Falln knew something was up—his monkey senses told him so. In the distance, plumes of smoke darkened the horizon line, and rows of once mighty trees gradually disappeared. As a tamarin, an un-fanged, un-formidable monkey, vigilance was a way of life, and the steadily burning forest was something to take note of. What he noticed was twofold: firstly, that burning was a beautiful thing—because flames crackled and snapped and danced and reveled in all the fun that monkey-kind craved, especially for Falln and his tribe, as their fur was the red-orange of every blaze. They called themselves fire monkeys, the flaming tamarins—flamarins. It was catchy. Very cute. The tribe loved it. When they swung, they swung together, flouncing about the forest like flames. But secondly, though, flames were deadly. Their fur was flammable, their skins cookable, and no amount of fire worship could change that. Falln, being Falln, wasn't a simple chimp. Not a smidgen of the expected banana-eating, poop-flinging ignorance could be found in him. He loved The Burning Forest as much as his kinfolk, he really did, but dying for it(?)—he wasn't quite sold on all that. Death, to him at least, was decidedly problematic, so he figured speaking up would be the responsible thing to do.
"Hey guys." Falln swung upside-down from his tail, pointed to the smoke. "The fires are close."
"It's warm, isn't it?" The same dreamy smile swept amongst the flamarins.
"Maybe we should get moving."
"Why? The Burning Forest is home."
"You do remember that this used to be called The Raining Forest?" And it was. Their home was absolutely The Raining Forest, though Falln was baby during the last of those days. Still, he'd remembered the tribe's talk of it since he didn't know what rain was. Water from the sky. He'd never seen it but it was a gorgeous story, one he'd held on to. Amusing enough. But the flames were what he knew.
"What can you do?," his tribesman said, "The Burning Forest has a better ring to it. Besides, do we look like rain monkeys?" The flamarin lifted his arm to the light. The reds glistened, crackling spectacularly. "We're flames."
"That's not how this works."
"Says you."
And that was that. The monkeys swung off without a care. As the smoke rose in the distance, the flames heightened, the flamarins chimped. They clapped their paws, their excited screeching piercing the air. For them, the Burning Forest was perfect in every way. Falln wanted to believe this too. The flames inspired him. They moved freely and decisively. Deep inside he too believed they were flame—to a point. He gazed in admiration at the red-orange inferno, the black plumes of smoke trailing upwards into Heaven, the sky itself scarred in beautiful, beautiful soot—
And then a tree crumbled into a blackened pile of itself.
Falln snapped to attention—Death, it was real—and he left the territory and vine-swung over toward the flames, the steadily disintegrating horizon line. He focused toward distant vines in his travel route, looking everywhere but the ground. Falln, in his quest to avoid the surface, kept reinventing the game of his life.
The Floor is Teeth was the first game—back when the only dangers were snakes and jaguars and gators and other toothy creatures. Back when the forest was known for its rain. And then came the fires. The deafening crashing of trees. Unknown imprints in the floor which Falln later learned were tire tracks, machine trends. His game evolved to more frightful forms. The Floor is Wheels. The Floor is a Woodchipper. The Floor is a Bulldozed. There were a thousand ways for a tree to die, and thousands of more ways for a flamarin to suffer the carnage.
Falln swung onwards, black smoke rising and choking him as he drew closer to the site of the burning. Suddenly, a bright glint caught his eye, a grounded object distracting him. And who was a monkey to ignore the draw of shine? He gingerly descended the thin branches, carefully bending them downward. As he drew closer to the ground, the treetops and smoke caged him, and his little heart pounded away. One branch above the ground. He curled his tail around the branch and hung upside-down, reaching for the object—reaching, reaching—until he grabbed it. Success. The small perplexing item was interesting. He shook it and liquid sloshed about its transparent container. He flicked his thumb over the ridged wheel and a sudden spark shocked him. He flicked again, produced flame, then he shot back upwards into the tree, punching through the smoke, grateful to escape solid ground.
