An Updated Version - Might Go Through More Changes. :)
An updated version - might go through more changes. :)
burn
It wasn’t about him. It was never about him.
In fact, she never meant for him to have any involvment in the matter, never meant for him to ever know about it. He was never meant to know anything.
It had started long before she ever knew him.
It started when her father had brought out a lighter one evening. He opened his pack of cigarettes and took a long drag, his shoulders relaxing. He sunk into the chair. He no longer cared about hiding his addiction from his daughter, playing with a doll idly on the carpeted floor, six years old and quiet as a mouse.
She was known for being a rather emotionless child. Not once had she laughed or grinned or cried. Her mother fretted about her, but her father didn’t mind. No tantrums was fine with him. The lack of feelings wasn’t a problem with him. She watched with glazed eyes as flaky ashes fell to the carpet. She stared at them as they floated gently to the floor, choking and coughing a bit from the fumes.
She stared even longer at the lighter. How could a fire be hiding in the tiny object?
Late into the night, she snuck into the living room where the lighter was still lying next to the ashtray, and stole it. The next morning, she hid it in her backpack and ran off into the woods to play.
It was yellow and shiny and had a grey top that flipped open. She immediately was fascinated, entranced. Her eyes lit up for the first time. It was so small, but had such power! When she mimicked her father’s motions, it let out a fizzling spark once, twice, thrice, and then burst into a tiny flame.
She knew what she was doing tomorrow. Her eyes burned with the fire she now possessed.
Her mother found the neighbor’s cat later that month, half-decomposed and covered in soot, and she had screamed. It was the kind of scream from a horror movie that got half-hearted reviews, one that never really sent shivers down your spine. It never even got under her skin. She didn’t care that she had been found out. The cat was annoying anyways. Her flames were bright, unstoppable, unable to be extinguished, and she would feed the fire until everything came down around her.
Years later, in her twenties, she met him. Her lover. He was sunny and bright and passionate and emotional and everything she wasn’t. He was her fire. She wanted him, in a way that she hadn’t wanted since she’d laid her eyes on that lighter over a decade ago.
And eventually, she got him. It seemed like she had attached herself to him, in a strange way. She wanted him to be hers, and only hers, but shied away from affection and emotion. She didn’t know how to respond to his hugs, how to smile for him. She didn’t know how to be genuine.
And that meant that she had to avoid him, and that meant that she left the house often, coat over her shoulders and lighter in her pocket.
She didn’t know what she wanted more, him or her fire. And that scared her.
She hadn’t known what it was like to be scared before.
She flicked the lighter, and threw it down on the large pile of dry grass and twigs at her feet. The willow tree sheltered the newborn flame, and it slowly climbed higher and higher. As it began to lick the tree top, she backed away to admire the light in the drizzling rain. Her light.
Her eyes gleamed.
Her fire burned.
Her lover still smiled for her when she came home. He smiled through watery eyes, and she wasn’t sure if it was from her late return or from the water drops tapping out a rhythm on the sidewalk or from the ash that clung to her shoulders, even through the rain. She didn’t know how to understand what he felt on their best days together.
He hugged her close and securely whenever she came home, and she responded the same. Her eyes were as dry as the Sahara, saved from the rain by her umbrella, glazed over with disinterest. Waiting for the next opportunity to buy another lighter. To buy more gasoline. To build a stack of sticks and grass. To relish in the newfound brightness.
To burn.
(She never thought about how he had had an umbrella of his own when she came out to greet him, and how his clothes were dry.)
She would set the world on fire just to watch it go ablaze, and she would smile the same smile she always had before. An answering smile. An answer to the questions, to the counselors at school and the dead cat her mother found covered in charcoal and gasoline, to the classmates who were afraid of her in kindergarten, to the prescriptions in her cabinet, ever fluorescent.
To her lover, whose eyes were still full of water on the sunniest day of the year. She still ignored the drip-dropping of water on her neck whenever they hugged.
(It wasn’t raining.)
(She didn’t know how to explain it, so she avoided it.)
(Sometimes, she thinks that he cries because he doesn’t know what to do anymore.)
He cried when she left and cried when she came home, and he cried when he was alone and cried when she was with him. He cried when she smelled like a campfire and when she had ashes sprinkled in her hair, and he cried when their budgeting started to include lighters and gasoline.
He cried every tear that she never could.
Sometimes she wished that she could cry for him instead. He must have been so dehydrated.
(For his birthday, she bought him a nice water bottle. “So you can stay hydrated. You cry an awful lot,” she said. He grinned and hugged her, then pulled away quickly.
“Thank you.” His lips were wobbly and saltwater streamed down his cheeks. She smelled like a campfire.)
