The phone lines are dead. You slam down the receiver into the dock, your futile attempt at a call resulting in only the resonating beep of a resigned truth. You can feel the water slapping against the base of the house like a cruel promise. It is raining; the drops are pelting down upon the window relentlessly, pattering and pattering, washing away at your hope. You are holed up inside, kept at bay by the incessant barrage, and, strangely, what comes to mind is that day’s choice of breakfast, a piece of toast with vibrant jelly—thick raspberry—smeared across its surface. Oh, how you had savored it, exploring the fusion of fruit and bread with your tongue as you sat peering out of the very same window, on the very same day.
Except it hadn’t been storming right then. It had been merely dancing, frolicking, fooling about like an innocent child, flickering in the still-present sunlight. Ha—the sunlight! It seems like ages prior in which it had been visible, unbridled in its joy and warmth. The poor sun, you think. It is strangled and choking, far too smothered by this wretched storm to get any air. But then again, so are you, inevitably trapped inside your own home. It’s sickening, really, to think about spending an eternity here, with nothing to look at but the old, coffee-stained, shredded sofa, which pitifully is your most prized piece of furniture left to boast of. How can this be? you ask yourself, staring at the blemished cushions in disgust. Already, the water is lapping away at the furnishing, ringing its legs with moisture filthy with sediment and stray pieces of floating garbage.
You figure that no, this is not the ideal place to be stuck in a storm. At the very least, you should be someplace with a working telephone, or some form of running communication, because under no circumstances will you ever lose the battle of life to the mere force of water. I’m better than that, you say to yourself, although saying is always a long way off from believing.
Knowing that you cannot allow yourself to stay is the difficult part, primarily because it entails admitting the direness of your situation. You knew that this could happen, just like everyone else, but never once assumed that it would happen to you. The sheer wetness eating away at your all too frail door serves as a pressing reminder, a sinister mockery of your own ignorance. Nonetheless, you meander over to the entryway and place your hand on the fingerprinted doorknob, far prior rendered feeble with absentminded tugs, and scratched beyond repair with house keys held in turning hands.
It seems larger than usual, almost overwhelming... perhaps, though, it is only your hand that seems smaller, left powerless and weak by comparison. But you tighten your grip nonetheless and the feeling vanishes as quickly as it came. You shake your head. Quit behaving like a fool, you say, for now is no time for foolishness. With a twist of your wrist, the doorknob turns, but the accompanying budge of the door is strangely absent. Only when you lean heavily against the wood and push, push, push does it creak ever so slightly open, straining with reluctance and weariness against the flowing water outside. At only about half a foot high, it’s not so much frightening to you as it is hindering. Your doorframe, at the very least, is suffering.
Shoving the thought from your mind, you assure yourself that your door will be absolutely fine. You will be fine. In fact, everything will be fine... or so you hope.
Bah, far too much pondering! You must stop blaming the door for your restless unease. Frustrated now, you step outside quickly, before the rushing sea of tears can seal your house closed once more. All you have in your possession is the clothing on your back—an old, green down coat ridden with duct tape patches, damply clinging to your faded college sweatshirt, which is tattered from years of overuse. You have a layer underneath as well, comprised of a gray thermal shirt and a pair of torn jeans under waterproof, (but almost outgrown) black sweatpants. You are very thankful that you could find these items, shoved as they were in the back of your closet due to the imminent heat of the impending late summer months. If only you had known sooner that you would need them.
Your mud-splattered snow boots, the closest substitute for rain boots available at the time, sink into the stream, splashing a bit as you stumble your way down the chipped concrete of your entryway stairs. While there are only three steps, you trip over the current on every one save the last, by which time you have readjusted your gait to correlate with your newly waterlogged world. The imaginary fill line you have created below you is slowly but surely rising, and you know that if you do not get moving this storm will be more than just a minor annoyance. By then, you figure, it will have become a true horror. Yes, surely you must move more quickly, more efficiently.
A few neighbors of yours, apparently already ahead of you, have scrounged kayaks and small river boats from their garages, clearly not planning on returning to their beloved homes. You have every such impulse of the exact opposite intentions, and, even if you didn’t, your garage contains no water transportation to speak of.
