Shoes burn for a long time. There is a kind of patience in it, quiet and strange. Maybe different kinds of shoes burn at different rates. This particular pair—suede-esque ankle boots with rubber soles, zippers, and man-made fabric interiors—took three hours to burn. I wore them hard for a year. They trudged through mud, carried me in and out of trouble, and by the time I finally set them on fire, I knew they weren’t real suede. Real suede is too temperamental. These were survivors. Watching them burn carried a small ache of sadness, but nowhere near the same strength as the fear of returning to that cold place, that confinement I was desperate never to see again.

I hadn’t planned it as a ritual at first, but it became one. The old inmate lore whispered warnings in my head: finish every book you start in jail or you’ll have to come back to finish it there; never tag your name on the walls or you’ll return; burn everything you wore when you went in, or else you’ll be back to wear it again. When I read those things almost a year after release, my stomach dropped. I still had the outfit. So I burned it. All of it. Even the underwear and socks I bought at the commissary. The only thing I kept was the hair pick, and I wonder if that’s a mistake.

The spot where I burned the shoes wasn’t random. It was a place I’d crossed thousands of times, the easiest path from the driveway to the back fields of my childhood home. For years, I had run back and forth across it daily, and even now, living there again, I still do. Time has worn away the gravel; truck tires and the Jeep have left deep ruts that fill with water after heavy rain. In spring and summer, those ruts become playgrounds for frogs. When I walk through with my rubber rain boots, I feel like royalty, saluted by arches of jumping frogs as they splash into the water, swan-diving like tiny Olympians. On the night of the burning, though, it was January. No frogs, no cicadas. Just cold mud, wet enough to reassure me I wouldn’t set the brush on fire.

To my left curved an old rock wall, only two stones high, circling what was once a garden. A propane tank sat at the back, and in the middle, a flat rock I used to sit on as a child. A walnut tree stood closest to me, and opposite it, one of my favorites: an old oak. It had been struck by lightning but still grew stubbornly, even swallowing the chain someone had once wrapped around its branch. I’ve always loved stubborn trees. It seemed fitting that this one, adorned with its permanent chain, stood beside the pile of possessions I’d carried from confinement.

The sounds that night were few but sharp. Wind whispered through the branches, nudging the smoke into a dance. Now and then, a dog barked in the distance. And faintly, beyond the trees, the interstate hummed. Sometimes, from the wild animal park across the highway, a lion’s roar carried across Stanton. I’ve always thought it peculiar and wonderful: most people in Missouri get woken up by an alarm clock. Some by a rooster. I get an African lion. It’s a strange reminder of resilience, that something unexpected can survive in an unlikely place.

I had placed everything into a cardboard box and, after setting it on the muddy ground, christened it with a generous squeeze of lighter fluid. I’d bought matches just for this. I pinched two between my index finger and thumb and ran them against the strip on the box; the sharp smell of sulfur cut into my nostrils and pulled up every memory where matches were required. I glanced at the box, the heap of the only worldly possessions that came with me when I exited jail. The heat from the matches started to tease the skin of my fingers, so I dropped them, unceremoniously, into the middle of the pile. The flame spread quickly. I stepped back.

The fire became a performance. Tube socks with gray soles went first, curling in on themselves. A cream maxi dress with faint menstrual stains flared quickly, as if flames devour blood with eagerness. Fire is a noisy eater. Pops, cracks, chewing sounds…all mouth sounds I’d normally hate from a person, but didn’t mind from the flames. The T-shirts went next. I’m fairly certain they were 100% cotton. Then the underwear: two pairs of white Hanes cotton, size 6, and one brown pair, not brown like the color of earth: rich and warm and alive. This was an institutional brown, cold, and ugly, the color that calls to mind the digested material the body expels. All three pairs went up in smoke—pun intended. Two sports bras sputtered, their elastic bands resisting before snapping apart. A handmade hair tie, a gift from a fellow inmate, went reluctantly. And my favorite gray tank top, found by accident in an Airbnb dryer, fit me so perfectly it once felt like fate. But it too had to go. I mourned it the most. 

The fire ate fast, greedy. And I watched.

I stood still. The smoke danced in circles, like it always does. People joke that it finds you no matter where you sit around a fire. I stayed still anyway. I told myself the smoke stinging my eyes was part of it, some kind of penance, perhaps, or maybe a way to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. My hands were clasped. I tried to remember what I’d been reading about Islam and prayers. Would a prayer now count? I don’t think so. Still, I murmured something close to the prayers I say five times a day. I stayed rooted even as the mud soaked my cheap Walmart sneakers. Hours passed. I breathed, maybe. I must have. But I didn’t move.

I stood as still as the walnut tree to my left and the oak tree to my right. But my mind was busy jumping from one thing to the next. I pondered how I arrived at this point. The fight that started it. Truthfully, all of the fighting resurfaced in my memory. I mourned the things I lost. The embarrassment. The shame. The fierce determination I now possessed to claw my way back out of despair. The thankfulness I had for my parents. I thought about it all. 

The fire dwindled. Cardboard crumbled to ash. Fabrics turned to smoke. Only the boots remained, defiant. They amazed me. Everything else was gone, and still those suede-ish, zipper-armed, rubber-soled ankle boots held on. Leather, or faux leather, whatever they were, doesn’t go easily. They smoldered, folded, spat back, and finally gave. When they did, the sound was small, almost polite, like a final surrender, until nothing was left but blackened husks. I watched them go, every second of it.

When there was only a small pile of ash left, I listened to my heartbeat. It was calm and steady. I didn’t feel sad or bothered. Maybe I felt relief. I still felt fear for the outcome awaiting me at the end of this seemingly endless legal battle. But in that moment, only calm.

I thought of the black hair pick in my top dresser drawer. It stayed in my mind as I nudged the ashes with my toe to make sure the fire was out. It stayed in my mind as I turned to go inside. When I reached for the doorknob and turned it, I thought to myself, I wonder how long a plastic hair pick will take to burn…