The Fire Weeds

Chapter 1

I like watching T.V. even though it kills me. I think T.V. is slowly killing me. It's because I watch shows about suburbs, and housewives who dovetail into trivial but tranquil single story ranch style homes, tucked cozily behind elms and oaks. I look outside and all I see is a cold, harsh light ricocheting off the snow, making my room look cold and empty. Most of these housewives have a 9 to 5 husband, and two rowdy kids bought up on all the right morals. There kitchen isn't brimming with empty paint tubes and vodka bottles and I'm sure there house doesn't smell like old fish and burning wool. I'm almost positive that T.V. is killing me because I get an ache in my stomach and my head starts to throb. It feels like I've swallowed my heart. And no matter how warm we make the house, breaking the thermostat dial and chopping down a forest, I'm always cold. My feet are rough and bitter, my cuticles are always dry and bloodied, and the corners of my mouth are agitated and raw. My annual chaptstick budget is through the roof, and beneath my frosted mirror (still resting on my armoire, because my mom hasn't gotten around to nailing it to the wall in the last sixteen years) is lined with a parade of moisturizing products.

School is not important, because I know It doesn't matter how well I do. I sit and bubble in the A or B, chew down my eraser till it looks like a pink raisin, scratch my head and stare with vacuum eyes at sin and cosin, but it doesn't matter. I feel bound to Alaska by a permafrost ball and chain.  To me, a world outside Alaska is a fantasy world that only exists in 24 inch color, smoldering in the reflection of my window when sleep eludes me, like it often does. My dream is to sleep with warm feet. Then I would finally be at peace. But so what If I'm near the top of my class. When your class in twenty-five, it's not all too impressive.

My mom is a self-proclaimed starving artist and is proud of the fact that we live on welfare. She thinks it's more "authentic." She paints, but never really finishes much of anything. Probably because once you lose your sobriety, it's hard to color with-in the lines. My little sister is a comatose ragdoll. I don't think she was born with a soul because she saunters around all day with a look on her face more barren than the wearisome tundras rolling for miles and miles until they meet the lips of a cold ocean's shore.

The busride home is long and bumpy, I bouces and crash my head on the ceiling and the back of the seat infront of my. I will drown out the noise of elementry school children screaming to one anothers face and focus on the fire weeds whizzing past my face and snow capped pines sternly suffering in dirt. How far down do there roots go, I wonder? A lumberjack can come and cut it down with tug of a kickstarter, and all that's left is saw dust over the weeds and a lousy stump freckled in the dense woods. But the roots are still there. And the tree can grey and die and the roots are still there.

A train of tourists passes us in the other direction. Tourists are the brightest things I have ever seen. There lips are full of color and eyes full of luster. My eyes are weighted with the a dark, starless space.

The train is gone as soon as it came and all I can here is the resonanse of train whistle and wheels winding over tracks and the wind as it blows carelessly over tree stumps, not bothering to hiss like it would through the thick branches of a golden aspen or  a wispy willow alike.