Instead, you choose to tread across your yard, your boots squelching as they trudge through the filthy muck that used to at least somewhat resemble patches of grass and stones. As you do so, you marvel at the flux of cars streaming through your otherwise fairly unvisited street. Their wheels turn so quickly that they jet streams of the squalid water all about, some drops even shooting so far as to pepper your already chilled face. The people are panicking, scrambling for any hope of escape from the city. Many, you suppose, are now without their homes, and even more don’t plan on returning to them. This is painfully evident from the piles of bags strapped to roofs of cars, attached in any space available, and you desperately wish that your car was in working order. But what does wishing get you? Surely, it gets you soggy boots and socks plastered to your skin with water.
You puzzle over how you will ever cross the street—there are pre-established safe house buildings on the other side, one of the hidden advantages of living just barely outside the city—as the gaps in traffic are so few and far between that you will be more likely to fly over the stretch of asphalt than to cross it on foot. No, you think, I must get across. It’s the last chance I have. Thereupon, you scold yourself once more for your pathetic dramatics, surprised that you even allowed such emotion to slither out into the open.
The encroaching mixture of storm drainage, sorrow, and fear is now halfway up your shins. It startles you, when you first look down at it, assuming previously that the excess moisture you noticed was merely a figment of your imagination. How nice it would be, if that were so. The rising grime spurs you into determined action, and just in time, for there is a pause in the chaotic forward motion, replaced by an even more chaotic standstill. You don’t really catch it, but maybe a car swerved and toppled an already weakened telephone pole. None of it matters, though, so long as you can finally cross the blasted street.
You charge across the expanse, head down and feet shuffling furiously. Perhaps you hear the noise, perhaps you don’t. You’re not sure whether you should be glad and accepting of either. Nonetheless, the noise is there whether you hear it or not, though not apparent readily enough for any preparation whatsoever. Then, out of the corner of your eye, the source of the sound reveals itself to be a motorcycle, toting around its leather-clad rider and whipping down the road in your direction with an obvious lack of intention in slowing. Its thick wheels are currently undeterred by the sluggishly rising muck, but in fifteen minutes or so all will be different. Stupidly, you increase your own pace until it seems that you and the motorcycle are on a collision course, but then, just when you are about to be hit....
You launch yourself forward, straining and straining against the syrupy moisture that restrains your limbs, and almost find yourself landing safely across the street when the front wheel of the motorcycle clips your heels and sends you sprawling across the pavement face first. Tumbling around in the soupy sludge only adds to the nausea that has been building up in your stomach, but still you tumble, wildly crashing about until your back hits a door and your momentum carries you through it. Once you regain your bearings, you feel that it is somewhat safe to stand, so you do, splaying your arms out at your sides to steady yourself. When you do finally get your bearings, you are slapped in the face with the wet-handed, utterly atrocious sting of reality.
What you have so clumsily entered is a safe house, much like one you had in mind when crossing the street, although now you are sure your wanting was all for naught. Rather than a cozy reprieve from the relentless storm, it is a pit of desperation, of countless other last chances. Ultimately, it is a sea of lost souls, none familiar, and you place them to be from the coastal neighborhoods, more brutally hit by the hurricane. These people have lost so much. They have suffered. They are obviously far beyond what you have experienced in your brief lapse of storm-time madness.
Many mothers and fathers clutch children at their sides, which in turn clutch favorite toys in white-knuckled, fiercely stubborn grips. Most prominently, there are tiny girls with their even tinier drenched cloth dollies, clinging with the deliberate, concise purpose of saviors. However, some families appear to be broken. Scattered mothers and fathers have no children to hold; they must have been taken by the first waves to hit the shores. In these instances, the parents are wailing, folded into embraces like letters into envelopes. There are cases, though, in which the parents do not make a sound. They simply sit, stunned, the color drained from their faces and the shine snuffed out of their eyes, looking bleak and hopeless and ruined. Those are the ones, you figure, who saw it happen, and actually witnessed their child, their pride and joy, being whisked away into nonexistence. You want to vomit.
Any chance of an exit is gone now, as when you attempt to open the door, you find it sealed shut against the water, and assume that what now inhabits the outdoors would make the pooling in your front yard look like a meager puddle. At the very least, the water must be neck high now, so of course you must stay.
You feel very out of place here. You have no family in the area. You are not in mourning nor in panic. You simply desire a way out of this situation, not the recovery of anything in particular. Toying with the possibility that you would feel better if you found others with the same notion, you begin to weave your way through mob after mob of people, longing for someone to talk to. You should have stayed put. Oh, how you should have stayed put!
