So, when the theme from the latest  Thursday_Prompt was 'Expansive Imprint'... yeah, there was no way I wasn't going there. The basic idea came to me almost immediately, but sadly I've been having a lot of crap going on that made writing difficult. (See also the fact that this is the first story I've posted since before Christmas.) I did at least manage to get it done before the next prompt was released, if not by much.

Some of the phrasing is a little awkward, partly because I was rushed (pretty much all of the writing was within the last 24 hours), and partly because I decided partway through to do something interesting with the viewpoint character. I'd be interested in seeing how obvious it is what I did that made things complicated to write.

And yes, underground fires can burn for a long time... while the Centralia fire that's been going since the 1960s is one of the more famous ones, there's the Burning Mountain in Australia that's had a coal seam fire going for something like 6000 years. Once fires get going along coal seams, they're almost impossible to put out unless you can somehow get it all at once. And in this case I was thinking of the sort of terrain where I grew up in central British Columbia, where there are hundreds of little valleys between mountains, and lots of broken coal seams. Indeed, there's a town called Elkford in the East Kootenay which has had a coal seam fire burning for decades.