In the far off East there had been floods years ago, but now the drought had come. For the past year the water supply threatened to be low and people had begun to wonder just when the rains would come. It was easy to forget about the rain, that it could not always be present while also being vital to being alive. Thunderstorms had a way of clearing stagnant sounds from the air. Ame's cries, the cry of the rain, kept the entire world in perspective.

This was not one of those times.

There wasn't an Ame to coyote-clear the air with his voice. There wasn't a Madison Rye to give her Mona Lisa smile just before she straddled his lap, smelling like lightning. Down the hall there wasn't Penny, constructing the world with a rainbow of colors where always, always, the dark man was in an overlap of different colored crayons, as if she really believed he could be everything. This was a time before that, before coins flipping and red ribbons tying off at his wrist. Before the dance of a Beltane fire.

When he didn't have a house at all, when all of those parts of life that could not be conceived rested like a dream somewhere else.

This was the first time fire had come to him, when he wasn't yet twenty and had no idea of how it would follow like a mark in his world. He could not have known, either, that it still had more in his life to burn.

This was nearly twenty years ago, at the first spark that would never leave him.