We are made out of our stories. We are a collection of creation myths. But this one was never really mine.
I wake up to the smell of smoke. I will never wake up to anything else. The world is on fire and I am on fire, and we are all burning.
Your house is surrounded by fire trucks, police cars, the brittle hedges belted by flapping yellow tape. Olympic Road is a parade of onlookers and paparazzi. The deer and raccoons are in hiding.
I watch the smoke rise from your house to join the smoke that has made its way down the mountains. I wonder about the glass walls. Are they still standing? Are they melting? Are they charring black? How does glass burn?
That house was never your home. It was a glass box meant to keep the shame in and the smoke out, but it failed at its job.
I float above it all. I inspect the pool. The water is still clear. You are not floating, alive or dead.
No one knows where you and Ash or Tami are. But I know. I know everything. I am omniscient.
I am the author of all these stories.
The story is over. The fire has done its damage. It has burned itself out.
In some parallel universe, there is such a thing as happily ever after. In a place where we have evolved beyond human, there is such a thing as getting what you want and having it be enough.
Maybe all of Daddy’s Buddhist philosophy is wrong. Maybe the goal is not to end the clinging and yearning. Maybe it’s exactly those things that tell us we’re alive. Maybe we’re nothing without our hunger.
All we have now are burned ruins, with glass walls still, miraculously, standing. People have found Ash’s secret deer path; they have made it onto the property; they are hiding in the bushes, getting scratched by the same branches that drew bloody cross-stitch into your skin. People are out on the water, in kayaks, on Jet Skis. They are watching. They are recording. They are waiting for the big reveal, when a firefighter will pull your lifeless, charred body from the wreckage. Your grand finale.
Your mother is in her bathrobe. She has no gin and tonics to share with paparazzi this time. This time, they’re all for herself.
“What am I going to do?” she says. To nobody. To me. “She was everything. God, she could have been something. She could have done so much.”
Everyone assumes that you’re dead. How could you not be? That is how these stories always end.
The smoke says: “You have her money now, don’t you? You’re her next of kin. You’ll be fine.”
This is the woman’s defining moment. This is her origin story. With your death, the royalties from your work would come pouring in. This is when your mother would graduate to become one of the people, like Tami and Ash, who will always be fine.
She blinks. She doesn’t know where my voice is coming from.
The smoke says: “Isn’t this what you wanted? Look around. This is everything you always wanted. This is everything you sold your daughter for.”