'Circuit', by Brian Stephen Ellis

That oil furnace was no end of trouble. It was a huge house we lived in, turn of the century, three floors ten bedrooms three living rooms just on the first floor. Our landlord’s real and actual name was Christ J. Stamatos, Big Chris to those who knew him. In the winter filling that tank cost a grand easy, maybe more, lasted a month, each year we tried to push back when we first turned it on, Adam said real New Englanders didn’t turn their heat on until Thanksgiving, but not all of us had lived off the land in the Vermont woods like he had. So one year the steam pipes in the walls freeze and then we do go to turn the heat on there’s this crackling noise, it was during a show at the house the first night the heat was on, Kennedy is playing guitar kids lounging on the floor lights off singer-songwriter romance dream and then there’s this explosion, trapped steam in frozen pipes and the pipes cracked and burst, punching a hole in the wall of the front room shooting steam in the dark room hippies scattering everywhere, I call Stamatos and he sends one of his cousins huge Greek man right from the discotheque and maybe on ecstasy? He’s real sorry can’t do anything tonight maybe we can all crash in the same room to conserve heat, he’s got some space heaters in the van. 
The oil furnace caught fire the follow spring. It was a weekend, another morning after another show, it didn’t have to be the weekend for there to be shows, we hosted singers and bands and comedians and magicians and puppeteers and performance artists every night of the week, but it was the weekend and the weekend staggered breakfast was happening with groups coming through the kitchen in waves cooking big batches of eggs or potatoes or leeks or oatmeal and I was there not eating and pounding coffee like I do and Adam was cooking and we were arguing about I don’t know what, probably about putting lentils in burritos, I’ve always said the kitchen is like the analog version of the internet. Tim was there in the kitchen too with us, not doing the dishes as usual, and he said hey do you smell smoke, and Adam said yeah and he looked up at the ceiling just above my head, wooden spatula in hand, and there were these streaks of black along the ceiling like still flickers emanating from the top of the basement door, and I don’t know if I said huh that’s weird out loud but that was my vibe and without thinking about it much I opened the basement door.
A wall of thick black smoke came into the room, the smoke was rich and sticky, and Tim shouted fire! and ran past me to wake up the band in the front room and Adam followed him out of the kitchen, Adam went to the base of the main staircase and shouted fire! up the stairs, and then went out to the front porch where everyone else was eating and drinking coffee in the sun to tell them not to go into the house, and what we didn’t know then was that Patricia was asleep in her room on the third floor and no one thought to go up the stairs and check all the bedrooms.
I ran down into the basement, towards the smoke. 
In my life I’ve experienced fight, flight and freeze. I’ve seen guns and I’ve seen knives and felt my body take on a rigidity I could not control. I confronted a stranger once, who I came upon beating someone else up in the street. I attacked a man once who threatened a friend of mine while I was drunk outside a poetry reading, but in my drunkenness, it turned out I got the wrong person. I have run, faster than I knew I could, from the police. And none of these moments felt like a decision, none of them felt like me. The best word I can use to describe them is circuit. Or maybe it’s the reverse: the circuit-me is me, and the other one, the decision-maker is the lie. Either way, I am responsible. I’ve punched bullies in the face, and I’ve broken into houses in order to steal, and both memories feel the same. They fill me with a version of shame, a fear I feel towards myself. 
I ran against the current. It wasn’t ordinary smoke, not campfire or cigarette or even barbeque, this was pure oil smoke, Dickensian and heavy. I clomped down the seven wooden steps to the basement. The ceiling down there was thick with a layer of that smoke, and there was the huge old furnace, on the other side of our coin operated washer and dryer, smoke billowing off of its top, a grate in the base burping with flame, it was like an evil refrigerator with its great metal drum on its back. 
To the left of the stairs there was a light switch that cut the electricity to the furnace, the spark that starts the thing going, plenty of times strangers to the house had flicked it off thinking it was the overhead lights, and I flicked the switch and the beast rumbled, whirring down, but that didn’t put out the fire that was already burning inside the thing.
  I moved closer to the furnace, holding my mouth closed and coughing through my nose. High on the furnace was a pipe that led from the burner to the drum, and midway along this pipe was a metal handle with a red rubber coating, a little wax coated tag attached to the handle with a metal clip, and the tag read SHUT OFF VALVE in block red letters, it was a device that was built onto the machine for this exact moment, this exact purpose, and I reached up over the boiling surface of the burning metal furnace and yanked the hinge of the shut off valve. 
The fire went out a second later. The entire event was only a few moments.
Patricia slept through all of it. When she woke up and we told her what happened she was so pissed we had to have two house meetings about it.
Our house didn’t burn down, and that was good. But I was left with that same feeling of embarrassment, this sense of shame. The thing that remains is the knowledge that there is another me, who I do not control, who has the ability to take over my body. There is so much about myself that I will never know.

Brian Stephen Ellis (he/they) is the author of four collections of poetry, and one collection of short fiction, Pretty Much the Last Hardcore Kid in This Town from Alien Buddha Press. They live in Portland Ore. Find them at: https://brianellis.info/.