Two billion, five hundred and eighty-seven million, five hundred and ninety-three thousand, six hundred and fifteen seconds after he first saw the light of day, Alvin McKenna died. A flame quenched twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and forty-five seconds before he turned eighty-two.

Fire had played a pivotal role in Alvin’s life. His surname, in its pre-anglicised Gaelic form, translated as ‘Born of Fire’, and then there was the matter of his family’s livelihood. A local steel mill’s furnaces had nourished several generations, putting food on the table since his great-grandfather’s time. But it had also robbed him of what was most dear to him. A night shift, long ago, when Alvin was a much younger man, had seen him called home from work to witness a different blaze. One that engulfed his home and stole both his wife and the infant she was carrying. He never remarried.

Looking back, something Alvin had been doing a lot of recently, he’d recalled round the table tales of his childhood—some he suspected to be taller than the limited stature of most of his relatives—of family members back in Ireland, characters who lived to a ripe old age. From what he remembered, many reached their nineties, but today, there was no one left, of any age, to light a birthday cake’s candles. Besides, he hadn’t the energy, or this late in the day, the appetite to extinguish them. He was tired. Tired of being the last in the line. A widower. Of losing the opportunity at fatherhood, of not hearing a small child greet him as grandad. Exhausted from being the last repository of his family’s memories.

Alvin saw no point in dragging it out any longer. He’d lost the will to live, and with that, took his last breath.