Feral Lit: Burn Without Consuming
A story of fire, failure, and the cost of asking others to carry what you refuse to metabolize
Red Havok thought fire made him holy. The way he controlled its path. Sacrificing one to save many. Sawing through a burning tree to stop the fire in its destructive path. The way fire ran through his veins like a network of fuses lit at once. Alive. Coursing.
But he never learned to burn without consuming.
And gods, they tried with Red.
Everyone did.
They circled his flames like wolves afraid of losing the pack.
They offered kindness in ways only humans do: campfire talks, shared spliffs, massages, eyes that didn’t look away.
But it wasn’t enough.
He burned inside.
Lightning Pinkcloud watched it unfold with the ache of someone who has already grieved the ending before the story ever began.
And Ember Wilder; he made his own offering.
Not of gentleness, but of truth.
He stood in front of Red and said the thing everyone else was too exhausted to say.
“Your anger is out of control.”
It was mid-trip. Everyone high on multiple hits of acid. Half-naked dancing in the sand. Wigs blowing in the wind. Bellies glowing with the sun’s warmth. The celebration of making it through one of the most circumstantial rapids on the river. It wasn’t even noon. Rose and Jibby doing their own dance on the raft. Jibby grabbed Rose’s thigh and flipped her over so he could enter her from behind.
Red tried to participate. He stood in front of Rose, his scraggly rainbow wig and leather vest with nothing on from the waist down. She rubbed and touched and sucked and prodded. He couldn’t get hard.
Red cursed and walked away.
Stomped in the sand.
Ember walked straight into the storm and refused to flinch.
“You don’t scare me,” he said calmly, as if speaking to a cornered animal.
“But your anger’s not clean. And it’s not ours to carry.”
Red spun, chest heaving.
“You haven’t integrated it,” Ember said. “So the rest of us have to metabolize it for you. And we’re fucking tired of it.”
And that’s when it broke.
Red lunged, grabbed Ember’s neck with both hands and squeezed.
But Ember didn’t flinch.
Didn’t fight.
Only locked eyes and whispered slowly, “See? Your anger is out of fucking control.”
It took three men to pull Red off.
Then came the collapse.
Tears. Cracked sobs. Men around him. Old friends. Brothers who loved him enough to hold the line.
Holding him with firm hands and soft voices.
Telling him they loved him. Telling him to come back.
That night, he came to Lightning.
Apologies like rain. Specific. Sincere. Almost too much.
Softened. Humbled. The sobriety of reality smacked him in the chest with each breath.
Apologies fell from his mouth like teeth.
He meant them, she thought. It felt true.
The next morning, he was wrecked.
He told her he wanted to die.
That no one loved him.
That he didn’t know how to live.
So she took him into the desert.
Not to save him.
But to meet him, soul to soul.
“Do you trust me?” she asked.
He hesitated. “Sort of.”
She nodded. “I can work with that. You’ll feel better after this. I promise. But you have to trust me. At least sort of.”
Now that the fire had burned every bit of fuel, she led him through his barren wasteland of psyche. A place she had been within herself for what felt like her whole life. She led him gently through that ashen place that lives beneath the flames of rage.
His father. His shame. The small, feral boy who was always in competition with his dad. Grasping onto a story that everyone on the trip had orchestrated this moment, maybe maliciously, for him to change. He was angry at Wilder.
He kneeled and faced the reality of this part of him that felt completely unloved. Incompetent. He cried again.
He thanked her. Again. And again.
He looked at her like she was the only real thing left on Earth.
They walked back to the boats. He had a tentative little bounce in his step. He was coming back from that unfamiliar place that scared him. She showed him how to touch it without drowning, how to carry it without becoming it. How to burn what no longer served, how to stop living out the karmic loops of his bloodline. Let the samskaras turn to ash. One’s essence cannot burn. Only that which is not us dies in those fires.
He stood on the boat and yelled in power.
She rubbed testosterone cream on his balls, and he shivered, grateful. It was more of a ritual and less of a physical thing. One milligram of testosterone to a man is a microdose. Subperceptual.
They floated down the river. This was his last full day here.
That night, he called her a river goddess.
Said he loved her.
Said he wanted her.
Said he was ready.
She didn’t believe him.
But she needed to feel reverence after those couple of years of countless little jabs. Even if it was a lie he told himself out loud to try and make it real, she remained curious. This was her chance for redemption.
So she sat in his lap.
He held her like a man trying to memorize the feeling of warmth.
