The Corvette Stingray skids to a stop in a smoking heap just at the bottom of a cliff, the metal scraped and torn to crimson ribbons after tumbling like the world’s most expensive boulder for a few dozen feet. I hang upside down in the driver’s seat, somehow still gripping the wheel in midair after it had been snapped off its axis like the bones of baby bird that left the nest a little too early. Like my bones should’ve been, but instead I’m hanging, whole and unbroken, though cut open. A leaky wound above my eyebrow sends crimson rain down past the crown of my head, towards the searing metal beneath. I can smell the iron in wisps of steam rising to become stardust for the universe dancing in my eyes.  

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I sit there in a daze, replaying the last 30 seconds for what feels like 30 years. The fireball with 18 wheels that suddenly jerked into my lane, the driver’s screams inaudible as his hair singed. Maybe he was on his way to make a delivery at a Kroger or Whole Foods before his truck caught fire and he ran me off the side of a mountain. Maybe he was just running too, but in a different, equally doomed direction. 

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The sound of distant sirens blaring eventually brings me out of it. I haven’t moved, I haven’t so much as relaxed a muscle, despite willing the change for so long. I am just here, upside down in my wreck of a car, gripping the wheel. My limbs aren’t listening to a single command, but I’m oddly comfortable. It’s warm here, granted warm was default in California, but this is an odd, localized warmth running from my temple to my shoulder. 

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My left shoulder being devoured by flames.  

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Now I can’t tell if I’m lightheaded because I’m upside down, or if blood loss is starting to work its magic, but either way I’m certain I’m seeing things. Because fire is supposed to hurt and people are supposed to panic when their things are burning, but here I am sitting calm in a burning corvette.  

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The corvette is burning.  

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An electric engine is burning. 

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Crackle. Crackle. Boom.  

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Flames erupt from the hood, pushing into the chassis and sending shards of glass on a collision course with my face. The funny thing is the glass never makes it. I see it all explode away before I get so much as a scratch. 

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It’s just like that. Glass one instant, empty air the next. The first blast has somehow been cancelled out by a second, and I’m left there effectively blind. And deaf. But somehow, I’m not dizzy anymore. 

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I blink myself back to focus in a small, blackened crater, the corpses of surrounding shrubs all uniformly charred to perfection on whichever side was facing me. I can see everything so clearly. My suit is a light and curling away from hands brighter than a lit barrel of kerosene. It’s mystifying to watch. It’s euphoric. I can’t feel the heat, but I feel strong. 

 

There’s a brief moment of wonder there, a moment of “why am I still breathing?” But then I make the mistake of looking up.  

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The skies were already turning hours before, but something had changed, giving way to a whirling storm of embers and ash. Falling from an angry sky like blazing spittle from the maw of a beast whose innards glow in a slowly darkening bronze. This sky looks like it was just about ready to swallow the world, and I take this as a go-ahead from the universe to lose my mind.   

I run from that pit, longer and faster than I ever had before. The world is melting around me and if I stop, the hail of ash will bury me like that car crash should’ve, like those explosions should’ve, like the burns I was racking up undoubtably would. But I’m not hurting.

  

I realize I’m not hurting anymore despite running through an active wildfire. I didn’t feel close to tired. I could sprint across the entire state. I am the wildfire, all powerful, all consuming. 

That thought carried a sort of lucidity with it and for the first time since the accident, I took in what was happening around me. All around me trees were dyed in fall colors well before the season and the grass beneath my feet was covered in black and white, a fresh layer of ash being charred and regenerated, charred and regenerated. I am perfectly at home in that hellscape, I breathe smoke better than the purest air and the fires raging around me passed over me like a breeze, it was ecstasy.  

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From there I move like a man possessed. Though I can’t see more than three feet ahead of me, I could vaguely follow the sound of the sirens. Where there were sirens there were people and those people usually had hoses and I wasn’t ready to be doused. 

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I trudge through the piles that seem to take on life all their own as the steadily worsening wind scatter more ash and heat around. I eventually come to the base of a hill with the red-hot concrete barriers of a highway peaking just over the top, haloed by a set of muted lights alternating red and blue. The silt begins to smoke and sizzle as I dig into it, clawing my way up the hill with my bare hands. Their water is up there, and their water is my life. 

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But truthfully the only thing waiting on top of that is the site of a dead sea. Cars clogging the roads in either direction, losing their way in the haze of smoke of mirage lines. I can’t see the drivers past the debris in their windows, but I can tell that there’s nothing left for me to take and burn.  

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So, after all that I just . . . sit; a lone supernova shining on an eclipsed highway. I sit and lean my burning back into a sign just off the road. My sign, lonely and now slowly melting, that reads

 

“Welcome to Paradise.”