The Flame

The Flame

         Once upon a time there was a girl who hated writing. She would write every day, and every day she got more and more bitter, angry, and beautiful. It was a curious thing to see for those around her: this young woman scribbling away furiously on everything around her, anything her pen would make a mark on. It had begun to shape her: her eyes grew quicker, lighter, full of life, her lips quirked and drooped into strange shapes, and her body grew angular as the stories inside consumed her, eating away at her flesh. No matter how much she wrote or what she wrote about, she could never bring the stories to life. They were words on paper, and she couldn’t grip them, make them images, make them mean something.

         One day, on her twenty-first birthday, she became so lovely and so full of the energy, so overflowing with other lives and other worlds, that she actually began to glow. She looked down at her pale glowing skin and could feel ideas seeping out of her pores, see the little blond hair on her arms stand up with the force of it. The ideas were leaving her: floating off into the air, the light inside escaping from the tiny holes of her, radiating.

         That day she stopped writing. In a glowing rage she gathered together everything she had written her whole life. All the scraps of parchment, the pages and pages of loose-leaf, the box tops, and journals, and leafs, and pieces of edible paper made out of potato starch, and computer paper, and backs of old photographs, and post-its, and posters, and newspapers and wrappers. She gathered them all up in her back yard and she lit them up with flint from her junk drawer. Flint she’d found hiking with her father when she was little.

         She thought about the flint: about finding things in the woods, and trees that stood taller than houses, and people that drifted away, and all the people from all the ages that stood under those trees and the deaths they died and the stories they could tell. She thought of all this and her skin glowed even brighter, the little blond hairs on her arms stood even taller, and she could see the stories evaporating off of her.

         She bent over the heaps in her thin white dress and struck the flint together so violently it sparked. Her eyes lit. Her plush lips pulled back in a dazzling grin as she struck the sparks, as she blew the sparks into flames, and as the flames began to roar.
         Hundreds of eyes looked back at her from the fire, Paul, Elsia, Papa, Sir Trunbury; houses were engulfed, villages burned, worlds collapsed, thousands upon thousands of little black letters turning to ash. None of them were his words, but in the flames, she could finally see them as images, finally feel them live as they died.

         She danced around the flames in her thin flowing dress, graceful and lovely, her pure white glow blending and mixing with the rich reds, oranges, and yellows. Her eyes lit up, her lithe limbs snapped and flowed, and she danced and glowed. Leaping, twisting, flashing, she danced, growing brighter and brighter.

         She laughed at the stars, she laughed at the flames, she laughed at the people inside it, the houses, the worlds. The wood smoke smelt like campfires, like stories that lived. Her family watched on, their beautiful daughter.

         Sometimes she seemed to fly up, like she’d never come down, like she’d be sucked up into the stars, but then she’d crash down in a flurry of white, like a crystal vase dropping, only to be shattered into a million pieces as she began her dance again. Her years of work burned, and she moved faster and faster, her limbs seeming separate from her body: a perfect hand fluttered there, a shapely foot leaped across the flames. Her hair moved like a thing possessed, all gold and glowing flames.

         And sparks flew out from the fire and made the family stand back, but still they watched. There was a cool breeze and they huddled together.

         Their daughter whirled like a top does, slower and slower, friction finally catching up. Her dress began to cling to her. Her hair began to lay flat. The fire caught a low branch on the tree. It lit.

         Her smile faded, she dropped to the ground, her eyes closed, images fading, a scruff beard and a green tent.

         Her stepfather dragged her away.

         The tree burned like a torch.

         Someone called the fire department, and she opened her eyes. She began to cry.

         She looked at the fire; there were ashes on her dress.

         She blinked, wiped away a stray tear, then slipped back into the house and began writing.