We don’t talk about the mountain. We don’t talk about the black clouds that waft down and wrack our breaths with coughs, don’t talk about the brilliant sparks we see glittering around its peaks. Nothing grows on the mountain, nothing lives there. We peek out our windows and see one, violent jagged shadow against pale blue skies. And it scares us. Some don’t believe it’s a mountain at all. A monster or a devil, they whisper. A fallen.

They say he was one of the first to fall. That he was at the right hand of the morning star—the striking hand. But we know how the war ended; they failed. And he fell, screaming with every ounce of his being as he plummeted down and collided with the earth in a torrent of flame. Everything burned until all that was left of his fall was his writhing body, hot ash and black smoke. The cinder and soot swarmed him then, pushing his body deeper into the chasm he had created. The density of the disintegrated earth stilled him and he became a great black scar on the green ground. You can see the land stretched taut against his angry, open mouth, against his heaven sculpted face, against his sickeningly broken wings. Sometimes smoke slips through the soil beneath his snarl. Sometimes scintillating sparks creep into the sky and are so beautiful we close our blinds and worry about what we’ve just seen. We buy thick curtains to keep the light from dancing onto our pillows through the glass. But not all of us.

There are those of us that creep close to windows and thrust them open to taste the sweet smoke, to sigh at the beauty of those glittering lights. Those of us who dance too close, who reach to touch and hold, who spend too much time watching the horizon. They drink in the mountain with a ferocious greed, watching, whispering, and reaching to that jagged scar against the sky. Then, on a night dry of moonlight and starlight, music drifts through their walls, curls around their necks and draws them out their doors. The melody enchants them to dance and their bare feet fly against sidewalk in hurried frenzied steps as they twist and twirl beyond concrete and onto the black cinder-soil of the mountain. The dancers, the holders, and the watchers clamber up the mountain, stepping and spinning uncontrollably faster as they make their way to the wide, scarred mouth. And the music is all they can see, all they can feel and they move to it desperately, passionately. Their skins shed dazzling sparks in the heat of their motion, their toes scald the dead land beneath them and when those people—the dancers, the holders, the watchers—become one spiraling mass of fire and flesh and song he pulls them into his mouth with magnificent jaws and flaming tongue. And swallows.

When the dawn comes, we don’t talk about the breathtaking loveliness of the lights that spun and sparked the night before. We pretend we didn’t notice the petrifying roar of laughter that made the ground quiver beneath our beds, that bit into our bones and blood and hurt us. We stay inside those days because the sky is hot and dark and the air smells like it’s on fire.

-Alexandra Solmaz Sharabianlou