IKaggen, Matarisvan, Prometheus, and Maui were heroes, tricksters, and fire thieves. Adila has been thinking of fire a lot lately. It’s likely due to the scorching summer in Vancouver, the smoke from the interior forest fires that has shrouded the city, and her recent bout with heat stroke that sent her to the edge of sanity, questioning her existence.

She wondered whether it could be the frenzy her heat stroke put her through. She jolted out of a nap, sweating, heading straight for her freezer for ice to make a freezing cup of water. After 8 cups of water, she immediately stripped all of her clothes, crawling on all fours to her bathtub, for the refuge of a cold shower. She passed out in her tub, but thankfully, her sister Anika found her and got her to an emergency room.

A heat stroke puts your body through a lot. It’s not just the pounding headache, your heart beating out of your chest, the vomiting or the nausea, it’s the delirium that will shake you. It’s the delirium that starts with an imaginary world if you’re napping, but turns into a nightmare world between life and death. It also doesn’t help that you’re stoned out of your mind from your favorite sativa strain.

The doctors said she was close to death. Fortunate that her sister found her when she did. But the feeling of delirium while being high as a kite brought her images she still can’t shake off. She remembers the last few minutes before she passed out in her tub. Vomiting out the chewed remnants of a Five Guys Little Bacon Cheeseburger.

She remembered the feeling of her body being a heat sponge, absorbing all the heat trapped in her tiny studio apartment. She became the furnace, the heat, the reason people all across this city, known for its rain, are miserable, sticky, and in need of constant hydration.

She believed she was the heat, and as the heat, she felt everything ancient about it, and the primal knowledge that came with it. She had flashbacks of her mom telling her not to play with fire in Gujarati. She imagined hundreds of sparks that start fires, burning through the Canadian prairies.

She felt the source of its power, its ability to give life and take it away, provoking thought and creating civilizations. She even remembered a voice that sounded like Te Fiti from Disney’s Moana, but it could have also seeped into her trance-like state because she had watched Moana two days ago.

Whoever she was talking to wanted her to feel the fury of fire. This heightened her frenzied state, and she began seeing images of structures burned down to a crisp and thick black smoke racing to blanket everything in its path. She remembered Lytton, a town burned down two years ago, but this was not a town; it was buildings from cities, crumbling from flames, hearing screams of a thousand, not hundreds, maybe a million.

Once she was back to her normal state of mind in the hospital, she still couldn’t shake off the images of fiery destruction and her out-of-body state that left her with a profound feeling of macabre and renewal.

“Was this what confronting your shadow is like?” Adila wondered. It was a fiery shadow side. One that reminded her of all the fire thieves she read about when she had an ancient mythology obsession during her late teenage years. All those stories seemed closer to her after she woke up from her stroke.

They were close to her, not as an obsession but as a curiosity. The thieves who brought warmth and knowledge to humankind were on her mind. It was hard to shake them off. She could, in the blink of an eye, see Prometheus’ liver being eaten out by the eagle assigned to torment him for eternity. Will these images torment her for the rest of her life, she wondered.

The answer, she soon found out, was no. She came to the thought that maybe she was a fire thief as well, for having survived her heat stroke and carrying a sort of knowledge given to her in her state of clawing and squirming for breaths of life. Or maybe it was the life-altering shake-up she needed to feel gratitude for the very boring life she leads.

Yes, in the end, she would return to her Monday to Friday at the airport, managing people’s vacation experiences, resolving their issues, and being as welcoming and detailed as possible. However, she had a few more days of sick leave from her soul-shaking experience.

Her body is still weakened from her ordeal, but her mind and emotions are still throbbing from the scope of horror and elation given to her by the struggle of life and death. She wanted to feel like the fire thieves exulted through stories, myth, and ritual.

Before returning to her repetitive life routines on earth, she wanted to feel and dream her spiritual shakeup in a much more manageable state. It was the first time she actually made great use of downtime. She didn’t worry about work and the fact that she would have to deal with people who would never be happy.

She fired up her second-hand Cleveland Iron Works Wood Stove, the only reliable heat she had in her apartment, imagining herself in a mud-made village thousands of years ago, somewhere in the Indus River Valley, when existence may have required gathering around a fire and spewing stories or expressions.

Imagination was given back to her. A forgotten tool she once found solace in. She could now see and feel IKaggen, the folk hero of the San People, shape-shifting into an elland, bull, snake, and the form he stole fire with, the praying mantis.

He tricked an ostrich with a weakness for plums, stealing some fire from its wing and gifting it to the San People. Adila never knew why it was an ostrich that kept fire, but as a kid, she never questioned the ostrich as the keeper of fire.

She also never questioned the heavenly tale of Matarisvan, the Hindu deity, messenger of the sun deity Surya, bringer of fire to humans. This gift sparked fire rituals to return to purity and mediate a channel between humans and the divine. Divine, a feeling Adila still had after her ordeal.

At the back of her mind, she knows the smoking of weed didn’t help her struggle with life and death, but for now, she wants to hold on to her perceived divinity and imagination. Like the Polynesian hero Maui, she wanted to be curious and imaginative again.

Maui wanted to know where fire came from, angering Mahuika, the goddess of fire, who sent fire's fury to destroy Maui after he had continually extinguished her fingernails of fire that were presented to him.

Adila did not venture into the cave of a burning mountain at the ends of the earth to know the riddle of fire. She did not have to call upon Tawhirimatea, the god of weather, to put out Mahuika’s fires with rain or bring back the knowledge of how to create fire to his people so they didn’t have to rely on the gods.

No. She only ventured into the deep, dark corners of her mind. Corners you will only get to visit when you’re close to death. Where she stole back her childhood ability to create. The creation of fire within her whenever her reality dampens her spirit.

She wasn’t a titan like Prometheus, a hero like Maui, a shape-shifting trickster like IKaggen, or a fire deity like Matarisvan. But she’d like to believe that, like them, she is a fire thief, and that she also brought knowledge after a fiery ordeal.

Knowledge filled with renewed imagination, hope, and ritual. Ritual to remind her that all she needs to do to blunt monotony is channel another realm filled with stories of noble thievery, gods, heroes, eternal damnation, and great escapes. From now on, she will always escape. She’ll always stop time. She’ll always bring back curiosity and knowledge of the beyond. She’ll learn caution, expansion, and respect because when it comes to fire, it will burn whether it brings life or death.

The forests of the interior will continue to burn every summer, painting Vancouver skies fiery red hues. She hopes she’ll never have to plan a fire escape in this world. But for now, she’ll continue her escapades as a fire thief in imaginary worlds. An airport guest service officer in the realm of humans, and a fire thief in the realm of titans, gods, heroes, and shape shifters.