No one seems to be alone but you; everyone is embracing someone else, regardless of that person’s identity, stranger or not. The atmosphere is sticky with tears. You guess that the hub of activity is mainly based in the center of the building , so you make your way to a corner instead in search of a more suitable, less hysterical companion. What you do manage to find, however, does not quite fit the bill.
The girl snatches your attention the second you lay eyes on her. Though you are almost fifteen feet away, you take the time to absorb her every detail, for she startles you in the gut wrenching way only a small child could. Her hair is short and brown, with sparse dry tufts aloft in the mostly clumped sections stuck to her face with fluid. It’s quite wild, really, and not arranged in any specific fashion. Her eyes are round and wide, and you soon come to see that the irises are a deep, wood brown, like kindling hosed off before an unwanted ignition. They are framed by thick and long eyelashes, also bound together with water. The girl must be eight or so—you can tell, as her scarce height and her facial features are the very embodiment of youth.
For a reason that eludes you, you shamble ever closer, slowly closing the distance between you and the little girl. When you are maybe ten feet apart, you stop. She is standing in something—there is a reason she is huddled in the corner, wide-eyed and alone. But what is it she is standing in? It’s a puddle, for sure, but of what? From the coloring of the liquid, it could be anything from water to urine to car gas. Nevertheless, it’s not water. It’s not urine. It’s not car gas.
What you see before you is a pool of blood, fairly fresh from the looks of it, with a barefoot girl standing in it. The blood can’t possibly be from her, as her smock of a dress shows enough skin to verify that she isn’t its source. Not a trace of blood marks her skin but a dripping crimson handprint on her cheek. It’s so perfect, the handprint, unflawed and free of smudging. It’s almost serene. Frantically, you keep searching, terrified of what you might discover.
Then, in absolute horror, you find it. Spread around the girl’s feet are a pair of mismatched shoes, one a feminine sneaker befitting of a busy mother, and the other a rugged work boot, possibly belonging to a diligent father. The owners of the shoes are hauntingly absent.
The shoes, having tumbled over sideways onto the cement floor, must have been previously filled to their brims with blood-streaked water. Yes, you can see the crimson stains now, marring the inner material of both pairs. The repugnant blend must have pooled around the girl’s feet when the shoes were knocked over, you figure, but you can’t place just why she wouldn’t move away, to a different patch of ground. You step closer, unsure of whether she needed to be comforted or left alone.
As you do so, the girl’s head slowly tilts upward, away from the gruesome scene beneath her, and her kindling eyes catch yours. You gasp, then halt in your approach. Now you understand—the shoes had been her parents’ shoes, the blood had been her parents’ blood, and she herself had filled the shoes with it. More than likely, it had been all there was left to salvage—the one piece left recoverable.
Immediately upon this realization, you also come to comprehend why you feel sickened and out of place here, because a piece of you is now part of the reason. The air is drained of moisture, completely hot and dry with sadness, with fear. It forms a cocoon, encasing the building and evaporating the water that plagues its victims so ever harshly. Your sadness now leaps up, bonding with everyone else’s, and the cocoon stretches accordingly, accommodating its new material. Now it is big enough to rid the entire building of the rain and river, and, when your gaze returns to the little girl’s eyes, you see that her kindling is dried out now, too. There is a shard of gratefulness hidden in there, muffled by the whirlwind of other emotions. Still, it is there, somewhat.
No one seems to notice this peculiar smog, just as no one seems to notice the little girl standing barefooted in a pool of her parents’ blood. You despise that this is so. Negativity, being a very powerful thing, snatches that despising lash and launches it into the fear atmosphere, strengthening it. An internal glow has washed over the girl’s eyes, and just when you obtain a sliver of hope, the unthinkable happens.
The girl begins to cry. Before a single tear hits her face, you can tell what is happening, because the girl’s own sorrow has leapt up and joined the rest. When the tears do show themselves, they are far from the expected.
The girl cries flames. The tears spurt out, they sizzle. They burn her cheeks and melt away her defenses, soaking into her very being. They ignite it. Fiery rage ensues, charring her soul and engulfing her mind. The smoke is suffocating, and you cough. It is very hungry, this fire, so the girl fuels it with hate and rage, sadness and pain. The fire licks at your feeble conscience, wrapping the crackling fingertips around its throat and choking it. The swirling inferno consumes all in its path, and you can feel the structure around you begin to creak from the heat. It burns and burns, free to roam in the space sheltered from moisture by the cocoon.