She always had grey peppering her clothes. Her smile was subdued, but her eyes were distant and wild. Like they knew something. Like they had already watched the world burn down in their head a million times, and enjoyed every second.
A psychopath.
An arsonist.
Someone who burned trees and papers for fun. Someone who bought too many lighters in too little time. (The gas station attendant had never seen so many lighters be laid out on the checkout counter.) Someone who watched her lover cry and looked away with disinterest. Someone who didn’t leave the house one day to burn.
(He was still home, crying in the corner. She didn’t notice him until the end.)
Someone who never cried when she watched her lover scream and his tears evaporate, ugly crying, with eyes of crimson and half moon bruises underneath and snot running down his face, saltwater on his tongue and dripping off his chin just to go up and evaporate in flames and smoke.
Someone who died with her lover by accident and didn’t care. Someone who watched the flames with gleaming eyes until the end.
(Her eyes were still gleaming when they burned to the ground.)
More Posts from Wired-writing-wallflower and Others
Prompt #18
(Character A) is a rebellious angel. (Character B) is a caring demon.
(Character B) tries to stop (Character A) from being too crazy, (Character A) tries to influence (Character B), and they’re both a mess.
Prompt #2
Soulmate AU, where the first words you say to someone are written on your body somewhere. The catch is that they’re written in your soulmate’s handwriting, aging with them.
For example, if a child is about four years old when their soulmate is born, then scribbles will appear on their body somewhere, illegible until they get older and learn how to write. The baby would be born with their soulmate’s writing already on them.
Illiterate people’s soulmates would be nearly unable to find them. People would be getting older and older, and not know whether they had no soulmate or whether their soulmate had not been born yet.
Prompt #12
(Character A)’s life is set up completely by their parents for a social experiment; complete with castings for background characters and side characters.
(Character B) is a side character in (Character A)’s life. They’re supposed to be the bully, but as they find themselves falling for (Character A), they start to break their script.
the oasis vs the ocean
it’s freezing in the quiet empty.
cold is comforting in its honesty;
the heat may envelope me but it only burns my skin,
its lies are all-encompassing.
yet the cold is here now,
and it is blunt, but it never hugs - it loves without a single touch.
the heat tries to love,
but it sears and scratches my bones, marking and tearing at my skin.
it smears its ash over my broken body, tears turning to steam and my gasping sobs turning into a cacophony of silence.
‘would you rather die of heat or cold?’
someone once said to me that the world will either end in fire or ice.
i know what i would prefer.
i know what i would rather feel.
numbness, hot, blazing frostbite causing slow inane hallucinations, a sick parody of the little match girl.
scathing, writhing flames licking the walls and leaning in, reeking of its victims and leering at its future prey.
i know myself well.
i hate that sometimes.
did you know that cold is not a feasible term?
cold is not its own self.
cold is simply the absence of heat.
a room filled to the brim with snow is not full,
not in the way a room full of fire is.
a room full of fire is suffocation in its most simple form,
smoke rising and smothering.
the snow is breathable, almost nonexistent,
and some animals even hide in the snow for protection in the winter.
did you know that?
the heat is a hitch in your breath, it’s a splatter of ink from a shaking hand.
it is stifling and deadly, not an embrace but a chokehold.
the heat will kill fierce, passionate, ares in his most pure form.
the cold is a ghost of a touch, a never ending inhale, a whisp of an idea.
it is a weathered blanket, holed and tattered and a false shelter in the storm.
the cold will kill gentle, quiet.
there is no glory, no fight in dying of cold.
resignation is cold, so it makes sense that cold will kill with resignation.
too little or too much?
i have always been safe in my choices.
too much will never make me empty,
too much will never leave me in the dark, blind and unknowing,
too much will never let me stay alone in blue air and white breaths and blurry vision from the saltwater streaming down my crimson cheeks and lips like shattered glass,
too much will never crack me with nothing, a void in my eyes and a thousand yard stare,
too much will never keep me deathly still in anticipation until everything seeps out of me in a realization that I only anticipate anticipation.
but even so…
too little will never send a fire through my nerves and cauterize my heart,
too little will never shatter me in a haze of red and dusty charcoal,
too little will never trace delicate fingers of ember across me and scar me in the ashes,
too little will never kill me with a glance, break me with uncertainty.
drowning is inevitable either way.
i will drown in either the oasis or the ocean,
nothing or all.
too little will never satisfy me,
but too much will only hurt me.
adventure has never been my friend,
and courage is swapped for anxiety.
my mind is not my brain,
and its thoughts aren’t my choices,
so i take the safe road,
as i always do.
…..
….
…
..
.
..
…
….
…..
the oasis is an empty salvation.
the ocean is an empty home.
water is simply an empty.
in the end, i will die, and it will be silent.
it is on nights like these that i think i will live in the nothing until nothing is my everything.
until i know the nothing as my home.
