Arnold’s face burst into flames in the bathroom while his wife showered. He was stunned by surprise, then further paralyzed by the sudden myopia that followed when his glasses melted from his face. If he could have seen better, he might have appreciated the way the lenses, unscorched, lay in the opaque pool of his liquefied frames, like two crystal jellyfish in a pan of motor oil.

“Janet,” he shouted, “my face is on fire!”

Janet opened the shower curtain, saw Arnold’s face on fire, and fainted, her head coming dangerously close to the bathtub spigot. Arnold frowned at her exhibition.

“Oh Janet, stop faking,” Arnold said.

Janet, her eyes still shut, sighed.

“Leave me alone Arnie. It’s too damn early for me to deal with another one of your calamities.”

“It hurts! This is an emergency!”

“Of course it is. They all are.” She paused, metering out the exact length of effort she was willing to expend for him. “Why not try sticking it in the toilet?””

Arnold threw his hands up in the air. “Of course!” he said.

His head in the toilet, Arnold felt momentary relief. But as quickly as it had soothed, the toilet water turned to steam, which scalded his stomach and neck. The flames seemed more intense than before.

“No way! Jaaaanet,” he whined, “the entire bowl has e-vap-o-ra-ted.”

Janet opened her eyes and stood up. At 6’2’’, she had twelve inches on her diminutive husband, and standing over him always gave her the impression she was saying things Arnold should listen to, while inspiring in him the realization that she should be obeyed, simply to avoid the embarrassment of getting punched out by his wife. Her right cross was nearly lethal.

“Go to the kitchen and leave me alone. I can’t get any peace with you steaming up the place and shouting like a Hare Krishna about your face.”

In the kitchen, Arnold continued to pout. The grapefruit in the fruit bowl was a much more receptive audience, if lacking in advice. Settling down, Arnold remembered the fire extinguisher they kept in the garage. He kept his face far from the cabinets as he passed them, concerned that their decision to skimp on the sheetrock in the kitchen would finally catch up to them. Janet would definitely give him hell for burning the house down. Thinking about it made him more nervous, and beads of anxious sweat hissed on his temples.

The garage was a wreck. Janet’s black Volvo was crowded on all sides by tools, old clothes, winter clothes, the remains of Arnold’s dilettante phase with stained glass, Christmas decorations, Janet’s employee of the month awards from the bank, and boxes upon boxes of photographs in various states of curling, yellowing, fading, or outright decay. Above this mess was the extinguisher, hanging by the nozzle hose from a red hook Janet had drilled high into the wall. Arnold stretched to reach it. Even on his tip-toes (a precariously unbalanced position), he fell just short of reaching it, his fingers straining centimeters from it as if repulsed by an invisible barrier. There was no room for him to use the stepstool, which incidentally, was barely within his reach.

“I need Janet’s help,” he said to himself.

Getting Janet to help him was problematic. Disrupting her morning routine went beyond annoyance for her: it bordered on legal grounds for violent reprisal. Weighed against this was the continued pain of the flames. While he was adjusting to the pain as best as he could, it was not a thing he wished to endure. Less tolerable yet was the thought of going to work, his face on fire. The amount of flak the guys would give him was incalculable. This imagined taunting, combined with an optimistic sense of potential spousal forgiveness, overtook his deep-rooted and practical fears of his wife, and led him boldly back to their bedroom, where she was getting dressed.

“Janet?” Arnold said. He stood in the doorway, the only exit from the room.

Janet turned from the mirror, her skirt unbuttoned and her bra, which she was trying to pull up, around her ribcage. The cups, without the mechanical advantage of proper placement, yielded to the strain of her exuberant breasts. Her nipples were still red from the heat of the shower. They looked at Arnold, with Janet, like an extra set of irritated eyes.

“Yes Arnold? Is there anything I can do to make your morning better?” Sarcasm dripped from her voice. Arnold was sure she was about to break something.

“Uhh, sweetie, my face is still on fire.”

“Hmm, I can see that.” She stepped towards him slowly, a big cat approaching its meal.

“Well, I was wondering if you could get the fire extinguisher for me. I can’t quite reach it.”

Arnold saw her face darken and turned to run. Too slow. By the time he began rotating to flee, Janet had already leaped across the room and grabbed him by his pajama shirt, lifting him off the ground.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he squealed. “I’ll rub your feet tonight.”

“Not good enough.” She shook him rigorously.

“We’ll watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and I won’t shout out any letters. I swear!”

“Getting warmer,” she said, turning him upside down.

“Alright, alright already. We won’t do vacation with my mother this year.”

“Bingo,” she said, “now promise.”

