Devon, being on fire, had found it increasingly hard to do normal things.  Except for showering, which he had taken to doing obsessively using cold water, routine things had become painfully complex.  When brushing his teeth he would grit and scream through his teeth as foamy toothpaste collected between his parted lips.  If the foam grew too heavy it would fall in glops onto his chin or shirt.  Even something as simple as scratching an itch was a difficulty.  While he was physically capable of doing it, the burning at the spot of the itch would intensify as he scratched it.  Most days he called out from work.  In a half-hearted attempt to stay employed, if he wasn't too bothered on a particular morning, he would make it to the office.  But odds were that by the middle of the day he'd make an excuse to go home.  It's not like he could just say to his boss, "I'm sorry Joe, but being engulfed in flames is killing me.  I really need to go jump in a pool or something."

      But Devon wasn't crazy.  Not exactly.  Yes, he had this insane sensation that he was always on fire.  But he knew he wasn't.  He couldn't even see the flames that he so intensley felt cooking his skin.  He likened it to when he was a kid and his mother drove him to school each morning.  As an unintentional routine the last thing his mom would say as she locked the front door was, "I feel like I'm forgetting something."  She rarely was.  It didn't mean she didn't honestly think she was, but she just probably wasn't.  Devon could, however, recall one or two times that his mother did legitimately forget something.  It made him nervous.  What if one day he woke up and he really was on fire?  He remembered reading in a new age book about thoughts and perceptions being able to manifest themselves physically, especially thoughts and perceptions that seemed a little too over the top for what the book termed blind reality.  At the time he dismissed it as a bunch of hooey.  But standing naked in his bathroom, patting himself dry with a towel (he had found that the patting method was the least irritating to his burning flesh), he began to wonder what if?