“Did you ever think about the creation of the flame-thrower? Someone, somewhere, at some time must have been sitting on his porch, and said, thoughtfully, 'I want to set him on fire.' gesturing to his neighbor. His friend who sat beside him and happened to be handy with tools said, 'I can do that.' Thus, we have a flame thrower.”

“He sat across from me now, chin on his hands, brooding into the fire. Part of me wanted to walk up to him and hug him from behind, and part of me wanted to hurl a snowball at his perfect face to get some kind of reaction.I opted for a less suicidal route. “Hey,” I said, poking at the flames with a stick, making them cough sparks. “Earth to Ash. What are you thinking about?”

“This has happened and will happen again,' said Euphorbus. 'You are not lighting a pyre, you are lighting a labyrinth of flames. If all the fires I have seen were gathered together here, they would not fit on earth and the angels would be blinded. I have said this many times.' Then he cried out, because the flames had reached him.”

“Hey Dad, will you buy me a flame thrower? Of course not. Don't be silly. Even if I didn't use it in the house?”

“He liked having the boy there beside him. Like some bright flame of life still burning bright beside the spent lamp of his own spirit.”

“I’m reminded of Orville Tethington, inventor of the world’s first steam-powered fog machine. He’s also the guy who, after the Germans invented the flame thrower in WWI, decided to counteract it with his own creation, the candle thrower. The candle thrower was only battle tested once, and after fifteen minutes the war zone was littered with lit candles. Upon returning home after the war, some of the soldiers suffered such extreme and bizarre cases of PTSD that anytime a civilian lit a match or used their lighter, the soldiers would hit the ground and start singing “Happy Birthday.”