“I promise!”

She righted Arnold, dropped him on his feet, and walked to the garage fixing her bra and readjusting her skirt, which had gone askew in her bolt across the room. Arnold collected his breath. A dull headache set in. Mindlessly, his hand moved to his forehead to knead out the pain, unfortunately overlooking that his face was still on fire.

“YEEEOUCH,” he shouted. Reflexively, his hand shot to his mouth to cool itself and it was burned again. “YEEEOUCH,” he shouted again.

“Pipe down,” Janet said, returning from the garage with the extinguisher in her hand. “Why don’t you go into the yard and put yourself out?” It wasn’t really a suggestion.

“Absolutely dear.” Arnold took the extinguisher from her. “Thanks dear.” Arnold stood up to leave.

“Forgetting something?” Janet asked. Arnold glanced at the clock. Eight thirty-two. Almost time for Janet to leave.

“Have a great day at work,” he said. “I love you and respect you more than anyone, and I can’t wait until you come back home.”

“Damn right.” She looked at the extinguisher resting heavily in his arms like a fat red toddler. “Keep that shit off the tulips. They’re going to be giants this year.”

“Of course.” Arnold ran out of the house and into the front yard. There, Mr. Humphrey was walking his cocker spaniel bitch, Noodle, through the grass. Mr. Humphrey was of the mind that Noodle should roam as she wanted, and so let her explore his neighbor’s lawns quite liberally. At the moment Arnold came out, Mr. Humphrey was placidly observing Noodle defecating on Janet’s tulips.

“Uh oh,” Arnold said.

“Don’t worry, I have a bag.” Mr. Humphrey bent over and collected Noodle’s droppings. When he was done, he shook the bag merrily to show Arnold that there weren’t any problems.

“See,” he said, “No problems.”

“Thanks Hubert. You know how Janet is about her flowers.”

“Sure, I understand.” He squinted at Arnold. “Hey Neighbor, is your face on fire?”

“Seems that way.” Beneath the spectrum of blue and orange flame, Arnold’s face turned red.

“It’s always one thing or another these days.”

“Seems that way.”

The garage door opened and Janet drove out onto the street. She waved happily enough at Arnold and Mr. Humphrey, but scowled harshly at Noodle, who was looking with suspicious longing at the flowerbed. In seconds, she was gone from sight. The fire extinguisher grew heavy in Arnold’s arms and he felt the need to bring an end to the conversation.

“If you’ll excuse me Mr. Humphrey, I need to put my face out.”

“Sure you don’t need help Neighbor?”

“I’ll manage. Thanks anyhow.”

They exchanged good days and Mr. Humphrey headed back towards his house, Noodle trailing and periodically urinating on the fence posts and mailboxes. Arnold dropped the extinguisher and sat down in front of it. He tried to read the directions printed on its side but without his glasses, it was no use. He thought, I’ve seen this on TV. He pulled the pin and shook the canister knowingly.

“Amateurs wouldn’t shake it, but I know better.” He babbled.

Pointing the hose at his face, he closed his eyes tightly and took a deep breath. Despite how gently he squeezed down on the handle, the extinguisher’s contents shot out like from a gun, knocking him on his back. Arnold stared up at the sky through the blur of myopia and the yellow liquid on his face, increasingly aware that his ears and neck felt cooler. Cautiously, he raised his hands to his face. The fire was out. No sooner had the realization come to him then the flames reignited defiantly, nearly burning his hands again.

“Oh peanuts!” he cursed.

Feeling defeated, Arnold dragged the extinguisher back into the garage. His shoulders drooped under the weight of his own helplessness, and his eyes sizzled with quickly fried tearlets. He called his foreman at the smelting factory and told him he was sick. Careless in his melancholy, Arnold melted the phone, though he was almost positive Joe got the message. For the next three hours, he was unable to do anything more than sit on the closed toilet in the guest bathroom and alternate between crying and trying to cry.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been in this very situation before. Two years ago, seven months after marrying Janet, the tops of Arnold’s feet sprouted shockingly lustrous blonde hillocks of hair. The hair was so voluminous and resistant to razors that he couldn’t fit his shoes over them. He suffered the following two weeks stepping on gum, screws, other sharp objects, generally benign-looking objects with unexpectedly sharp, rectilinear edges, and an abundance of curious wet, sticky spots. Of course, the hair met its end when Janet got the idea to take an ornamental Scottish broadsword to the task. After the foot hair incident, there followed a series of bodily mutinies: a mange that seized Arnold from head to foot and turned him the color of eggplant, fits of torrential sweat smelling of chili, and the goiter that spoke in verse, crudely, making mayhem of any attempts to have company. The goiter was specifically fond of exploring the rhymes of racial epithets and had no objections to slurs involving family pets or the wives of others. At the end of its tenure, the goiter left a libelous note submitting its intentions to make it big in Hollywood between rages against Arnold (Janet laughing as she read it aloud). Why even just last week, Arnold’s right arm had dropped off. Plop! During the doctor’s examination, Arnold’s left leg fell with a meaty thud on the tiled floor, leading to the jokes later about medicine really costing… a lot these days.