At the tribal grounds he settled into a tree nook and clutched the lighter. He played with the flame, flicking it on and off, on and off. He couldn't stop. The magic provided by the Burning Forest, its warmth and flamarin color, was addictive. But he soon stopped—tired was tired—and curled up to sleep. But in the darkness he heard a soft commotion of his tribe, and even glimpsed an army of hazel eyes glowing between the tree branches. Falln, exhausted, drifted out of consciousness, but not before a chant formed. "King, King," the tribe said. "God, you're God!" they also said.
*
He woke in a different spot from where he first slept. The tree branch didn't caress him, the surface was decidedly thicker. He had a headache too, a strange weight bearing down on his skull—which he soon discovered was a crown of bananas. The tribe surrounded him and stared, their hazel pupils no longer glowing but just reflecting in the sun. And, most noticeably, his hands and tail were empty—panic—until seeing a few flamarins before him, tapping the Firestarter, shaking it and such.
"Give it! You'll burn us!" Falln shouted, snatching the Firestarter.
"I can't get it going anyway."
"Because you're being a dumb-dumb." Falln checked the Firestarter for damage, and worried over the mysterious liquid that sloshed inside.
"That's okay, fire is for kings."
"How'd you decide that?"
"We're flames but you're the most flaming of us all. You're the Fire King!"
"Falln, I'm just Falln."
"King Falln!"
"No, Falln—"
"Gather round! King Falln will show us flame!"
They stared at Falln with hope, and he, not seeing the harm, summoned the flame. A chorus of screeching, clapping, backflips. They leapt from tree to tree. The monkeys converged jubilantly as one being, one flame. Falln couldn't kill their joy, and in fact, felt it too. He waved the Firestarter in the air, conducting the clan's primal performance.
"Lead us," they said. "Tell us what to do!"
Falln wasn't prepared for that. He didn't care to lead or anything like that, but since he was here, since life presented him with a tangible, controllable fire, he thought, Hey, why not? Let's get ambitious.
"Humans," Falln said. "They're always up to something. Let's see what."
*
Falln had a plan: he'd give the tribe the basics about the humans he'd seen in The Burning Forest. In his daily life, he'd seen a thing or two. Such as each former burn site, within weeks and months of the fires, becoming settled by humans. An obvious cycle. Fire, then humans. One came and the other came next. The mystery of humans was slightly unlocked. Just like birds came and went with the seasons, humans followed the flames.
Find their fire, Falln was going to say next, Maybe they're the living firestarters. But the tribe dispersed. No direction, no clues, no order. As soon as he said humans, the tribe began their pursuit. Their chief concern was playing with fire. Saving the forest wasn't a concern at all.
So Falln stood in the tree, alone, with nothing to do but eat from his banana crown and restlessly wait.
By sunset the flamarins returned, bringing back an assortment of items. The haul was mostly trinkets from the nearby human villages. Some wore headscarves from the women. Shirts, tank tops, sandals. Others stole shiny rings. One, in particular, kept bringing back boiled eggs, which especially irked Falln—baby theft and all.
"The humans made these," the tribesman said, "With fire."
Screeching, nervous climbing, eyes widening.
Falln himself was confused. He knew about cooking—human magic—but was deeply irked by the disappeared hatchlings, the arcane kidnapping. Besides, that didn't get them any closer to the reason for the Burning Forest. Villages never burned. Cooking, though performed with open flame, didn't do this. His mind turned and turned...but the hearts of his clan were filled with unrestrained fervor for the human bounty of flames. An antsy energy tore through them, urging them to find more, touch more, and become sticky with soot.
"Wait, hold it—"
But they were off again. Boiled eggs, fire-craft—Falln's plan was purely in shambles.
The reluctant king had had enough.
Falln left under the cover of darkness, clutching the Firestarter within his curled tail. The stars were pretty. The moon glowed with a non-threatening, non-burning splendor. And most importantly of all, the tribe was asleep. He swung from the vines, leaping from treetop to treetop, speeding through the night toward the source of the fires.
Soon he arrived to the fire site, a graveyard of blackened trees, and perched on a naked treetop. Burnt, flaky leaves floated down upon his landing. He gingerly navigated the burned branches and surveyed the surroundings. All night long he scaled trees, sniffed their crevices, dug his claws underneath the bark, but found nothing. Though, of course, he wasn't exactly sure what he was looking for. With the last of the moonlight, he left the graveyard and slept in the foliage of a nearby tree untouched by flame but dusty with ashes.
