The Fireman

by Joe Hill

The devil stood in that immense cloud: a devil that towered two stories high, a broad-shouldered demon with a vast rack of horns. He was a flickering apparition of flame, buried deep in that boiling thunderhead of smoke. In one hand he held a hammer and he raised an arm as thick as a telephone pole and brought it down on a burning red anvil. Steel clanged—she heard it quite distinctly. Sparks flew from somewhere in the black cloud. The devil’s tail—a slender, twelve-foot whip braided from fire—lashed behind him.

They made their unsteady way up onto damp, firm sand, through the cool wet.

Through the cool wet...love that.

Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet

another with your child. Those other people create you—finish you—as much as you create you. When you’re gone, the ones you’ve left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.”

They had forgotten their own names, the voices of their mothers, the faces of their fathers.