Yesterday
Fire.
Everything was fire.
Searing heat, the putrid scent of burning flesh—my clothes, my skin, my hair.
The fire roared, a sound like screaming. Or maybe that was the sound of people. Or me.
Smoke pillared around me, thick rivers of it, and I didn’t dare take a breath.
My eyes closed, I still saw a kaleidoscope of color, red upon red. So many variations, so much light, a continuous starburst.
There was pain, pain beyond pain, a sensation so intense it morphed into annihilation. It climbed in degrees, hitting a ceiling I’d never experienced, only to break through to higher and higher levels of agony. I was ripped bare, as if my skin was flayed in strips, cooked alive, and I was reduced to sheer essence. Then, miraculously, it stopped, and I knew from some deep part of my brain that I’d suffered horrific burns. Nerve damage. My body was breaking and I had blessedly become numb.
I can’t say if I crawled or ran or did some combination of the two, but I moved. Nothing else existed. Only escape. Only the will to live. Only the ferocious need to get away. I knew the layout of the school by heart, every window, every door, and with the fire swirling overhead, around me, engulfing the school, I trailed through a maze of corners and hallways until I found an exit.
It was the window Dirk had shattered earlier. I climbed out, my hands gripping the sill, shredding against the shards of glass and I felt nothing.
Once outside, I stumbled a few steps in the soothing moisture of the humid island air. I cleansed myself there, rolling in the mud, anything to cool myself down. The small drops of dew were a balm. Maybe I imagined it, but my skin literally sizzled against the water.
My arms and hands were covered in patches of black and molten red, my fingernails seemingly melted off, and where there remained evidence of skin, fat blisters had cropped up, a kind of horrible acne. I fought the urge to pop them. Pieces of my clothes had meshed into my skin—neither one nor the other, but a mutation of both. The very air against me burned.
I lay shriveled, charred, some burned piece of humanity, and I laughed. It was so insane. I laughed and my throat hurt, my lungs hurt and still I laughed.
Behind me, the school was ablaze, wisps of fire leaping from the tops of the building. To me, it looked like people dancing, their arms in the air, reaching for the stars. Smoke poured into the sky, and the sounds of metal wrenched, soon to bend and eventually break.
I was witnessing the destruction of my town.
There were no screams. No other survivors. Anyone left inside had been trapped. Those who had perished in the hallway were the lucky ones.
The fire rose and embers rained on nearby buildings. The embers found dry patches on roofs, and one by one, first the post office, then the grocery store and then all down the line, Main Street was aflame.
I hate to admit, but it was beautiful. A light show of epic proportions, nature’s wrath on display, bigger and better than any 4th of July fireworks show.
Hypnotic. Mesmerizing.
My eyes couldn’t take it all in. The flames kept growing, multiplying.
Explosions ripped through the street—gas mains belching fire, like solar flares from the sun, turning night into day.
The gradations and undulating color of it all, I could’ve laid there and watched forever, caught up in its amber glow. But I knew if I stayed, I would never get up again. I forced myself to move, one limb at a time, commanding my body, watching my skin splinter across the char, my blood flowing like lava against dark rocks. One step, then another.
I staggered toward the dock, my body a great weight I had to carry.
I thought I’d seen everything on my journey through the streets, but it was nothing to how I felt, alone and raw, stumbling from the fire.
Only outside did I try to understand what had happened.
Did my brother try to kill me or had he just lost his mind?
No, he’d said he was saving us. But from what?
My own brother betrayed me.
Not an adult. A sibling.
My brother, gone, by his own hand. Sitting in the fire, not moving, saying nothing. Allowing himself to burn. How was that even possible? Cowardice or courageousness, I didn’t know.
I would never know. I pictured him giving up, giving in, and maybe I was jealous.
I didn’t feel anything then—neither hate nor compassion. I felt nothing at all.
Now
I have not seen myself in the mirror, but I know when I do, it’ll be Theo that I think of. He may no longer be with me, but he left his mark on me forever. I don’t know if I can forgive him for leaving me.
For scarring me.
Yesterday
Then I saw it. A body. Sprawled on the grass a few feet ahead. Someone had escaped. Someone had made it out alive.
Let it be Theo. Please, let it be Theo.
Maybe he’d crawled away, too. Maybe he really was trying to save us by killing everyone else.
It would prove me wrong. I so badly wanted to be wrong.
But as I approached, it was a man’s body, curled in a fetal position.
My heart dropped, and somehow I felt impossibly worse than I had before.
I imagined I looked as the man did—charcoaled skin, hair singed to baldness, clothes tattered and everything reeking of smoke.
I turned him over, and the night erupted with his screams.
A banshee’s scream.
It was Mr. Scronce.
The thing about fire is that it purifies. It burns away impurities. It reveals the true nature of things. That’s what I thought when I saw Mr. Scronce’s face.
There was bone. The bone usually covered by skin. The window-dressing stretched over all of us that hides who we really are—just bodies. Walking skeletons.
Without skin, there he was, like me, a creature.
I thought in that moment we understood each other, saw each other for the first time. One human being witnessing another and really seeing them and not who they pretended to be. Laid bare.
I didn’t look away, for he and I were the same—pure essences, pre-dating names and identities.
The eye in his socket oscillated toward me and his face was expressionless. No muscles to sneer or smile. He gurgled and I leaned close, placing my ear near the hole where his lips used to be. I heard the faintest gravely rasp, less a word and more a sound, “Why?”
Funny, I’d wanted to ask him the same thing.
His body contorted and yet there was nothing I could do. He was in so much pain. I had nothing to put him out of his misery, no 911 to call, so I simply stayed with him, my burned hand holding his. I said, my voice sounding alien to my own ears, “It’s okay, let go, Mr. Scronce. Just let go.”
A few minutes later, he did just that. His sharp staccato breaths fell silent.
Once again, I thought I must be alive for a reason.
Then I stood and lurched to the dock. I was getting the hell out of there.