A Fire Hydrant named Bill

Bill was a fire hydrant, a red fire hydrant, the reddest fire hydrant in the universe, so he believed. Whenever there was a fire on his block, the red fire trucks would screech to a stop in front of him on the gray asphalt, black tires leaving smoldering black streaks. The firemen in the yellow boots and hats would leap from the sides of the truck, shouting to one another as they uncoiled their hoses, and one would always take the giant red wrench and undo one of Bill's pentagonal nuts to plug the hose to his raging water supply.

Bill loved to feel the water surging through him into the rubber house, loved knowing that somewhere the power that rushed through him jetted forth to extinguish the hottest of flames. It made Bill feel important, purposeful.

When Bill wasn't attached to the hose, when there wasn't a building engulfed in flames, restlessness twisted through his metal housing, a geyser supressed, and he found himself frustrated with his inability to wrench himself free from the concrete and venture boldly towards a place where he would be needed immediately. Sometimes he wondered what it would feel like just to open himself up and pour into the street to watch his precious poor vanish into the storm drains.

On quite sunny days, he tried to will his pentagonal valve nut to unscrew, if just for a moment to release the pressure that sometimes seemed to threaten to launch him into the sky from below, to erupt in a glistening torrent. Whenever a woman carrying a little leather hand bag and a pooper scooper stopped her dog at the end of its leash, Bill found himself envying the dog's ability to release the fluids welling inside with a simple lift of the leg. The envy grew so great that he no longer disdained being urinated on by canines and wished that he was a canine himself.

One fall morning, as the golden leaves tumbled from the branches of the sparse trees that decorated the street, as the amber light of the late afternoon sun refracted off the broken glass in the gutter by the curb, two teenage boys walked up to Bill in tattered jeans and frayed sneakers. One carried a monkey wrench, the other the hammer, and they proceeded to bang and twist on Bill's pentagonal valve nut.

A strange feeling came over Bill as the threads gave first just a touch and then in swift twists as the teeth of the monkey wrench found their purchase on the ill-fitted angles. The feeling was that Bill didn't want to let loose his flow of water into the streets. There was no fire, not even anything to cool because the summer heats had passed. Helplessness coursed through Bill's metal as the pressure grew more urgent as if sensing its imminent release.

Metal cried Bill's despair as the nut wrenched further down its threads until suddenly bursting off in an eruption of water and sadness. It was a violation, a forced opening without purpose. It wasn't that Bill hadn't sometimes wished the pressure would just release, but that it was the fulfillment of a fantasy he'd never expected to come true. He never imagined he could be left so vulnerable by his dreaming, that their fulfillment could be so empty.

The boys didn't even have the decency to play in the water they set free, but instead they lit cigarettes above the very force meant to extinguish all flames. The boy with the hammer whacked Bill across the top with the blunt end. Bill's tears trickled unobservable into the greater stream, and a great regret filled the hollow where the pressure had been. So much potential given over to so little reason.

It was that night, after the firemen in their yellow boots and hats had wrestled the valve shut again, that Bill first noticed spots of rust on his red paint, but when he cried over it, the tears stayed in the tumolt of swirling force just inside the valve just as invisible as before, just as useless.

The birds sung from the trees. A gentle rain began to fall. A slight gap where the pentagonal valve had not been screwed as tightly as possible because the firemen where irritated to inattention by having their time wasted allowed just a little bit of water in. The threads began to rust, and Bill knew that it was only a matter of time that he would either rust shut forever or become so brittle that he broke open. Either way, his pressure would either be forever or nothing.

That night Bill didn't cry anymore. He didn't cry again. Sadness and tears are irrelevant in a world where the fulfillment of dreams and the empowerment of the self amount to little more than futile expression that is lost because it is delivered too far from where it is needed.