Blueberry Pie

Way out west, the fire burns low. Not like before, when it was a roaring blaze for weeks and weeks. No, not at all. Since then, it has dissipated quite a bit, due to the scarcity of fuel. It seemed to have started on a remote patch of forest, one of those places you might come across out of the blue, where, inexplicably, there are dozens of kitchen appliances, old ones, abandoned and dumped out there in the woods for some reason. That’s where the fire started, in one of those ovens.

Somebody had come by one morning and put in a blueberry pie, turned it up to 400 degrees, set the timer for 45 minutes, and left. Who was it? Nobody knows. An old hermit, perhaps, or a young urbanite out for a hike, with an ultra-sleek Yeti water bottle in one hand and a yet to be baked blueberry pie in the other. Whoever it was, and here’s the weird part, didn’t know the oven existed, had no idea it was going to be there. They just happened to have the pie in one hand when coming down the hill and finding the odd assortment of old kitchen appliances out there in the woods.

“Well, everything happens for a reason”, the mystery person thought, before putting the pie in the oven. Did they wait for it to preheat, or just slide it in at once? No one knows. No one else was there.

An assortment of songbirds, perched on the branches surrounding the clearing, gazed down at the scene, like some scene out of a Franciscan Gospel. There must have been magic in the air because there certainly wasn’t electricity. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PGE) had long ago abandoned the grid, and even back then, before the virus hit, when there was a grid, it didn’t come close to reaching anywhere around here.

However, the oven worked, and the pie started baking, and the forest air was infused with the smell of dough, sugar, the melting berries, the spices. I think a note of ginger was detected, cinnamon, but, thank God, no nutmeg. Anyway, it was all pleasant enough for a while, but then the mood turned. The person, it seems, if there had ever been a person, left after putting the pie in the oven. They just kept walking. So, we know, or at least we think we know, that the person themselves, if there was a person at all, was not the source of the energy that powered the oven., because after they left, the pie kept cooking.

Then, it started to burn, because when you cook something, it has to be heated up for a certain period of time and then that process needs to end. I know this sounds obvious, because it is, but back when they were baking the first pies, this all had to be figured out, the baking time and such. They didn’t even have thermometers, I don’t think, or timers either, so how could they even figure it out at all, could they?

So, the pie burst into flames eventually. As did the oven and the other discarded kitchen appliances, and the trees and plants, and the molds, mosses and fungi, even the rocks and the dirt. It all burned and burned until there was nothing left, and then the fire smoldered for a long while and eventually went out.