Now the people notice. Joined with the crying is the screaming, and it all blends into one continuous wail as all pandemonium breaks loose. Your eyes dart around the confused yet terrified crowd, until you tear your gaze away from them and back to the little girl, who keeps crying regardless. Everything else is fading away into blackness, until it is only you and the little girl with the terrible fire. Everything is no more. Soon, you come to register, you will be no more as well.
Even the blackness has faded by now, and you are left in a flaming world of nothingness with your tiny onlooker. For she hasn’t taken her eyes off you, as blurred as you may appear in the midst of the tears and accompanying smoke that must cloud her eyes. All that you know is being eaten away, and the girl stops crying. She disappears then as well, until you truly are in pure nothing, soon to be pure nothing yourself. You can feel it happening. As the flames begin to nibble at you, to snatch you in their capable fingers and take you away forever, you express one last flicker of gratitude, in its entirety intended for the little girl. For the boats and kayaks may have buoyed some. The cars with bags lashed on top may have transported others. But this little girl, this little girl with her fire, she has accomplished the impossible. For the desperation, the suffering, the pain—all that has vanished. She has saved you. She has saved you all.
Except it hadn’t been storming right then. It had been merely dancing, frolicking, fooling about like an innocent child, flickering in the still-present sunlight. Ha—the sunlight! It seems like ages prior in which it had been visible, unbridled in its joy and warmth. The poor sun, you think. It is strangled and choking, far too smothered by this wretched storm to get any air. But then again, so are you, inevitably trapped inside your own home. It’s sickening, really, to think about spending an eternity here, with nothing to look at but the old, coffee-stained, shredded sofa, which pitifully is your most prized piece of furniture left to boast of. How can this be? you ask yourself, staring at the blemished cushions in disgust. Already, the water is lapping away at the furnishing, ringing its legs with moisture filthy with sediment and stray pieces of floating garbage.
You figure that no, this is not the ideal place to be stuck in a storm. At the very least, you should be someplace with a working telephone, or some form of running communication, because under no circumstances will you ever lose the battle of life to the mere force of water. I’m better than that, you say to yourself, although saying is always a long way off from believing.
Knowing that you cannot allow yourself to stay is the difficult part, primarily because it entails admitting the direness of your situation. You knew that this could happen, just like everyone else, but never once assumed that it would happen to you. The sheer wetness eating away at your all too frail door serves as a pressing reminder, a sinister mockery of your own ignorance. Nonetheless, you meander over to the entryway and place your hand on the fingerprinted doorknob, far prior rendered feeble with absentminded tugs, and scratched beyond repair with house keys held in turning hands.
It seems larger than usual, almost overwhelming... perhaps, though, it is only your hand that seems smaller, left powerless and weak by comparison. But you tighten your grip nonetheless and the feeling vanishes as quickly as it came. You shake your head. Quit behaving like a fool, you say, for now is no time for foolishness. With a twist of your wrist, the doorknob turns, but the accompanying budge of the door is strangely absent. Only when you lean heavily against the wood and push, push, push does it creak ever so slightly open, straining with reluctance and weariness against the flowing water outside. At only about half a foot high, it’s not so much frightening to you as it is hindering. Your doorframe, at the very least, is suffering.
Shoving the thought from your mind, you assure yourself that your door will be absolutely fine. You will be fine. In fact, everything will be fine... or so you hope.
Bah, far too much pondering! You must stop blaming the door for your restless unease. Frustrated now, you step outside quickly, before the rushing sea of tears can seal your house closed once more. All you have in your possession is the clothing on your back—an old, green down coat ridden with duct tape patches, damply clinging to your faded college sweatshirt, which is tattered from years of overuse. You have a layer underneath as well, comprised of a gray thermal shirt and a pair of torn jeans under waterproof, (but almost outgrown) black sweatpants. You are very thankful that you could find these items, shoved as they were in the back of your closet due to the imminent heat of the impending late summer months. If only you had known sooner that you would need them.
