Life has a funny way of smacking you directly in the mouth right when you least expect, yet right when you most need it. It doesn’t tap you politely. It doesn’t clear its throat. It balls up a fist and rearranges your teeth like bad furniture.

  I’d been astray, aloft in entropy, drifting through the stale corridors of my own negligence. I’d grown comfortable in the gray hum between purpose and oblivion. That was my first mistake. The universe despises comfort. It sends fire; here came the immolation to stir me from slumber.

  I think I smelled the cindered flesh before I heard the gargled screams. Smoke curled through the alley like a serpent rehearsing its sins. The scream came second. Wet, animal, truncated: the kind of sound a body makes when language abandons it.

  I dropped the Luckies. Fuck all good they’d done me up to now. I crushed them under my heel without looking. My vices and I had an understanding: they wouldn’t save me, and I wouldn’t expect them to.

  I scanned with intense clarity and saw nothing. Just swirling flame that once held a soul. The blaze moved with purpose, licking upward in frantic devotion. The alley had narrowed into a throat, and the fire was clearing it. No one else in sight.

  My instincts worked faster than consciousness could be compelled. There are moments when the mind takes a backseat and the animal drives. This was one of them. I shrugged off my jacket and plunged forward, wrapping the burning figure in wool and regret. The heat bit into my hands with rabid enthusiasm. Skin blistered before I had the courtesy to notice. Pain is a patient creditor. It collects later.

  I wrestled the inferno like it owed me money. I smothered flame with fabric, with my body, with whatever scraps of stubbornness I had left. The alley filled with smoke thick enough to chew. My lungs protested; I ignored them. I’d been ignoring my lungs for years.

  With much conflagration of self, I managed to extinguish the suffering. She was gone long before I made it.

  The body lay twisted, anatomy abandoned mid-sentence. The flames had devoured her features, leaving behind a topography of ruin. I’d seen death in many dialects, but this one spoke in charcoal.

  A small crowd began to gather, because horror has a way of ringing a dinner bell. Faces bloomed at the mouth of the alley pale, curious, nauseated. It occurred to me, with a dull thud, that I was meant to be the one in charge.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  I lumbered to my feet. My knees sounded like old floorboards. I reached into my pocket and drew out my identification. The badge caught the alley light like a reluctant confession.

  “Police,” I said, though the word felt theatrical in the aftermath of something so final. “Did anyone see anything?”

  Shaken heads answered first. A synchronized denial. A woman bent double near a dumpster and surrendered her lunch in violent installments. A man in a business suit stared too long, as if memorizing the scene for later retelling over cocktails.

  No one saw anything. No one ever does. Crime in this town moved like a rumor; everybody heard it, nobody owned it.

  I knelt beside what remained.

  The incinerated left behind very little to go on. Fire is an efficient editor. Wallet and I.D. grafted to her inner thigh, melted leather fused to carbonized flesh. I pried it loose with the edge of my pen, trying not to think about the intimacy of it. Her name was warped but legible enough to haunt me later. Sacha Cobb. 22. Black hair. Burned to death. I am the only witness.

  Five now. Five women. I let the number settle in my skull like a bullet that hadn’t decided whether or not it wants to exit. Five women reduced to ash and riddles over the last week. Different jobs. Different routines. No witnesses worth their salt. No signs of struggle beyond the obvious betrayal of combustion. Coincidence is a coward’s explanation. None could be accidental.

  Still, I couldn’t see any connection. No shared employer. No overlapping friends. No common haunts. They spanned class and color and creed. One was a graduate student. One a single mother. One a corporate attorney with a smile like a knife. The fourth was a child, and now this one, whose face had been taken before I’d ever see it.

  Each death only drew more questions. Questions stacked atop questions until they resembled architecture. I couldn’t see a door, let alone a path forward.

  The fire trucks arrived late enough to be redundant. Paramedics moved through ritual motions with professional gentleness. I waved them down. “She’s gone,” I said. They nodded, already knowing.

  I called the local mortuary to help clean the scene. The voice on the other end sounded bored; death is just another appointment if you schedule enough of it.

  Spontaneous human combustion. The phrase floated through precinct gossip like a drunk at last call. I didn’t buy it. The universe may be chaotic, but it’s rarely whimsical. Someone was behind this. Or something, but I was too tired to entertain mythology.

  Having to start somewhere, I decided to speak first to the Ashford brood.