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When I was a kid, comics could only use four colors. What I liked about comics was that they only had so many pages, right? Tolstoy could write as much as he damn well wanted to tell us about War and Peace, but Stan Lee only has twenty-four pages to show us how Spider-Man learned about responsibility. I figured at least writing comic books I’d be safe locked inside a dusty one-room apartment eating beans out of a can. What Dad wanted for me was to go to Berkeley, like he did, and we argued so fiercely about it that it was the last thing we talked about before he went and got himself crushed on the highway by an eighteen-wheeler on the way home from a lecture. “But not you.”īefore I burned, I fancied that I could have been a comic book writer. “A lot of things die burning,” Old Man Gasper said. Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky? Will it go ‘round in circles? Billy Preston was asking me. I remembered tripping over my shoelaces and hearing a song somewhere in the distance, a hard grind of sax and bass. I remembered some ugly words and the grate of a lighter being clicked to life over and over again. Tiny, knife-shaped headaches that ground through my skull like diamond. It wasn’t true - I saw glimpses of it in short, painful bursts.
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My tongue was still numb from blistering, my eyes hazy and cheeks raw from where the skin had sloughed off in rubbery sheets. “What do you remember?” the Old Man asked me when I could speak. I spent six hours popping yellowed sacks of pus to reveal my new skin, baby-soft and unmarked. By nightfall I was covered in an armor of abscess. I raised my hands above my head and watched as it bubbled and leaked, as it grew pink - then brown - between the charcoal scabs. My skin was still charred when I first woke up. He had to hold me down so I didn’t keep screaming or else I might have done that until I died the right way. You came right back up.” He told me this with his cold, dusty gloves cupping either side of my face. Right to the center of it all, but they don’t stay there. Sometimes they go down, down, right down to the bottom. The Old Man said to me: “Sometimes they go down. So I’m gonna tell you a story about what that that means, and I want you to listen real carefully. The first thing the Old Man told me was this: “Sometimes folks just don’t die right.” By Jennifer Giesbrecht | Narrated by Mahvesh Murad