jerked her head upward, gazing at Adam’s piercing brown eyes staring back at her. He had closed and opened his eyes periodically, occasionally watching her, but this was the first time she’d heard him speak.
“Adam…” she stammered.
“Deserve. Funny concept. Senator Jonah Miller deserves to prance about in Bora Bora while the people who live here deserve to watch their homes get swallowed by the sea.”
“Adam, what do you want from me?” Delilah managed to whisper.
“I don’t want anything, not anymore, not from anyone. This dying world that I once fought so hard to protect means less and less to me. I live in a new world now, where the people have the good sense to take better care of their homes.” The words poured out of Adam, though she couldn’t see his lips moving at all.
“Why are you here, then? Why do I see you everywhere?” Delilah asked with a voice that cracked under the weight of grief and exhaustion.
The glass door slid open and Jonah entered, grinning. He scooped Delilah off the ground and placed her on the kitchen countertop.
“I just had the most wonderful dream,” he said in his slight twang. “It was about you.”
Delilah glanced over Jonah’s shoulder and saw Adam still there, burning where he’d been a moment earlier. “What about me?” she said, doing her best to summon up her dormant sexuality.
“We were on a beach in Bora Bora for our honeymoon, and we danced all night under the stars, and we forgot all about our problems and had glorious, sandy sex beside a roaring bonfire,” Jonah said, grinning.
“Dreams really do come true,” Delilah said, though the last thing she wanted was to have sex on the beach, especially next to a bonfire.
The night passed by in a whirl. The rooftop dinner. The champagne and peach cobbler. The salsa and samba, the cocaine and blowjob in the bathroom, the sex under the stars with the waves lapping against their ankles. And Adam there for all of it, burning and staring.
As Jonah lay snoring on the beach next to her, Delilah met Adam’s gaze firmly and scowled. “What can I do to make you go away?” she asked. “I want my life back.”
“Your life was a sham, we both know it.”
“Fuck off, Adam, you don’t know anything about my life or my marriage.”
“I don’t mean to hurt you. I’m here because I love you.”
“You burnt yourself to a crisp in the middle of my first dance, how could you say that you didn’t mean to hurt me?”
“You were hurting yourself more than I ever could. You were living a lie, marrying that man. You were the one who first taught me what the words climate change even meant.”
“I can’t control who I fall in love with.”
Adam started to grow larger, and as he did his face transformed into Delilah’s. Delilah stared up at the towering, burning figure of herself staring down at her.
“You can fall in love with a charlatan, but you can’t love yourself,” the towering Delilah bellowed. “You’ve compromised everything you once held dear for this man, and for what?”
Delilah shielded her eyes from the flames, tears streaming down her face, as it dawned on her how far she’d drifted from the woman she’d once been. She hadn’t had much time for self-reflection in the last few years, too wrapped up as she was in picking the perfect wedding dress and showing off her sparkling engagement ring. But a part of her had been sacrificed even before she’d met Jonah, when she’d switched career tracks from environmental law to corporate litigation in her last year of law school. She’d had qualms about Jonah in the beginning of their relationship, after learning of his family business and his politics, but she was pushing thirty-five and a handsome, wealthy, unmarried state attorney general was paying attention to her. She’d swallowed her apprehension and convinced herself that maybe, with time, she’d be able to subtly influence him, but it seemed that if anything it had been the other way around. She’d voted for everyone Jonah campaigned with in the last election, most of whom were funded primarily by fossil fuel companies.
“So what do you want me to do?” Delilah cried. “Divorce him? What will that accomplish?”
The burning Delilah gazed out into the sea, pensive and mournful. “A mother makes countless sacrifices for her children. Sometimes those children are called to make sacrifices in return.”
“What are you saying?” Delilah asked.
“Under the dock beside the jet skis there are two cannisters of kerosene, and a lighter in your husband’s jacket pocket.”
“You…want me to set myself on fire?” Delilah stammered.
“You could be a symbol. What your brother did reverberated around the world. Your sacrifice would drive his home.”
“I’m not a symbol, I’m just a woman!” Delilah screamed. Jonah stirred in his sleep, but luckily a large wave crashed onto the shore, masking her voice.
“I’ve done everything I can for you,” the massive Delilah said as her body crumbled into ash. “The choice is yours.” And with that, she faded into nothingness and all Delilah could hear was the thrashing of waves and Jonah’s snore.
She withdrew the lighter from Jonah’s jacket pocket and flicked it on, watching it flicker in the night breeze. That’s when the deep dark loneliness descended upon her, a loneliness which she hadn’t felt since childhood. In that moment she wished Adam were there beside her, even if he was on fire.
About Max Rissman: Max Rissman is an author and filmmaker living in Pasadena, CA. His short films have screened at the Austin Film Festival among many others, and he is currently in post-production on Upon Waking, his first feature film as writer and director. He is currently working on a collection of short horror fiction about weddings and getting married, and his fiancé has assured him she is cool with it.