Your mud-splattered snow boots, the closest substitute for rain boots available at the time, sink into the stream, splashing a bit as you stumble your way down the chipped concrete of your entryway stairs. While there are only three steps, you trip over the current on every one save the last, by which time you have readjusted your gait to correlate with your newly waterlogged world. The imaginary fill line you have created below you is slowly but surely rising, and you know that if you do not get moving this storm will be more than just a minor annoyance. By then, you figure, it will have become a true horror. Yes, surely you must move more quickly, more efficiently.
A few neighbors of yours, apparently already ahead of you, have scrounged kayaks and small river boats from their garages, clearly not planning on returning to their beloved homes. You have every such impulse of the exact opposite intentions, and, even if you didn’t, your garage contains no water transportation to speak of.
Instead, you choose to tread across your yard, your boots squelching as they trudge through the filthy muck that used to at least somewhat resemble patches of grass and stones. As you do so, you marvel at the flux of cars streaming through your otherwise fairly unvisited street. Their wheels turn so quickly that they jet streams of the squalid water all about, some drops even shooting so far as to pepper your already chilled face. The people are panicking, scrambling for any hope of escape from the city. Many, you suppose, are now without their homes, and even more don’t plan on returning to them. This is painfully evident from the piles of bags strapped to roofs of cars, attached in any space available, and you desperately wish that your car was in working order. But what does wishing get you? Surely, it gets you soggy boots and socks plastered to your skin with water.
You puzzle over how you will ever cross the street—there are pre-established safe house buildings on the other side, one of the hidden advantages of living just barely outside the city—as the gaps in traffic are so few and far between that you will be more likely to fly over the stretch of asphalt than to cross it on foot. No, you think, I must get across. It’s the last chance I have. Thereupon, you scold yourself once more for your pathetic dramatics, surprised that you even allowed such emotion to slither out into the open.
The encroaching mixture of storm drainage, sorrow, and fear is now halfway up your shins. It startles you, when you first look down at it, assuming previously that the excess moisture you noticed was merely a figment of your imagination. How nice it would be, if that were so. The rising grime spurs you into determined action, and just in time, for there is a pause in the chaotic forward motion, replaced by an even more chaotic standstill. You don’t really catch it, but maybe a car swerved and toppled an already weakened telephone pole. None of it matters, though, so long as you can finally cross the blasted street.
You charge across the expanse, head down and feet shuffling furiously. Perhaps you hear the noise, perhaps you don’t. You’re not sure whether you should be glad and accepting of either. Nonetheless, the noise is there whether you hear it or not, though not apparent readily enough for any preparation whatsoever. Then, out of the corner of your eye, the source of the sound reveals itself to be a motorcycle, toting around its leather-clad rider and whipping down the road in your direction with an obvious lack of intention in slowing. Its thick wheels are currently undeterred by the sluggishly rising muck, but in fifteen minutes or so all will be different. Stupidly, you increase your own pace until it seems that you and the motorcycle are on a collision course, but then, just when you are about to be hit....
You launch yourself forward, straining and straining against the syrupy moisture that restrains your limbs, and almost find yourself landing safely across the street when the front wheel of the motorcycle clips your heels and sends you sprawling across the pavement face first. Tumbling around in the soupy sludge only adds to the nausea that has been building up in your stomach, but still you tumble, wildly crashing about until your back hits a door and your momentum carries you through it. Once you regain your bearings, you feel that it is somewhat safe to stand, so you do, splaying your arms out at your sides to steady yourself. When you do finally get your bearings, you are slapped in the face with the wet-handed, utterly atrocious sting of reality.
What you have so clumsily entered is a safe house, much like one you had in mind when crossing the street, although now you are sure your wanting was all for naught. Rather than a cozy reprieve from the relentless storm, it is a pit of desperation, of countless other last chances. Ultimately, it is a sea of lost souls, none familiar, and you place them to be from the coastal neighborhoods, more brutally hit by the hurricane. These people have lost so much. They have suffered. They are obviously far beyond what you have experienced in your brief lapse of storm-time madness.
Many mothers and fathers clutch children at their sides, which in turn clutch favorite toys in white-knuckled, fiercely stubborn grips. Most prominently, there are tiny girls with their even tinier drenched cloth dollies, clinging with the deliberate, concise purpose of saviors. However, some families appear to be broken. Scattered mothers and fathers have no children to hold; they must have been taken by the first waves to hit the shores. In these instances, the parents are wailing, folded into embraces like letters into envelopes. There are cases, though, in which the parents do not make a sound. They simply sit, stunned, the color drained from their faces and the shine snuffed out of their eyes, looking bleak and hopeless and ruined. Those are the ones, you figure, who saw it happen, and actually witnessed their child, their pride and joy, being whisked away into nonexistence. You want to vomit.
