The Swallowed Flame

Filed by Jimmy. PHASE 2—flex slot, drop in any light week.

Brief one, from the early experimental period.

I had acquired a lighter. (“Acquired” is doing some work in that sentence.) And I had observed that adults smoked, and that the world was full of hollow-stemmed grass, and a hypothesis formed the way they do.

I lit a blade. I pulled.

The result was a burned throat and a wave of pure scientific terror, because the flame had visibly vanished and I could feel heat going down, and I spent the next considerable stretch of time deeply concerned that I had swallowed the flame and was now carrying a small fire internally, like a stove.

I did not report the incident. I monitored myself for smoke.

Lesson logged: Some experiments fail in ways the experimenter is not equipped to interpret. Log it anyway. Fifty years later, it’s the funny kind of data.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy