Dante's Fire

PROLOGUE When Jackie kissed him, she felt something. This is not to say that all those other times with men who had somehow just caught her eye, Jackie had not felt anything at all. She had felt a lot, in truth. The first time with Andrew, a beautiful man with hair the colour of lacquered gold whom she had met attending a student conference, she had felt only warm. Nothing else. She felt warm when he slipped inside of her underneath the covers. They rocked each others bodies, back and forth, swinging like a sweet pendulum made of limbs and flesh, gasping, clawing at each other's skin, but not seeing each other, because the lights had been turned off. Andrew was that sort of man, the sort that turned off the lights before he undid a woman's clothes. He had a sad politeness about him that could almost be mistaken for sweetness if you did not recognize it for what it was. There, in that air-conditioned room, under the hotel's pristine sheets, Jackie had felt only warm, like all the o

Chapter TwoDANTEIt was snowing when the phone rang the first time, and Dante was at the corner store buying groceries for the night. They had come early this year, the snowflakes, suddenly filling the sky and blocking out the sun, thin tufts of white drifting downwards like brown leaves from trees in autumn, like locks from God's scalp. Only this morning, children played at the basketball court, scuffing knees and bruising elbows, jumping several feet in the air to dunk worn-out basketballs in the even more worn net. It was still warm outside. Not enough to warrant sun-dresses and bare thighs, but not frigid enough to make people encase themselves in coats or carry parasols with them, hurrying as they went, looking like frozen burritos. The cold had crept up on them, on the entire New York, out of nowhere.At the store, Dante's fingers were freezing. He had forgotten his mittens at home. He pulled the coat tight around his shoulders and shoved his hands into his pockets for warmth.

Chapter 4JACKIE It was the afternoon after graduation night that Jackie finally saw the numerous calls on her phone. They were all from her father. On her phone, she had saved his name as Big Jack, the moniker everyone knew him by. It was amusing sometimes, how the name made him sound impressive and colossal, but it was she, a six year old with eyes like white oil and lips like cramped petals, who started calling him that. Suddenly, everyone they knew took up the name, and it stuck. If she was Little Jack, then he was Big Jack. It made sense at the time.Her mouth tasted of vileness when she awoke. It was bright outside, a watery, egg-yolk sun hovering above, its light spilling through the shutters weakly. Her eyes were still swimming from all the liquor she had drank the night before when she saw them, the missed calls lighting her phone. She had picked the device to check what the time was. Jackie made to toss the phone back onto the mattress before she noticed the notifications.

Chapter SixANDRE Andre watched the snow fall. It had been falling for days by now, unendingly. Silently it fell, at first, then it gathered momentum, tumbling down in straight lines. It soon became an torrent that pressed down on the people below, shoving their parasols with the wind that accompanied it, pounding the roof of cars, of cafés and restaurants and the awnings of bookstores.New York. A clutter of tall structures and old trees and hurrying people. Even when it was silent here, it was loud. While daytime was a carnival of colours, the night was one colour. Grey. It was all grey. Even with all the lights shining in the numerous apartments across the city, the colour grey prevailed. Andre liked the enveloping darkness, relished it. He came here every other night to look down at the grey city—even if were raining, or snowing, as it was now. The building at the top of which he stood was tall, quaint, sandwiched between a store and a block of residential buildings. Andre had

Chapter EightBIG JACKA cop car sped past Big Jack, splashing muddy snow and spraying water. Its siren was on and wailing, and the colours blue and red flashed across the buildings as it blew past. On its side, the acronym NYPD was embossed in bold black letters.To Big Jack, wailing police sirens had to be the scariest sound a person could hear when he or she was a criminal. It was a lesson that Big Jack had learnt and relearnt, and then learnt again a dozen times. He had come to know fear intimately, because he had grown up in an atmosphere of it. And because he had come to know fear as intimately as he did, because it had become a regularity in his life, it was an easy thing to shake off.Yet, when he saw his best friend on the tile floor of the ware house, staring up at the ceiling with unseeing eyes after Andre shot him, he had felt fear. Fear that was new and uncharted. Colder than a chilly December, it reached for and gripped his heart with icy fingers. He could not close his e