The house was made of wood. Fires, along with floods and cyclones, made up the pantheon of Creole horrors. Ma Ninotte, who cooked in the apartment over a gas burner, performed a precautionary ceremony before lighting it. She began by silently moving the children aside. Slowly and majestically, she pumped the fuel, then, her eyes sharpened, wielding a tiny needle, she unclogged the opening through which the flame would be fed. After a circular glance around, she proceeded to the lighting stage. And therein lay the mystery. For a split second the world was suspended on the edge of an intersection where everything was possible, especially disaster. Every living being prepared to make a run for it. Many were the cases of children singed bare, of shacks that disappeared in the gasp of flame, of lamps explosive as chabines.

(...)

It was underneath the stairs that he explored the hazy reality of a flame: an orange impatience filled with transparencies and deep reds, arising from nothing, feeding on the wood of the match and suffocating on its own vitality. To contemplate a spark cast him into the antiquity of a preworld, into a pit of memory suddenly awakened to the most muffled fears. The little boy discovered anxieties within himself existing since time immemorial. He felt them flicker and grow silent to the sacred rhythm of the diminishing fire. Each match, aside from its mystery, brought him a rush of fulfillment, which he speedily sought in the next one. The box was gone in a snap, unless, before his last match, his dreamy stupor had permitted the fire to lick his finger. Then he dropped everything, horrified, his imagination torched, fleeing from the box as if from some hole into hell.

Excerpt from "Childhood," Patrick Chamoiseau, 1990.
Translated from the French by Carol Volk.