In the morning Falln set off again. He hid from sight and swung through the thicket, following the paths and trails and roads that linked one human village to the next. Occasionally he spotted one of his fellow tribe members slinking about a village, sneaking off with clothes and pots and beads and rings. He ignored them, though, and pressed on. He travelled until nightfall. He was tired and weak and hardly able to grip a branch. But the more he fatigued, the harder he gripped—The Floor is Danger, The Floor is Hell, after all. He propelled through the forest, a small determined spark in the night, until at last encountering a terrifying yet marvelous sight: lights.
Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.
The lights scaled the mountainous city, decorating the curves and hills and winding roadways.
He'd heard humans speak of such immense settlements before. And now he was here. In the night, the city was illuminated. The bright lights glowed and glowed, and an ease was pulled from his exhausted body. New energy filled him: hope, he guessed.
Falln screeched, he backflipped, he'd gone full chimp.
*
The City of Flames, that's what Falln called it, and its buildings were painted in whites and blues and oranges and yellows. There were pink buildings too. Lime as well. And naturally there was fire: cooking fires and matches and candlelight. There were flames filling lanterns, and streetlamp bulbs glowing hot and bright. Humans lit fires by their mouths and exhaled smoke. Dark alleys brightened as trashcan fires flashed to life. Fire—fire everywhere. Falln was positively seduced.
He'd scale the apartments, clinging to the windowsills, peering inside. He watched people watch TV. He watched children watch their phones. He danced when they danced, and sung when they sung—though he scurried away when folks investigated his screechy high notes. After having his fill of one sight, he moved on to the next, the continuous itch of his curiosity urging him onwards.
And within each home, the flame-related novelties continued to appear.
Rooms were illuminated by glowing bulbs. Stoves summoned flame—reds, oranges, even blue ones. Objects of flame were abundant. A lamp. A lantern. Candles. Incense. There were Firestarters like what he gripped in his tail, what the humans called lighters.
Fire lived everywhere yet nothing burned down.
He waited for the damage, for the flames to take all their items away. Yet the fires caught at the city's convenience and graciously disappeared—on command it seemed—and Falln couldn't help but take it a little personally. The City of Flames was untouched while the Burning Forest crumbled.
He'd ruminate over the legend of the Raining Forest. How could we be fire monkeys when we were rain monkeys first? Do the flames love us or are we lying to ourselves? But Falln shook the thoughts away; the negativity didn't serve him. He geared his mental energies on appreciating the city instead.
He'd pluck fruit from the food stands, trade a couple backflips for bags of peanuts, and swipe handfuls of popcorn while behind as vendors' backs were turned.
Falln even climbed to the peak of an immense building, a silver fortress of glass called a skyscraper, and perched atop its roof edge. Intermittent windows were lit by lamps and hallway lighting. And by sundown the humans were gone: the building emptied out on a schedule, a flood of suits and dresses rushing outside to join the city's bustle. Nights, the shining tower belonged to Falln and Falln alone.
In one days, he'd accomplished so much.
He'd even begun his mission.
Atop the skyscraper he stored the city's fire. He didn't know what caused The Burning Forest to burn, but he possessed a vague sense that the source was here. As such, he stole all the flames he could.
Falln dragged about a potato sack and collected matchbooks from people's back pockets. He stole lighters from Quik-Marts and gas stations. He'd discovered Bunsen burners, sparklers, and firecrackers. He smashed high voltage boxes and fuse boxes and car headlights. At night he threw rocks at street-lamps. He tipped over lanterns. Before he slept, he emptied his potato sack bounty onto the skyscraper and hoped for a dimmer cityscape.
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But from atop his skyscraper, tired from a long evening of work, The City of Flames exploded with light. The windows, the porches, the traffic posts all beamed.
Firestarters sounded crisply in the night as the city folks dragged on their cigarettes, indulgently swallowing flames.
*
The second day, foolishness day, one that Falln should've known he was bound for.
