enwruble

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Abraham Lincoln

Fire. Fire was a drug to Mel, since the day she had been born. Intoxicating and so beautiful, the strands of orange, yellow and red licking the sky as it burned whatever it had found it’s home on. The heat, searing, painful, deadly, lovely. Another thing she absolutely adored. Whenever she saw a fire, big or small, she would always try to touch it before her parents snagged her away by her shoulders and scolded her for being so close to something dangerous. When she was six, she would go downstairs in the middle of the night and find matches in one of the kitchen drawers. She was just barely tall enough to reach the and they were stuck in the back of the drawer. She would light one and gawk at the dancing flame on the end of the small wooden stick.

She would touch it, resulting in a burn on her finger. At the end of one month, she will have gone to the hospital twice to get her burns looked at. After that month the matches were hidden on a higher shelf, where Mel would be unable to get to them. After finding this she was disappointed, but still persisted in trying to get it. Her parents reassembled a crib, larger this time, and she had to sleep in that to avoid sneaking down to the kitchen and falling off of the counter while attempting to get the matches from a tall shelf.

Mel was annoyed, but still persisted on trying to escape. She failed every time, but attempted for two more years to get to those matches. She was so close one night to escaping the crib, which had grown larger from her parents buying new ones as she got older, but she did not prevail. She only ended up falling back onto her mattress, defeated. She sighed, tucked herself underneath her blankets and began to dream about fire. The dream fire never really seemed to live up to the real thing.

One night she was dressed up in some pretty party dress. She was going to a special event at her parents’ work, and she had to attend. The roads were slippery that night, due to heavy rain, and as luck would have it they were driving along a highway. Mostly, all they could hear was the loud sssssshhhhhh of the rain on the road and car window, but as they continued on to being closer to their destination they heard something else. A loud engine, gunning down the highway, drunken laughter and a bottle smashing. Before they could pull over to call the police on a drunk driver incident they were smashed directly in the front of their vechicle, the collision crumpling the front of their small, fancy car and causing the engine to explode, gasoline leaking onto the pavement. That ignited quickly, the rain unable to subdue it.

Miraculously, Mel was thrown far from the explosion, a decent distance from the now large flames. The scent of burning flesh, hair and gasoline wafted through the air and hit Mel in the face like a solid wall, and it sparked something in her. There was fire, and lots of it. She stood up, shakily and heavily walked over to the burning accident zone. She touched the flames. When her parents, dead and burning, did not tell her to stop, she allowed herself to be fully engulfed by the flames. As she died she heard someone screaming, as if sad, but there was no one else nearby that cared about her.

She felt her flesh burn and bubble and she let herself slip into darkness.

Mel woke up screaming. She was two years old, but she wasn’t Mel – Not the old one, anyhow. She had not been allowed to stay up and watch the campfire. It was getting late and she kept getting too close to the flames. Her round, freckled face was red and streaked with tears as she was carried up to her room as she kicked, and screamed and stuggled to get out of her father’s grip. He kept a hand around her back and one firmly placed on her head so she didn’t shake it too much. He was flattening her curly blonde hair that barely reached her slightly pointy ears. He placed her down in her crib and told her if she didn’t calm down she would never be allowed to watch a fire ever again.

She slept peacefully that night.

Mel began to grow up, visiting various counsellors for her strange addiction to seeing fire in whatever way she could. She passed through many years, she moved once, when she was eight, and settled in quickly. She grew up to be twelve, thirteen.

Thirteen. Thirteen years of age when her parents accidentally left out the lighter. Mel was home alone that night, and she went to go get a slice of pizza from the refridgerator. She noticed the lighter on the counter. She got her pizza, ate it, then grabbed the lighter. She lifted it, flicking it on. She brought it close to her face, and the flame licked her forehead. Startled, she dropped the lighter and the flame began to burn the floor. It spread slowly and the increasing heat began to make Mel sweat. She did not move. It began to touch her face, caressing it carefully. It burned her hair, causing it to fall off and turn to ash. She breathed in the smoke now floating in the air, letting it wreck her lungs.

The back door was open. Strangely, because Mel had made sure to close and lock the door. She looked at the flame again and ran out the door. She counged, harder than she ever had before and kept coughing. The forest her farmland house backed up onto was dark, inviting. The fire was growing rapidly now, the dry summer helping it expand and decimate the surrounding land. It quickly caught up to Mel and she ran into the woods, the fire chasing her into the woods. The dry leaves went up and burned hot, and Mel finally gave up. She once again succumbed to the flame, watching it engulf her completely. She felt her flesh burning, her skin falling away from her bones.

She woke up.