Broken Spark Wheels

The patenting of ferrocerium (often misidentified as flint) by Carl Auer von Welsbach in 1903 has made modern lighters possible. When scratched, it produces a large spark which is responsible for lighting the fuel of many lighters, and is suitably inexpensive for use in disposable items--Facts on Lighters, Modern Version

It is not the fuel...it is the spark.

From the very first instance of her entering into his dim-lit world it was never about a source of the flame.  That could have been anything...the dark continent of her eyes, the fast whip of a smile, the stiletto heel of a wit.  You could almost say that any interaction was equivalent to the build up of an anxiety, the pent-up urge of something that you let pool, something you let slip through tiny cracks and soon you find yourself knee-deep in a substance that is volatile.  

Caution, reads the sign.  Flammable liquid.

In a way, she was ordinary.

Like the way the sun starts, or the moon begins.  Like the way a flower emerges from a snow.  Like the way you hit all the green lights on a long stretch of road.  Ordinary like that.

Which means to say that she was not...not in the same county. Not in the same jurisdiction of anything ordinary.  Yet she was built with the same piece parts, the same skeletal frame as everybody else.  

Except for hers.

It is not the fuel...it is the spark.

Perhaps the fact that she didn't believe made it that much more believable...perhaps the fact that she didn't want to hear, didn't want to absorb, didn't want to accept made her all the more truthful...more credible.  She possessed the slight small pieces that made her stand out, made her unique.  Made her enter a room of party favors and become the black-hole gravity center.  Eyes suddenly drawn to her.  An easy grace.  An easy on the eye presence...but in a subtle, almost nonchalant manner.

The spark wheel alights upon the friction, producing a spark that ignites the gas that spurs a flame.  The activities of a lighter are almost basic, almost industrial.  

The flame holds until the metal top of the lighter clamps it down.  Shuts it off.

She walked into a room like a lighter well-lit, already burning hot blue and yellow...with a top twisted off so that she would never be extinguished.  A constant.  Yes, sometimes winds would push her sideways and almost out but she, as far as he could tell, remained a pilot light.  A tiny flame.  

It is not the fuel...it is the spark.

In a minute when she would share with him, share a moment,  a discussion, a dialogue it was like piercing a fuel bladder and letting it spill around him...her conversation tiny sparks that he feared might explode around him, consuming him, twisting him into tiny branches and soon nothing but ashes to float in the rainbow hues of her oily residue.  

But fortunately...or unfortunately, that risk lessened.  In the process, in the interludes he had accidentally broken the spark wheel, he had broken whatever had caused that spark to ignite...he had smoothed over....or maybe she had.  Didn't matter, the friction was gone.  He had become the disposable item.  The fuel remained.

The spark didn't.