That morning he awoke to the city's typical signs of morning, the odors of cooked eggs (yuck!), the screaming of vendors, honking cars, construction equipment roaring to life, good-morning-good-day-hello-beautiful-I-love-you-be-well chatter—and one other dreadful sight: flamarins swinging from the power lines.
"Hey guys!" Falln called out. "What are you doing?"
"Monkeying around, obviously." They continued to swing, a split growing in the wire.
"Stop, that's dangerous!"
"Come on Falln, we won't fall." They laughed, they swung, and—when the wire sparked—the monkeys jumped off and landed on a building canopy. "Fire," they said in unison, awed, and ran off.
Falln traveled around the city, searching for the others. He quickly found them—who'd miss them with their reckless antics(?). They snatched the lights out of smokers' hands. They hid away the long wax candles on the altars of churches and scattered them on the church steps. They climbed street lanterns and punched at the glass. They snuck into gas stations and crushed every pack of cigarettes. The fire monkeys weren't as slick as Falln—they were brazen and loud and never hid. They just climbed out of reach, taunting the humans.
And the humans were upset. They threw bread, they threw rocks, they brandished brooms. Some pulled out guns. Even the most unsophisticated forest critter knew about guns. Even the snails and grubs knew. The fish knew. And the flamarins, obviously, knew—but didn't care. Shots were fired. The monkeys dodged, thankfully, and returned later to pick up the still-warm shell-casings. You didn't need a human brain to know that shots were done with fire.
The city was large, its entertainments constant and various, and there was no taming the flamarins amid the flames and noise and climbable structures. Monkey see, monkey do and do and do, never stopping, obsessively engaging their new toy-filled world.
"Help me!" Falln called to a clan mate, "There's lighters in this gas station!"
"I already have one!" the monkey responded, turning away to light a cigarette. He puffed rapidly, the cigarette burning down to its end within seconds. And then he lit another.
Falln tried with others but found his brethren in various states of disgrace: some monkeys stood on chimneys, inhaling the smoke; a few ate candles; others climbed the streetlights and traffic lights and porchlights, burning their eyeballs against the glowing bulbs; and the monkey who'd chain-smoked his entire pack now licked and snorted the pile of ash.
The flamarins were one with flame—supposedly.
Though to Falln it was madness through and through. "We don't have time for this chimping," he sighed.
That night he didn't climb atop the skyscraper. The sites were too bothersome. He broke one of the mid-level windows with a rock and curled up on a office chair. The ambient hallway lighting grated his nerves some, but at least his surroundings were the dimmest he'd seen in months.
Once asleep, he dreamed of the Raining Forest.
The sky was dark blue. The vegetation was green and damp. The world was humidity-hot, not flame-hot like what he was used to. Everything was strange and unfamiliar but the nesting grounds were intact. The tree wood were many-ringed and long-lived, no traces of burn-marks or cinders. And the flamarins were simply tamarins, orange-haired and wet, relaxingly drenched.
He walked on the forest floor. He didn't think of a human. He didn't think of a machine. No industrial hardware or tenacious blaze could keep him from the luxury of feeling the soil between his toes.
The earth was his. The earth was everyone's.
He got on all fours and kissed the ground.
*
Day three—he'd stirred himself awake and from out the office window he witnessed the sight of smoke clouds darkening the forest.
Footsteps, office chatter, the expresso steam wafting through the halls.
Falln ran for the broken window and climbed out on the ledge.
And that's when he got a better look at the rolling darkness, the smoke plumes gathering right above his clan's nesting grounds. He was frustrated. For a moment he hoped that it was just rain. That maybe the sky was in a bad mood. But no—it was never a storm cloud, always a fire.
He screeched, a shrill outcry used in emergency, and he hoped the tribe would respond. But as he descended the skyscraper, his paws burning on the hot windows, he only received pain and silence. Each monkey he saw was laid about in disgusting leisure, collapsed atop awnings, poking at sparking power lines, standing over chimneys as soot blasted their faces.
Falln went about the town, enlisting help. He soon found some of his tribe, gathered around, looking more human than ever. They wore the same thing: black ties decorated in gold coins, stodgy fingers flipping through stack of bills, unlit cigars dangling from their mouths.