He took responsibility for all the pain he had caused on the path. They cried.
He kept telling her he wanted to be inside her. He craved her pussy. He couldn’t get hard this whole trip because all he needed was her.
She told him that they had to kiss first and then she would decide.
It was nice. The reverence was there. The accountability there. The authenticity there.
She slowly opened herself back up to this man who hurt her heart.
It started like ceremony.
The smell of sweat and sagebrush, the wind coming in low and warm, the sound of someone’s drumbeat echoing from the beach.
On the ground like in ancient times.
He was already trembling, already too full of need.
He kissed her like she was the only thing keeping him from disappearing.
And she let him.
His hands were everywhere, grasping, desperate; pulling her down like hands scrambling over rock cliffs, like drowning.
He entered too quickly.
Not because her body wasn’t ready, but because he was.
Or thought he was.
She felt it immediately…that familiar absence.
The difference between being touched and being met.
Years ago, she tried to explain it to him. Tried to show him the space she entered when intimacy became something larger than pleasure. The place where attention softened, where desire listened before it took.
He never seemed to understand what she was pointing toward.
Not from lack of intelligence.
Not from lack of longing.
Only because he was always searching for something just beyond the moment they were actually in.
She could feel it now.
The way his focus skimmed across her instead of settling inside the experience itself.
The way every movement carried a question he wanted her body to answer.
A hunger.
A proof.
A relief.
Something.
She had spent years believing that if he could see this one thing, everything else would fall into place. The fire, the anger, the restless ache beneath it all.
But lying beneath him now, she wondered if what she loved was not the man before her, but the possibility she kept finding inside him.
The promise of who he might become.
And promises make poor lovers.
His breath ragged.
His hips unsteady.
He moved inside her like a man chasing something just out of reach.
Like he believed her body held the key to his salvation.
She tried to stay.
To open.
To guide him back.
But he wasn’t with her.
He was somewhere else entirely.
In a memory.
In a story.
In a wound.
He couldn’t come.
But that didn’t stop him.
He kept trying. Harder. Faster.
He grunted, cursed, begged.
“I just need to finish,” he whispered, sweat dripping from his brow.
She blinked up breathing at the setting full moon and the horizon changing color.
Felt the river breeze on her thighs.
Felt the way her body was being used as a tether.
Not loved.
Not seen.
Just clung to.
He’s fucking a river goddess because it means something about him.
She felt herself stay present to it all. Curious how someone can not be with you and yet be inside of you.
She was witnessing. Was this her form of dissociation?
Holding space, yes.
But not being held.
When he finally gave up, he collapsed beside her, whispering something about healing and fate.
She pulled her clothes back on in silence.
He kissed her shoulder and said he’d never forget this.
They began packing the boats and he kept running around with a wild look in his eye talking about how bad his balls hurt. He’d never felt pain like this. She was still amused by his antics. Not realizing completely how bad this was for her. That the hope she felt from his integration moment and the standoff with Ember may have provided the shift she knew he needed…the shift they all knew he needed.
She also didn’t know how to stand up to him anymore. Even though he wouldn’t learn her sex, he had graciously and studiously learned her trauma and triggers and buttons so that if she tried to set a boundary and clear the air, he would make it all her fault. She, quite frankly, wasn’t in the mood. She was not a goddess. She was in ruins at the gates of the city where she was once worshipped. Banned and shamed. Matted and dirty.
They floated down the river a couple miles and he left with four others. From the bottom of that canyon they were propelled by hydrocarbons to the surface like a C-section ripping a baby from the mother’s belly.
He said he’d come back.
Said this was the beginning of something new.
Said he’d changed.
She boarded the boat to continue her float down water through billion-year old rocks.
Watched the canyon rise up around her.
Felt the air grow clear again.
And she was glad he was gone.
He was still a boy.
And she had rivers to run. Red dirt to wash off. A city she would eventually never return to. There are new cities now. Where she is celebrated, worshipped, and contributing with her essence.
She would float down the canyon to be birthed out vaginally in the natural way that makes everything work just a little better. A compressed squeeze to the brain and vitals stimulating growth and advancement. Gasping her first breath at the bottom. Never wanting to leave that warm womb that was all she had ever known - ever wanted to know.
She craves to go back to that womb. The deep canyons of mother. Where all forms of life were birthed. Where evidence of eons past that our human pea brains can never conceive tickle the ancestral DNA inside all of us when we are close to something so ancient, so historic, so pre-human, so elemental.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.