35 - Thank you. I had a few hints throughout about her ethnicity and gender, with the most overt one being her comment about how dragons look when she made her Backburner - may I ask what in particular tipped you off? 36 - Thank you. That I was able to get my work to resonate that deeply with someone is something I'd hoped for, and to hear I did just made my week. Out of curiosity, you guessed her gender a while back; what was it you picked up on? 37 - Because it was over 50,000 words long by the time I'd finished and I had to get to the rest of the team. In any case, I'm terrifically flattered to hear you liked it that much. 38 - I'm glad to hear that, then. -- 14. When I was six, the hills caught on fire. It wasn’t something that happened by accident – it wasn’t because of a forgotten campfire or a dropped cigarette or a freak summer lightning storm. Someone had set them on fire because they’d wanted to see them burn. It’d been a dry summer, after a dry year, and a long time later I found out people set fires all over the world to clear the land and clean out all the dead plants and make sure that the next fire that comes won’t be so big they can’t control it. But when I was six, it’d been a long time since anyone had set the hills on fire, and they burned like hell. I was up near the hills with my family that day. My mother’s sister has some cousins and we were there for some celebration that I didn’t understand because I was six and all I cared about was getting away from the adults and exploring by myself. I came back for lunch, waited for my parents to finish showing me off, and went back outside when they were done. I came back when they called for me and my father had to come looking for me because I didn’t come back right away. I remember there was someone talking on the radio about something nearby, because so many people were sitting around and listening, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like how tight my dad’s hand was on my arm, and after he let go and wasn’t looking, I ran back outside. I saw the smoke before I smelled it. I hadn’t seen smoke clouds coming over the horizon before, or ever, and first I thought it was a summer rainstorm, except Los Angeles doesn’t get rain in summer, so then I didn’t know what it could be. It was dark, so it could be fog like in San Francisco like I’d seen last year when my family went there for a long vacation. But it was darker than fog, and it was coming from the hills, not the ocean. I stood up, the grass tall enough to hit me at the waist, and I kept watching. The smell came next. It was a huge smell, like candles or cook-fires but bigger and larger, rushing at me when the winds came faster. I covered my nose and mouth with my hands and kept breathing – I knew something was coming, I could feel it. I couldn’t stay there, and started running, going up the hill to get to the top so I could see what was coming sooner. Hills are bigger when you’re six, and it didn’t take me long to get up there but it felt like climbing a mountain. I could see it and smell it better up there, the grass still hitting me at the waist, and I rubbed my eyes to get them clear when tears started coming, one at a time so I could keep watching. I waited and watched and everything kept coming. Then I saw the fire. It was still plenty far away. I wasn’t close enough to feel it on my face, but I could finally see it, and stopped breathing for a moment when I did. I’d seen fire, I’d seen candles and cook-fires and roasted marshmallows in fireplaces, and none of it had looked anything like this. It was huge – it covered the hills almost as far as I could see them, and it was free. That was the word I thought of when I saw it, free. All the other fires I’d seen had been tamed or caught or so small like a match they were nothing compared to what I was seeing, and I knew then, I knew somehow and I knew right, that it was beautiful. It moved – I don’t know how it moved, just that it did, reaching up to the sky, opening itself to spread out and wide across the hills, more and more as I kept watching. It was bright and dark, so bright inside where I could see the flames, so dark at the edges where the smoke came out. It was dancing, it was flying, it was trying to reach out and cover the world. I knew it wouldn’t stop, that it’d keep burning, big and beautiful. Full of beauty. I hadn’t thought what the word was made of until then, and it fit. Full of beauty. It was dark and bright and glorious and I couldn’t look away, all the flames curving and curling and reaching for more, reaching away from itself, soaring. Burning everything away. The smoke ripped through the air as the winds blew it closer, and the whole sky was gray. Bits of ash started to float by, and I didn’t watch them, just kept staring at the fire. There wasn’t anything else then. That was all there was for me, that was all there could be. My father called out my name, grabbed me, and I yelled as he ran down the hill back to the house, threw me in the car and started driving. I looked out the back to where I knew it was, and he and my mother shouted and screamed at me for running away and putting myself in danger. I didn’t know how to tell them about what I’d seen, and couldn’t try, and kept my mouth shut. When I’d close my eyes, I’d think of the fire, and felt better. It was all over the news everywhere, on TV and the radio and in the newspapers, and I saw so many pictures and heard so many people talking about it. But they didn’t show the whole thing the way I’d seen it on the hill, covering so much and so beautiful. I drew so many pictures to try to show my parents but they didn’t see what I wanted them to. I learned how dangerous it was from everyone talking about it and from all the pictures of what came after it was gone, but I didn’t really understand until that fall, when my mother’s parents built a cook-fire in their pit in their backyard. It was the biggest fire I’d seen since that day, and it was so much closer, I could feel the heat on my face, and it was so much smaller than the fire on the hills and it was still so beautiful. I wanted to pick it up to show it to my parents, and stuck my hands into the flames.