"Guys," Falln pointed to the smoke clouds, "Our home is burning."
"It is, isn't it?"
"We have to check on it!" Falln shouted.
"If the city's fine, we're fine."
"The forest, idiot. The forest."
"What about it?" The clan mate brought his face close to Falln's, poking his cigar out. "Hey, King. Light this, yeah? Give me a good blaze!"
Falln zoned out—his brain couldn't handle any more of his brethren gone chimp.
A firetruck hit a tight corner and Falln jumped onto the rear bumper.
"Hey! My light!" his tribesman yelled, but Falln was off.
Other firetrucks sped out of the city as well, sirens blaring. Firefighters! The people said. Firefighters! It was the first time Falln had seen them defend the forest. Apparently they were going to save it.
"It's spreading!" he'd heard the firefighters say to each other, "The flames will take the city!"
Makes sense, Falln thought, Saving yourselves.
Disgusted as he felt, these selfish people were his only hope, so he clung tightly to the bumper, shielding himself from the wind and bugs. He kept his head low as they arrived to the fires, the black smoke rising. He could even hear the birds choke, and stray squirrels screaming as they were singed by flame. The anxiety, the heat, the dark smoke obscuring his vision. It'd all become real. Falln had never, not once, been burned by flame. He respected the fire, its touch of death, but he didn't know the first thing about extinguishing it. Who was he, a mere monkey, to win this fight against the flamarin's God?
Suddenly the firetruck stopped before a burning row of trees, and Falln was first to unroll the hose reel. The firefighters didn't flinch at the oddity of his help. They held the hose until fully released. Without a glance or sign, Falln hopped to the water pressure valve and turned it. The men gripped the hose firmly, guiding its blast into the flames. The jet damaged branches and leaves and bunches of fruit. The white smoke flew upwards from the burnt black branches. Dead tree, but dead fire too. So the firefighters persisted, and so too did Falln, hopping from truck to truck, releasing each valve.
As Falln and the firefighters battled the flames, there were human onlookers that spoke on the disaster. The villagers were full of exclamations, mostly of the oh-no-oh-why-oh-God sort. And there were other men standing off by their trucks. They wore yellow construction vests and hard-hats. Stacks of chopped wood were tied to their vehicle roofs.
"Can we help?" one of the workers said.
"You've done enough!" a firefighter said.
"We didn't mean to!"
"Who told you to clear the forest like this?"
"We usually contain the fire!"
The firefighter turned to the others, "Hey look! Guy never heard of an axe before. Who knew? The hard-hat kept protesting but the firefighter rolled his eyes, signaled for others to direct the spray elsewhere.
Falln was stunned. The admission was so clear and plain. The forest fires were a human creation. The Burning Forest didn't exist—just people who'd set the fires and built shelter upon the cinders. They'd built villages and farms and roads. They'd built the City of Flames. Within the luminous, magnificent city, Falln found refuge, and he now discovered that it was the fraud of a lifetime. Everything the humans enjoyed, the forest suffered for. And all Falln knew about the beauty of flames, their beloved wildness, had dissolved into ash.
He unraveled his tail, and let the Firestarter go.
*
At some point, Falln acquired a hard-hat. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, he'd overheard from one person or another, but he didn't know what that meant. He'd learned long ago that people say things just to say things—and apparently flamarins do things just to do them. So when one firefighter said, "Hey, give that monkey some head-gear!" Falln caught the incoming helmet and put it on.
Heavy(?)—yes. And oversized, too. But it had a strap so he secured it with ease.
Good timing, too, as entire clusters of foliage dropped onto the emergency vehicles, impacting in harsh thuds. But nobody ducked out the way or sidestepped or otherwise dodged. Everyone was singularly focused on combatting the spreading flames. As more firetrucks sped into the forest, screeching to sudden stops, Falln bolted toward their hose reels and worked the cranks like a professional. The dust flew up from the crackling wildfire. The ashes and soot caked every human face, and every inch of Falln's fur. And the burnt hollows emitted sickening pop-pops that Falln knew were incinerated, exploded grubs.
