Third Degree

The hitching cough of the house
was no less ordinary than its grandfatherly walls'
arthritic complaints of the summer heat,
or the choleric thermostat with only half a mind
and no mother to teach it manners, save
the girl. In honesty, though, the doll

felt peculiarity for a long while, but dolls
have paraplegic natures and make poor alarms. So, the house
rattled its termited skeleton until the girl had saved
herself and blinked awake from nightmares to the walls
that lullabied her rest. With clouded mind
and folded brow, she watched the crimson flush of heat

reach over her blankets to peel heated
lilac scales from the wall, and the frail-eyed doll
dripped varnished tears onto the floor, never minding
the warmth. She'd not known the house
for long enough to understand the language of the walls --
not to comprehend their groans as 'save

our souls' -- but the girl was sensitive of ear and saved
everything she could. While the heat
grew nearly solar, the paneled walls
shed chips of paint like snakeskin on the porcelain doll
the girl had chosen to rescue last. The house
wept hard for the coming taste of ash. The girl's mind

frightened itself rigid, the way minds
do, until flame appeared in valid stripes on the unsaved
carpet where everything in the house
stood, immobile and victim. But heat
could not steal spider-legged children, thought the doll,
not when the window was escape from the burning walls.

The girl saw too, the irreparably charring walls
were lost to savagery, devoid of magic. And in her mind
flickered, at last, the rose-cheeked doll
who smiled prim and tragic, saving
cinders. From her fixed spot, the doll had felt heat
for a long while. The house

mourned her ceramic skin while the walls ushered the girl through the windowsill,
her fingers blistering on the heat-warped iron of the gate that set her free. The house
smoldered bitterly and the fair-haired doll quieted the weeping colony of things unsaveable.