...
i will never know fulfillment the way i know the empty.
I made me!!!!
i’m just gonna spend the rest of my summer making myself in these things i swear
anyway anti os should make themselves
He doesn’t know what to make of it.
It’s ugly and it’s not, it’s beautiful and it’s not, it’s simultaneously everything he could have wanted and everything he dreaded.
She was leaving him.
She was leaving him, and wasn’t that fantastic? Wasn’t that horrible? Wasn’t that everything he could think of, alone but together with himself and a bottle that he could’ve sworn had fused to the callouses on his fingertips, had been superglued there and never ever left.
She was leaving him.
He still had his wedding ring, stuck to his finger in a different way than when you try on a ring and have to take it off with soap and water and time. It was stuck by the adhesive of his own mind. Trapped. He couldn’t take it off, couldn’t bare to pry it away.
She had taken hers off long ago, so why was his still stuck, like the bottle to his callouses and to his lips and permanent streams of saltwater that clung to his cheeks for days and days and days? Why?
All of his breaths were shudders and all of his thoughts were endless strings that never had a conclusion, an essay with an infinite word-count. He could still see the amber spilt on the floor through watery eyes, and still found it ironic that he was back to crying over spilt milk and spilt Jack Daniels and spilt tears and he was crying over everything and nothing and whatever was in between, so why did it matter anyways?
He clenched the bottle even tighter in his hand, and he wasn’t sure how much of it was alcohol and how much of it was his own tears at this point, and he knew he had to stop.
He had always known he needed to stop. He knew he needed to stop the first time he took a secret sip from beer in the fridge and the first time he had a serious hangover and the first time and the first time he met her and the first time she left him and the first time she came back and the first time she left a second time.
So many firsts. To him, the milestones didn’t matter a single bit. To him, all that mattered was that he didn’t have to care about what really did matter. And he was incredibly proficient at that in particular.
So he was good at knowing when to quit, but he was never quite as good at quitting. He was still stuck on that one time she smiled at him and she had looked so genuine, so real, and how she had looked just as real and tired when she said that she wanted a divorce and that she had had another.
She had another, didn’t she? Of course she did, she was always good at back-up plans and back-up-back-up plans. He knew it when she had a beer spilt on her shirt that neither of them liked (like the Jack Daniels on the floor and the milk knocked over to the ground and his heart to hell fires). He knew it when she came home with her lipstick smeared and with her eyes wild, he knew it when she stopped looking him in the eye and started looking at the wall behind him.
(The last time she looked him in the eye she told him straight to his face that she had another.)
(The last time he looked her in the eye he didn’t say a word.)
He stood up and slipped on the whiskey and prayed to whoever was out there that he wouldn’t be able to get up. It didn’t work.
It never worked, did it? Whoever was out there doesn’t care much for people like him anyway, and he could hear in the back of his head the whisper screams of ‘alcoholic’ and ‘acute mania’ his own screams weren’t loud enough. The shards of the bottles scattering everywhere when he smashed them to drown them out hid under his couch and beneath the coffee table to escape him and he understood why, because he was running from himself too, like her.
He didn’t know if there was a God anywhere.
Prompt #8
(Character A) makes a promise with (Character C) as a teenager that if they still aren’t married by 30, they will marry each other.
The thing is, (Character A) hates (Character C), and tries their hardest to get married to their significant other, (Character B), before their 29th birthday, which is fast approaching.
(Character C) is trying to make them break up, but (Character A) loves (Character B). How will it work out?
Prompt #15
(Character A), who is a peasant, accidentally saves (Character B), who is royalty, from an assasination attempt. However, (Character B) thinks it was purposeful, and thinks they are indebted to (Character A).
(Character A) is unaware of this, and wonders why the heir to the throne is so interested in them all of a sudden.
(Character A) always takes care of (Character B)
Me: Nice
(Character A) isn’t used to receiving the affection they usually give and is completely shocked when (Character B) responds the same
Me: NiCE
as it should be
“Yellow is fake,” says Lilac to Oleander. “It is because I say so.”
Lilac tilts their head and keeps staring at the setting sun, squinting to see the colours. Oranges and yellows blended together and draped around the clouds like the most perfect curtains to ever exist, natural and ugly.
Fake.
“And all of the clouds must be paintings.” Oleander has never understood Lilac. Maybe they never would.
“What do you mean?” Lilac traces the sky with a gentle, steady hand, the clouds just barely shifting and twisting, gliding instead of pulling like a current in a river. Impossible, incomprehensible.
“Why are black and white not colors, but yellow is?” Lilac questions. Lilac has an awful lot of questions. They’ve always been curious. Not so much that they never look before they leap, but just enough to look over the edge and decide it isn’t that far of a drop.