But the Burning Forest—or Burning Humanity, rather—did its thing: it burned, it smoldered, it blackened, and in the distance out towards Falln's home...it reduced.
The water jets continued onwards, uselessly producing smoke. From up above, helicopters dumped great quantities of sand over the forest. But the taunting inferno remained just as strong, refusing to be smothered.
Right above the flamarin home, the flames erupted.
Falln fought the flames, angry at his former god. He helped aim a hose-reel with several other men. Go out, please. Don't take the whole forest.
Meanwhile his tribe, hopelessly addicted to fire, streamed into the forest. Dozens of clan-mates swung across the tree branches, deftly avoiding the flames, shooting right over Falln's head. Each monkey was so mindlessly delighted by the burning, they hadn't considered that they should save their homes.
In fact: their were madly invested in doing the opposite.
When the tribe realized the firefighters were, indeed, fighting the fires, they rained down upon them, ripping off their hats, biting their hands, throwing rocks. A melee erupted: the firefighters abandoning their posts, running from the monkeys. But the flamarins were relentless. They chased the humans down. They stomped and clawed at the rubber hoses. They created lit torches from thick branches and torched the nearby brush.
Wildfire consumed the flamarins, their souls, a tenacious blaze that then ignited tree after tree after tree after tree, endlessly it seemed.
This is how the Burning Forest died. The humans torched it. And the tribe finished the job.
And there were no more valves to turn, no amount of dirt to blanket the wildfire, nothing Falln could possibly do but flee as the flames were everywhere by now. Suddenly, he found himself within a ring of burning trees, and he hopped to the first safe tree he spotted and ditched the scene.
Falln frantically swung away, heading straight to the only sanctuary he could think of: the city. Each tree he leapt from was set aflame seconds after. The gap in time grew shorter and he was riddled with anxiety. He kept poised, though, because the fires were nothing new, and he weighed his options as calmly as a monkey running for his life possibly could. Putting out the fires? Beyond his means. Running from the fire? Not forever—these fires were fierce and only getting faster.
Flight. That's all he could think of. He'd lost his forest but there was so much world for him to inhabit. And as he pressed onward, panicked and fatigued, he did his best to convince himself of that. The world is large. It can't all burn. There was no possible way. No way at all. But the doubts lingered. And sparks of embers danced in his peripheral vision, taunting him, threatening him.
And his uncertainties only flared when he'd at last reached the city: a tremendous blaze had taken over, and the backdrop of rejoicing flamarins and panicked humans told him all he needed to know. The buildings, the power lines, the cars and flowerbeds and store signs were burning. In the distance, the flames crept up the many floors of Falln's own skyscraper, its glass melting within the heat and transforming the building into a burning, black tower: a scene of destruction through and through—and Heaven to the tribe.
Though in the midst of raging incineration, a curious sight caught Falln's eye.
While the various metals and cloths and glassworks were melted down in various ways, the vast majority of the city's masonry remained undamaged, wholly intact.
The flames licked the stones, kissed the stones, loved the stones. It had to be love because the singed stones never crumbled or cracked or broke beyond repair.
The walls could handle the burn. Both stone and flame could exist together. Trees couldn't survive. But rocks were forever.
Falln curled his tail around a broken piece of brick and picked he up. He squeezed hard. He slammed it against the ground. He tried to tear it open with his hands. He then attempted peeling it like a banana. But its constitution remained intact, impenetrable. Whatever secrets the stone contained, couldn't be razed or dissolved or otherwise melted. Yes! Falln thought, There's hope!
And then he left the city—too chaotic, too risky. His "The Floor Is" game was rendered obsolete by his climbing, swinging, torch-wielding brethren. The entire settlement was a risk, a hot zone, a chaotic and unpredictable death waiting to happen.
Falln took off along the river which, thankfully, was untouched by the blaze. He slept on the ground for once, cooled by the damp soil on the bank. He camped out there for a week, watching the forest lose height with each passing day. After the week, the forest was done, purely flattened and black. A crispy landscape, dead but beautiful, its smokiness filling Falln's soul with the memory of the greatest blaze ever. He hated that it costed him his home but at least he had his life—and at least he had a vision for his new life, his durable, promising future. Alright, let's find these idiots.