Drained from his marathon of weeping, Arnold moped his way into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took stock of his options. Janet’s leftover pasta (off-limits until moldy, then still a hazardous proposition), a bag of scrapple that made his stomach turn, bananas, grapes, and oranges – all impractical in his current condition – some eggs, and a package of do it yourself hibachi cooking ingredients, including supposed shrimp, bits of an unidentifiable meat, and a smattering of wilted vegetables. Wait, Arnold thought, a memory making its way to the precipice of his consciousness. He had watched a special on the medicinal properties of Japanese hot springs a week ago. Standing with the door ajar, Arnold imagined himself dipping his face into the bubbling waters, emerging into the serene backdrop of perfectly manicured, utterly lush trees, and issuing spontaneous testimonials of the water’s magical power. His excitement dropped off harshly, however, when he tried to picture boarding a plane as a lit human matchstick. You can’t spell fantasy without F-A-A.

“Exactly,” he said, shaking his head, sparks cascading to the left and right.

Arnold shut the door, too upset with this new disappointment to eat anything. He figured he’d try to sleep the day off, allowing that a solution might come in his dreams, and failing that, he’d at least be rested enough to devote some serious critical thought to the adjustments in his lifestyle a face on fire would require.

His bed, the couch, and the family room’s densely cushioned carpet were all unquestionably flammable, and so out of the question as sleeping spots. The porch, while made of concrete and unlikely to spread fire, was a power-washed bone white. He wilted at the thought of a black oval of ash, roughly the size of his face, ruining the perfection of the routinely swept pavement. Janet would pummel him. The yard, laundry room, and garage were rejected on similar grounds. Then it dawned on him: the gravel mound in the back! Arnold celebrated the remnants of the abandoned landscaping project. Safe as milk in the president’s bunker and removed from the danger of Janet’s scrutiny (read: her resulting ire), the gravel mound was the ideal choice. Arnold exited the house, kicked the stones into a manageably flat bed, and lay on them, his hands crossed and folded on his chest to check their roaming as he slept.

Hours later, Janet found him in the same position. Looking through the kitchen window, she thought Bruce, the Damoose’s troublemaking redhead, was up to no good again. She went out the sliding glass doors, prepared to give him a good pinching, only to see her husband standing in for a campfire. Crickets had gathered around him, along with other sorts of pleasant insects, and she could make out frogs, deer, sparrows, and squirrels in the woods behind, their eyes glittering, reflecting the slowly flickering flame of Arnold’s face. Seeing this, Janet turned back to Arnold, duplicating his face again. The warmth of his fire seemed to spread – from her softening gaze to the bluffs of her shoulders, down into the mountain of her heart and from there, everywhere – like an incredibly virulent disease. Or a very potent drug around the floor of a Moby concert.

Under such a romantic influence, she returned to the house to retrieve a blanket. She unfolded it partially, measuring its length against Arnold’s body, and took a long, sighing look at her helpless husband. She raised it above her head and brought it down brutally, attending to Arnold’s face with the same violence the first man to taste coconut milk visited upon that first miserable coconut. Again and again she smacked his face with the blanket, each blow more determined than the one before. Arnold awoke bewildered. His cries sounded intermittent, but were actually all truncated segments of one long scream, which was periodically muffled by Janet’s bludgeoning. On her fifteenth swing, the beating, the crying, and the fire ceased. Arnold reached out his hand, whimpering faintly, and asked Janet to help him up.

“Fire’s out,” Janet said.

“Thanks again.” Arnold wiped his eyes and let out a final sniffle.

“You’re still a hot ticket in my book.” Janet slapped his rear end, causing him to leap high into the air.

“But you’re the hottest,” Arnold said.

Arnold gazed at her lustily, the redness of his freshly whacked face enhancing his handsome nose and brow. Janet scooped him up, hefted him over her shoulder, and sprinted for the backdoor.

Inside, they made love repeatedly and like insane beasts, each experiencing in the other a steady fulfillment. They fell asleep just before dawn, the moment when the promise of the day wavers on the horizon, considering its alternatives, and, finally certain of its decision, rolls over into the low reaches of the sky.