That doesn’t mean that they would be right, however.
Oleander has always been the kind of person to never leap in the first place, let alone look. The varying perspectives is exciting the main diffference between the two.
Oleander responds, “Because black and white aren’t part of the rainbow.”
Lilac furrows their brow. “But we’re just humans. If we were mantis shrimp, and we had sixteen color receptors, then maybe black and white would be colors in the rainbow.”
Lilac gestures at all the fake colour. It dances around in streaks, brush strokes painting lines stolen right off the rainbow. “Why are we allowed to judge that if we can’t know for sure? Why can’t I declare that yellow is fake, like black and white?”
“Because we want labels.” Oleander is becoming annoyed. “We want labels, because we want to have purpose and meaning. We want to be defined. Purpose is having a place, a contribution to something. That gives us purpose, or whatever we think is purpose anyways.
“We all want purpose, because without it we don’t have meaning.”
“But why can’t we have no labels and still have meaning and purpose?” Lilac runs a hand through their hair, squeezing their eyes shut and staring at the yellows in the backs of their eyelids instead. Comforting fireworks of golden sparks, raining down in waves. An ocean of fiery yellow. It’s fake. “Labels don’t indicate worth. Labels aren’t a purpose. They’re a box. People can’t fit in boxes. I mean, I haven’t ever tried, but I don’t think the shapes would match up.”
Oleander may never understand Lilac, but they will always listen, in case one day, they find an answer in the horde of never-ending questions. In case one day, Oleander figures out why Lilac keeps them up all night when they’re not even there.
In case one day, Oleander won’t have to strike through their thoughts anymore.
“Because boxes are comforting. They’re a safe place. A shelter. And people aren’t always comfortable in their own selves, so sometimes they’ll put themselves in shelters. They’ll make a home in a label because they can’t find one in their own mind.” The words are spilling out of their mouth, clumps and pieces jumbling together. “They don’t feel comfortable with who they are, so they try to make themselves someone they like because they think that they’ll be comfortable with someone else. With a cliché.”
The words stop flowing. They drift off instead, and Oleander tries to catch them, tries to fit them in their fists. It barely works. They only snatch a single sentence. “But they never are.”
It’s a grey sentence, Oleander knows. Shiny silvery grey, colourless. It’s a truthful group of words, honest. Nothing is really black and white. Black and white sentences aren’t lies, really, but they’re always mistaken.
Grey is the only honest colour.
Oleander wonders what the least honest colour is. They think that maybe, just maybe, it might be yellow.
Lilac thinks that Oleander is right. Lilac also thinks that when they look up and open their eyes, all they can see looks like paint on the water, and their focus shifts once more.
“Crystal clear water,” they murmur. “And acrylic.”
Oleander is not following. “What?”
“The clouds,” Lilac explains. They’ve got a sleepy look on their face, and eyes like stars. “I’ve decided they’re paint on water. They can’t be real.”
Oleander wishes they could be Lilac, and see the world as simple as they do.
Just for a second.
A single, sweet second of understanding.
Oleander think about the comparisons of the both of them frequently. It’s glaringly obvious that they contrast each other greatly. One might even say that they complimented each other well.
Lilac smiles slow, small, and sweet, and Oleander doesn’t smile much at all anymore. Lilac is fantastical and creative. Oleander doesn’t even like anything other than non-fiction. Lilac always has an idea. Oleander can’t remember the last time they thought of something new, original.
Oleander wants to contribute to something. Maybe Oleander needs meaning as well.
“Maybe oil pastels on acrylic,” Oleander offers.
Lilac stretches their arms out on the grass below them, digging their fingers in the warm dirt and getting it under their nails. Wet earth stains their hands, but they don’t care. “On a canvas,” they add quietly.
Lilac feels like they could just melt into the ground, close their eyes again without looking once at the explosions of fake colours, and just fall.
Fall intangible through the core of the world, and through the other side.
Maybe even fall through China instead of digging their way there.
Fall into the sky.
Fall asleep.
And they do.
Oleander goes on to stare at the moon. And the clouds go on to being oil pastels on acrylic, and yellow goes on being fake.
Everything is wrong.
As it should be.
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Mostly writing prompts, but will also post little drabbles and occasionally fanfic. If you use one of my prompts, please let me know! I would love to read it.Open to submissions, questions, and possibly writing for others. You can ask me anything, and I’ll answer or consider it!Really into TØP and P!ATD. Will switch fandoms a lot, but currently into Dear Evan Hansen, the Phandom, and Good Omens. Feminist. Bisexual and proud 😊No set schedule for my posts.By the way, check out my side-blog, rhythm-on-the-offbeat, which has some memes and more random thoughts of mine! :)
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