The phrase is not neutral diction. Unquenchable fire is Gehenna, verbatim — Matthew 3:12, Mark 9:43, “the fire that never shall be quenched.” It is scripture’s standing image for a punishment that does not end. In “Assumptions,” James Mulhern takes that phrase and hands it to the sun on the water, at the exact moment two women are walking into the sea to be cured. Damnation’s own image is repurposed as the shimmer over a baptism. This is the single boldest move in a story built almost entirely out of such reversals, and it gives the essay collected here its title: fire, in Mulhern’s hands, keeps burning past the moment we expect it to consume something.
The story earns the reversal by working the image for pages before it arrives. It opens with “the red seas of two droopy cheeks” — the Passion and the plague both folded into an old woman’s complexion — and moves through a hedge of gorse, “beautiful… with bright yellow flowers,” the flame-bush of the Irish countryside, concealing not God but a family’s petty cruelties. A minor deity, Lugh, presides over the feast as a storm-god, “turning heat lightening on and off behind a lacey curtain of gray,” a small-scale Sinai staged over a card table. Even the family’s reproduction of a Titian gets folded in: “the sun blazes a fervid yellow… the painting’s most vivid colors are orange and red, shades of fire, flesh and blood.” By the time the sea itself catches fire, the story has spent three separate images teaching the reader to read flame as a register of the sacred rather than a warning.
Then it does the same thing to a body. Peg, anointed with suntanning oil on the beach, “shone like a miniature sun” — the Transfiguration, reduced to a woman greased with Coppertone. The image is a promise, and the story keeps it: on its final page, “the Sun’s great light shines upon and caresses her warm skin,” the capital letter doing exactly the work a pun should do. Sol Iustitiae, the Sun of Righteousness in Malachi, and Son, the Christ who receives her after death, occupy the same four letters. The cure the family drove to the shore to find was never in the water. Her final description — “her countenance reflecting the brightness of a blazing fire” — completes a transposition that began on page one with two red, ordinary cheeks. A face that opened the story as a map of decline closes it as a face that has come down from a mountain.
It is worth noticing that the family’s own surname carries the motif before a single match is struck. Fleming. Flame. Mulhern does not remark on the pun anywhere in the text; he simply lets the reader arrive at it, the way the story wants every reader to arrive at its theology — sideways, through an ordinary noun, never through a raised finger.
The same instinct shows up, in miniature, at the very start of a companion piece. In “Arise and Go Now,” a boy named Aiden notices the paperback his elderly neighbor is reading: “A girl in a red dress stood in front of a grave. The ground was on fire.” It is a throwaway detail on a patio, tea about to be poured — but it is also the whole method in a single sentence. A child registers an image of doom on a cheap book jacket without knowing yet that he is about to deliver, in that same conversation, a small reckoning of his own: a confessed lie, forgiveness withheld and then not withheld. The ground on fire on a paperback cover; the actual ground, a suburban patio with a birdbath and a chipmunk, entirely calm. Mulhern likes to let the apocalypse sit quietly in the wallpaper while the real one happens at the kitchen table.
What holds these instances together is not decoration but argument. Scripture uses fire almost exclusively as a threat: the chaff burned, the unfaithful city, the fire that is not quenched. Mulhern keeps the word and reverses the sentence it is used to finishing. His fire does not consume; it reveals. It is the medium in which a homely, drunk, aging woman becomes, for one paragraph, indistinguishable from a saint coming down from Sinai with her face still shining. That is the argument “unquenchable” is built to make: whatever in these lives looks most like judgment — the failing body, the family’s casual cruelty, the shabby cure that doesn’t come from the place anyone expected — is, examined closely enough and long enough, the exact material glory is made of. The fire does not go out. It only waits to be seen for what it actually was the whole time.