I almost had to put this story aside this morning, listening to it while real-timing my brother-in-law's family having to evacuate from the massive fire at the gates of their home in Napa California. They too have had sheep and other large animals on the property, so the opening imagery of walking about the burnt ruins to bring hard necessary mercy to the animals caught in the wildfire had a lot of sobering real-world mental overlays of actual houses that I've slept in and animals I've touched.
There are some of those days when everything else you hear seems to funnel back into the same thought train. The most recent episode of This American Life, 'Suitable for Children' that I listened to a couple of hours after Bullets includes a memoir piece from a US soldier selected to stand and watch atomic explosions go off in the American Southwest, back in the day. Memories of heat, shock waves, being buried alive in collapsed trenches. And memories of seeing dying, blinded, suffering animals limping, crawling, twitching. Collateral damage of unbottling the Efrit. Both the writing and reading of Bullets had left a strong emotional raw spot for me, of that up close suffering, that was salted anew from the soldier's memoir.
My hearing of the 'cast took away parts of a Promethean allegory about there being both great possible benefits and terrible prices to be paid when doing business with fire. It can enable great steps forward, but you step away from watching it, even for a moment, at great peril. Whether you frame it as laws of Chemistry and Physics, or as the amoral sensibilities of an Elemental entity, fire may have the energy to create, but the base brain-stem desire of fire is to combine fuel, heat, and oxygen to consume, and a Marmite sandwich will not likely be more than a snack to keep that deeper hunger at bay for more than a moment.