He crawled along the bank, seeking out his siblings, the precious stone in tow.
*
A month later: The City of Flames was mostly restored. Gosh, the humans are fast. Falln was impressed at the human ability to construct shelter, to turn the world's resources into forms that served them and them alone.
And now the flamarins benefited, too.
Falln's assistance was noticed by the fire rescue people, so when he arrived back to the city he was immediately recognized. Some firefighters knew him as a brother because they had a sense for strong-spirited risk-takers, another kind of clan that Falln never expected to find himself in. But the locals mostly noticed Falln by his hard-hat—he'd kept it on during the week-long inferno. He'd used it to collect insects and berries. He scooped river water in it. And he wore it for its intended purpose as he traveled beneath, crinkled, hell-blasted trees.
As soon as Falln approached a firetruck, the pair of gruff men inside flagged him down. "Brother! You survived!"
Falln didn't really want to greet him them with the unintelligible oo-oo-ah-ah jabber. He was a monkey, of course, but in this situation it somehow felt unbecoming. He tipped his hard-hat to the men and they smiled.
"So polite!" One man said. "Cigar?"
Falln waved his hand to say No—but his clansman behind him held out their open palms. The oo-oo-ah-ah's were significant and shameless. The fireman went around to each monkey, handing out cigars, while the second firefighter followed-up with a lighter.
They all stood around, smoking, reminiscing—meaning the humans talked while Falln nodded.
"I see you have no place else, huh?" One man sadly said.
A nod, but expressive, a bit of soap-opera sadness that Falln saw on TV once.
"We're doing our own rebuilding, too."
Falln looked the man in the eyes, smiled, and with his tail he lifted up the rock. The tribe—while puffing away at their cigars—also lifted up their tail-gripped rocks. And now their monkey vocalizations were calmer, explanatory, and this time it was the firemen who were nodding. There was a language barrier, yes, but shelter was something all animals understood.
Fast-forward an entire month: the City of Flames was restored with the addition of a Flamarin reserve. At the entrance was a stone-etched obelisk labelled, MONKÉ PARK. Inside, the tribe lived their best, fire-worshipping lives as the territory was completely made of stone. Every other day or so, a huge van would come deliver more monkey-friendly masonry, a wide array of rock-sculpted trees and jungle gyms and torches. For nighttime, they were provided cement domes with in-ground fire pits.
For Falln, they even provided him a throne. He never sat in it, though, as lording over other beings didn't sit right with him. He instead encouraged his siblings to store the fire-starting implements in the empty seat, an altar to their god.
Besides, his real gift had nothing to do with flame.
Way in the back of the Monké Park was a cinderblock cave, tunnel-like and dark. He'd go inside for restful isolation after a long day of making sure their home was truly fireproof—Menace-proof actually. There were sounds, drip-drip, drip-drip, accompanied by a manufactured mist machine that spread dampness all over. This building contained the only pieces of technology in the entire reserve.
And the star feature(?): a state-of-the-art rain wall with a projected forest and never-ending deluge.
Falln hadn't asked for this but there were apparently many humans who remembered the days of the Raining Forest. On top of being inventive, destructive, and unpredictable, the humans were also long-lived, casually and frivolously ancient.
He'd stay there for hours, sleeping in his chilly refuge. For the first time in his life, he had access to the sensation of coolness, to a frosty and soothing tranquility. And he had access to the wall, its stunning visuals, its convincing audio, and the hidden feature the human who installed it bragged about. Touch it, my friend. Don't be afraid! It's truly amazing, the things we engineers can do.
Falln remembered back to when he first tried it out. He closed his eyes, which made the rain hit louder, vigorous pitter-patters consuming his mind. He thought about the raining monkeys, the unsuspecting and peace-filled ancestors. What a beautiful life they must've had—to not try so hard, to be in the essence of rain, to be a monkey and nothing more. And that was the mindset Falln adopted in that moment, of forgetting everything and of knowing very little.
He reached out his hand, slowly, slowly...
And when he at last touched the wall, his soul felt it as a waterfall.