Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2022-09-26 09:45 pm
brin_bellway) wrote2022-09-26 09:45 pm
Entry tags:
Happy...new...year?
[cw: (strong) fire, unreality, (mild) illness]
(*looks at those content warnings* ...to be clear up front, my house is intact)
It happened about four hours in. If it had been an hour later, I wouldn't have caught it. If it had been two hours earlier, I wouldn't have caught it.
But at 11:25 PM I was on the living room couch, with line-of-sight to the dining room table, and I saw the flare of orange light.
The last dregs of the middle Rosh Hashanah candle, rather than going out, had gone up. The flames were starting to spread, and climb higher.
I observed it for around half a minute, wondering if perhaps it was a last gasp before going out. The flames continued to spread.
I tried to blow it out. It would not be extinguished so easily. The flames were spreading *underneath* the disposable aluminum drip-catcher, now, starting to spread down the candlestick toward the wooden table--
I grabbed an oven mitt, carried the candlestick over to the kitchen sink, and doused it in cold water. If that didn't work, I'd grab the fire extinguisher.
The water worked. It went out, in a hiss of steam. (I shuddered to think what fumes I might be breathing in that moment, but it was the least bad of the remaining options.)
The drip-catcher fell into the sink. It looked partly melted.
(Though it's possible the damage was mostly from the thermal shock of abruptly going from fire to cold water, rather than directly from the fire itself.)
---
I took it around to the rest of the household members, asking if anyone had any idea what the fuck. Nobody knew of any reason why this candle would be so much worse than all the other candles, on all the other occasions.
I hadn't really processed what had happened enough to feel much *conscious* emotion past "what the fuck", but I was shaking for about twenty minutes afterward.
---
The thought occurred to me, slav-squatting on the basement floor while Dad tried in vain to come up with search-engine keywords that would let him perform Internet research on what the fuck, that it might be a dream. It's the sort of thing that happens in nightmares. Maybe my subconscious is working through some stuff about Brother's lack of a third dose of COVID vaccine or something: fire is a common dream-metaphor for plague around these parts, and perhaps it's telling that my first thought as the fire went out was to worry about the air quality.
(There was a bit of a smoky smell when I came home from work, and I remembered thinking it was odd that the air purifier hadn't taken care of it even hours after dinner, and that its air-quality indicator light hadn't even noticed it. Metal fumes cut right through HEPA and carbon filters, pipes up a memory. Or at least zinc does: we looked that up once when learning about why not to make flowerpot heaters. There's something there, in the damage to the drip-catcher, about burning metal as a metaphor for the limitations of air filtration.)
Even treated as reality, it feels intuitively like it *ought* to be an omen of some kind, but intellectually I know the world doesn't actually work that way.
---
I did make one concession to the superstitious part of me, though.
About an hour later, as I was preparing to start my bedtime routine, I looked over at my laptop running twin Whispers. I listened to its fan whirring. I felt it: it was warm to the touch.
I thought about the time when I was 13, and I left a shitty Walmart laptop that had just been through major surgery active overnight while it worked on a large download. Perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after I went to bed, I heard a commotion, and learned that Dad and Brother had found it with smoke coming out of it.
There *were* extenuating circumstances, more than one of them, that don't apply here. It's not a shitty Walmart laptop. It hasn't just been through major surgery.
I suspended my present-day laptop. The TV brain, too, while I was at it. I let them cool down and rest during their several unobserved hours.
---
I wrote most of this draft at 1 AM, thinking that perhaps if I stored it somewhere outside of my head it would help me get to sleep.
(are we sure this isn't just going to be one of those false-journalling things)
Didn't help. It wasn't fully done percolating yet.
---
I got up this morning. The half-destroyed drip-catcher was still in the sink. Text stays the same when I close my eyes and open them again, even if I will it not to. I jump, and gravity works normally.
What the fuck.
(*looks at those content warnings* ...to be clear up front, my house is intact)
It happened about four hours in. If it had been an hour later, I wouldn't have caught it. If it had been two hours earlier, I wouldn't have caught it.
But at 11:25 PM I was on the living room couch, with line-of-sight to the dining room table, and I saw the flare of orange light.
The last dregs of the middle Rosh Hashanah candle, rather than going out, had gone up. The flames were starting to spread, and climb higher.
I observed it for around half a minute, wondering if perhaps it was a last gasp before going out. The flames continued to spread.
I tried to blow it out. It would not be extinguished so easily. The flames were spreading *underneath* the disposable aluminum drip-catcher, now, starting to spread down the candlestick toward the wooden table--
I grabbed an oven mitt, carried the candlestick over to the kitchen sink, and doused it in cold water. If that didn't work, I'd grab the fire extinguisher.
The water worked. It went out, in a hiss of steam. (I shuddered to think what fumes I might be breathing in that moment, but it was the least bad of the remaining options.)
The drip-catcher fell into the sink. It looked partly melted.
(Though it's possible the damage was mostly from the thermal shock of abruptly going from fire to cold water, rather than directly from the fire itself.)
---
I took it around to the rest of the household members, asking if anyone had any idea what the fuck. Nobody knew of any reason why this candle would be so much worse than all the other candles, on all the other occasions.
I hadn't really processed what had happened enough to feel much *conscious* emotion past "what the fuck", but I was shaking for about twenty minutes afterward.
---
The thought occurred to me, slav-squatting on the basement floor while Dad tried in vain to come up with search-engine keywords that would let him perform Internet research on what the fuck, that it might be a dream. It's the sort of thing that happens in nightmares. Maybe my subconscious is working through some stuff about Brother's lack of a third dose of COVID vaccine or something: fire is a common dream-metaphor for plague around these parts, and perhaps it's telling that my first thought as the fire went out was to worry about the air quality.
(There was a bit of a smoky smell when I came home from work, and I remembered thinking it was odd that the air purifier hadn't taken care of it even hours after dinner, and that its air-quality indicator light hadn't even noticed it. Metal fumes cut right through HEPA and carbon filters, pipes up a memory. Or at least zinc does: we looked that up once when learning about why not to make flowerpot heaters. There's something there, in the damage to the drip-catcher, about burning metal as a metaphor for the limitations of air filtration.)
Even treated as reality, it feels intuitively like it *ought* to be an omen of some kind, but intellectually I know the world doesn't actually work that way.
---
I did make one concession to the superstitious part of me, though.
About an hour later, as I was preparing to start my bedtime routine, I looked over at my laptop running twin Whispers. I listened to its fan whirring. I felt it: it was warm to the touch.
I thought about the time when I was 13, and I left a shitty Walmart laptop that had just been through major surgery active overnight while it worked on a large download. Perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after I went to bed, I heard a commotion, and learned that Dad and Brother had found it with smoke coming out of it.
There *were* extenuating circumstances, more than one of them, that don't apply here. It's not a shitty Walmart laptop. It hasn't just been through major surgery.
I suspended my present-day laptop. The TV brain, too, while I was at it. I let them cool down and rest during their several unobserved hours.
---
I wrote most of this draft at 1 AM, thinking that perhaps if I stored it somewhere outside of my head it would help me get to sleep.
(are we sure this isn't just going to be one of those false-journalling things)
Didn't help. It wasn't fully done percolating yet.
---
I got up this morning. The half-destroyed drip-catcher was still in the sink. Text stays the same when I close my eyes and open them again, even if I will it not to. I jump, and gravity works normally.
What the fuck.