Burning

The name for this thing is one small word, and you know it — but it is not one of the words this book is allowed to use. This book does not need it. Burning is what happens when a thing connects with the air very quickly and gives out light and hot air. You have seen it: the yellow moving light on top of burning wood, hot on your hand before you touch it. It was here long before people, and long before names.

It moves like it is alive

Look at it. It does not sit like a stone — it moves at all times, like a small animal made from light. It eats: give it wood or paper, and they become part of it. It breathes: put it in a container with no air, and it dies. It grows: one light smaller than a flower can become as big as a house. And it can die. But it is not alive. It is not a thing at all — it is something happening: the light and the hot air that go out when things connect.

What it is, in very small pieces

When wood becomes hot, it gives out gas, and it is the gas that burns: atoms from the gas connect with atoms from the air, very quickly, and each connecting gives out light and more hot air — which makes more gas, which burns. The word for atoms connecting is chemical: burning is the chemical happening that people see most often. The yellow moving light is burning gas — that is why you cannot hold it, and why it moves the same as air moves. Near the wood, at the bottom, the light is blue: the blue part is the most hot part.

The sun looks like the biggest burning there is, but it is not burning at all — burning needs air, and there is no air in the sun or around it.

The three things it needs

Burning needs three things: something that can burn, air, and something hot to start it. Take one of the three from it, and it dies.

This is how you stop it. Water makes it cold: it dies. A cover that stops the air: it dies. And this is how you start it: rub one piece of wood on another piece — hard, quickly, for a long time — and the rubbing place becomes hot, and now you have all three. It is not easy, and your arms will hurt. But it works, and for most of the time there have been people, this was one of the most important things a person could know how to do.

How people took it

All animals fear it. When they see it, they go. People feared it as well — and then, one time, a person did not go. No one knows that person's name, and no one can know it now.

At first, people could not start it — they could only find it, in places where electricity from the sky had hit a tree, and take some, and carry it, and give it food, day after day, and not allow it to die. It was like a dangerous animal that lived with people — one that no one could touch. People have had it for more than a hundred thousand years, and maybe much longer.

Here is what it gave. Light after the sun goes down. A hot place in the cold part of the year. Animals that eat animals do not go near it, and people slept around it, inside its light. And food made hot: your body takes more from food that has been made hot, and some people who learn about things think this is part of why people's heads could grow as big as they did — a big head needs very much food, and making food hot is a person making more food from the same food.

And when the sky was black, people sat in a circle around it, and told stories. Maybe that is where stories started.

When no one holds it

It is not on your side. It does not know what a house is, or what a child is — it only knows what can burn.

In a dry year, in a place with very many trees, one small hot light — from electricity in the sky, or from a person not being careful — can become a burning as big as a small country. It goes from tree to tree quicker than a person can move, and the hot air above it makes the air around it move, and that moving air pushes it on: a very big burning pushes its own body on.

And the light is not the most dangerous part. When things burn, black air goes up from them — very small pieces of the thing that did not burn, carried up by the hot air. If a person breathes much of that black air, they sleep, and then they die: the black air ends more people than the burning does. If you are in a burning house, do not look for the things you own. Go down low — the black air goes up, and the good air is low — and go out quickly, and do not go back in.

One of the biggest burnings like this started in the house where a man made bread, in a very big place where very many people live. The houses there were made from wood, and the houses touched. In four days, it ate most of that place.

It did not go

You think it is far from your days? The electricity in your house is often made by burning coal — burning you do not see, inside a big building far from you. Cars and flying machines move by burning a liquid that burns. The thing from long before did not go. It went inside the machines. All of this — the house you are in, the light in your room, the words in front of you — started at a burning.

But someplace, right now, a person is sitting near a small one, doing no thing — only looking at it. People have sat like this, looking at the moving yellow light, from before there were words. Sit near one, and try not to look at it.

You cannot. No one can.