By Asha Mirriam

The devil did not build the cage.
He only left the matches
on the kitchen table
and waited.

Everyone who promised to stand watch
found another door,
another room,
another reason not to hear me knocking.

So I stopped waiting for the rescue party.
I lit the curtains.

The house took to fire
like it had been rehearsing
all its life.

The windows blistered.
The roof surrendered its weight.
Photographs curled
into small black mouths.

By morning,
there was nothing left
but iron, ash,
and the stubborn architecture of bone.

That was when he came.

The devil.

He found me sitting in the ruins,
palms split open,
clothes smelling of smoke.

He put his arms around me
and began to cry.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“You won. Look.”

I lifted my hands.

“Look at what you made of me.”

But he would not look at the ruins.

He looked at my palms,
at the calluses,
at the places where my skin
had learned the shape of heat.

He touched the scar beneath my ribs
as though it were an old signature.

“I wanted to be the one
who broke you,” he whispered.
“But they got there first.”

Behind him,
the last wall collapsed.

He flinched.

“The wounds they gave you
were supposed to be doors
I could enter through.”

He looked at me.

“And you turned them into teeth.”

I said nothing.

Some victories make no sound
only smoke leaving the ruins,
only a body
refusing to kneel,
only the knowledge
that when the house was burning,
I was no longer inside it.

Now I live in the clearing.

There is no roof here.
No one comes to save me.
No one comes to take me home.

But the ground knows my name.

And when night comes,
I sleep beside the ashes
with my hands open

not because I have forgiven the fire,
but because there is nothing left in me
that it can burn.

Author Biography