It Turns Out Books DO Burn at 451 Degrees

by Shannon Frost Greenstein

 Freddy Kearney

It used to be that I enjoyed the scent of fire. It would remind me of fireplaces at Christmas, barbecues in the summer, camping trips and food we would cook over the flames. I liked the crackling sound, a sound I didn’t understand in the time Before was actually famine, the flames ravenous and hangry; it’s the sound of the fire eating through anything it can find for sustenance, because the alternative is simply not to be at all. I used to be drawn to flame, to the warmth, to the light, driven by that primordial instinct in my lizard brain that equates fire with life.

Now, though, I can’t stand fire. I hear the sirens outside and cringe, a flashback to the war, a side-effect of the PTSD I am always fighting. My mind races, thoughts of third-degree burns and ineffable agony and being burned alive, like witches during the Dark Ages, only witches were usually just people, plain people, and group psychology is a terrifying force when you consider Medieval Europe’s body count.

I try not to think about it — we’re not supposed to think about it, we’re not supposed to think about things from Before, the television says — but sometimes, I smell fire and I can’t help but remember.

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They all stand out for one reason or another, but I will never forget the first book burning. Not because of the fire, or the gunshots; what I won’t forget is the smell.

I mean, think about it. A book is two covers and thousands of words and the whole universe within the pages inside, but there’s also the forest, the trees that bled to form the paper and the plants pulverized to make the ink on the pages, the oil from the fingerprints of everyone who has ever held it.

Books have a living smell.

The smell is what I think about most at night when I can’t sleep, the reason I put so much effort into trying to forget that there were once libraries and newspapers, because there is nothing quite like the smell of books dying.

But I remember feeling so alone. My husband had died; all my friends had been interred and then slaughtered. Since I had been left behind, alive — chosen because my rare blood type is so valuable now in the new Eugenics Movement — it was just me and the sound of stories screaming and the sound of children screaming and, through it all, that pungent smell of the world careening toward entropy. Toward what they promised us was Freedom.

It was late on a Tuesday. The growing flames were juxtaposed against the viscous darkness of the night sky, the growing flames illuminating everything in sight to an austere, almost holy brightness. Faster and faster books were dumped on the fire; The Communist Manifesto and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Slaughterhouse Five and The Lord of the Rings and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Much Ado About Nothing.

Eventually, books were shoveled, literally shoveled with shovels, onto the pyre, while the National Guard paced with their rifles — worshiping the destruction, davening like Rabbis when there used to be a Talmud to protect — and families who wanted nothing more than they have always wanted, wanted only peace and love and the security to raise their children, shrank back from the carnage in fear.

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It spread that night, the burnings. Libraries, universities, book depositories — all were subject to this literary rape, a political deux ex machina, an artificial blank slate upon which the government could build anew without any of us being poisoned by books and their secret toxicity.

Books, the chants went, keep us in chains; burn the books and Freedom reigns.

Soon everything was out of control, the fire and the fervor, and that was when society, I believe, really broke down beyond any hope of repair. The nerve gas followed not long after that, and the misinformation campaign, until we no longer knew who was on which side or who was winning; there was only misery, and death, and through it all, the ritual burnings, ridding the world of the scourge of evil that is unfettered access to information.

The skyline was glorious on fire, flames reaching up towards the stratosphere, billowing onyx smoke and a fine layer of ash settling everywhere. The fire roared like a dragon, devouring, growing, adapting like a unique species in a new environment to spread, corporeal natural selection in action. After society fell, I saw a few of my former neighbors — barely, just barely just barely through a smoldering haze, people with whom I had shared meals and bus stop-chatter and block parties — digging through the rubble and searching for lost children and wailing.

Then they came for us — but no, that’s not right, that’s the treasonous idea I carry, planted by my seditious brain and all the books that tainted it, a seed I refuse to let take root — then they came for the insurgents, and tested all our blood, and I didn’t see many people after that.

Then there came the isolation, and then all the tests, the job training, the doctors, the Orientation — propaganda, whispers my inner monologue occasionally, and I shush it automatically — everything in the name of Freedom.

Because of the Eugenics Movement, because of the power of my blood and the genome they are eager to map, because the next generation, the first born into Freedom, will be constructed with my rare DNA, I am one of the lucky ones.

I am alive. And that, I feel certain, is as good as it will possibly get.

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It’s really only at night that I think about books anymore.

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Shannon Frost Greenstein is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Shannon was awarded a writing residency through Sundress Academy for the Arts in October 2019. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Crab Fat Magazine, Spelk Fiction, trampset, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter at @mrsgreenstein or her website: www.shannonfrostgreenstein.wordpress.com. She comes up when you Google her.