Any chance of an exit is gone now, as when you attempt to open the door, you find it sealed shut against the water, and assume that what now inhabits the outdoors would make the pooling in your front yard look like a meager puddle. At the very least, the water must be neck high now, so of course you must stay.
You feel very out of place here. You have no family in the area. You are not in mourning nor in panic. You simply desire a way out of this situation, not the recovery of anything in particular. Toying with the possibility that you would feel better if you found others with the same notion, you begin to weave your way through mob after mob of people, longing for someone to talk to. You should have stayed put. Oh, how you should have stayed put!
No one seems to be alone but you; everyone is embracing someone else, regardless of that person’s identity, stranger or not. The atmosphere is sticky with tears. You guess that the hub of activity is mainly based in the center of the building , so you make your way to a corner instead in search of a more suitable, less hysterical companion. What you do manage to find, however, does not quite fit the bill.
The girl snatches your attention the second you lay eyes on her. Though you are almost fifteen feet away, you take the time to absorb her every detail, for she startles you in the gut wrenching way only a small child could. Her hair is short and brown, with sparse dry tufts aloft in the mostly clumped sections stuck to her face with fluid. It’s quite wild, really, and not arranged in any specific fashion. Her eyes are round and wide, and you soon come to see that the irises are a deep, wood brown, like kindling hosed off before an unwanted ignition. They are framed by thick and long eyelashes, also bound together with water. The girl must be eight or so—you can tell, as her scarce height and her facial features are the very embodiment of youth.
For a reason that eludes you, you shamble ever closer, slowly closing the distance between you and the little girl. When you are maybe ten feet apart, you stop. She is standing in something—there is a reason she is huddled in the corner, wide-eyed and alone. But what is it she is standing in? It’s a puddle, for sure, but of what? From the coloring of the liquid, it could be anything from water to urine to car gas. Nevertheless, it’s not water. It’s not urine. It’s not car gas.
What you see before you is a pool of blood, fairly fresh from the looks of it, with a barefoot girl standing in it. The blood can’t possibly be from her, as her smock of a dress shows enough skin to verify that she isn’t its source. Not a trace of blood marks her skin but a dripping crimson handprint on her cheek. It’s so perfect, the handprint, unflawed and free of smudging. It’s almost serene. Frantically, you keep searching, terrified of what you might discover.
Then, in absolute horror, you find it. Spread around the girl’s feet are a pair of mismatched shoes, one a feminine sneaker befitting of a busy mother, and the other a rugged work boot, possibly belonging to a diligent father. The owners of the shoes are hauntingly absent.
The shoes, having tumbled over sideways onto the cement floor, must have been previously filled to their brims with blood-streaked water. Yes, you can see the crimson stains now, marring the inner material of both pairs. The repugnant blend must have pooled around the girl’s feet when the shoes were knocked over, you figure, but you can’t place just why she wouldn’t move away, to a different patch of ground. You step closer, unsure of whether she needed to be comforted or left alone.
As you do so, the girl’s head slowly tilts upward, away from the gruesome scene beneath her, and her kindling eyes catch yours. You gasp, then halt in your approach. Now you understand—the shoes had been her parents’ shoes, the blood had been her parents’ blood, and she herself had filled the shoes with it. More than likely, it had been all there was left to salvage—the one piece left recoverable.
Immediately upon this realization, you also come to comprehend why you feel sickened and out of place here, because a piece of you is now part of the reason. The air is drained of moisture, completely hot and dry with sadness, with fear. It forms a cocoon, encasing the building and evaporating the water that plagues its victims so ever harshly. Your sadness now leaps up, bonding with everyone else’s, and the cocoon stretches accordingly, accommodating its new material. Now it is big enough to rid the entire building of the rain and river, and, when your gaze returns to the little girl’s eyes, you see that her kindling is dried out now, too. There is a shard of gratefulness hidden in there, muffled by the whirlwind of other emotions. Still, it is there, somewhat.
No one seems to notice this peculiar smog, just as no one seems to notice the little girl standing barefooted in a pool of her parents’ blood. You despise that this is so. Negativity, being a very powerful thing, snatches that despising lash and launches it into the fear atmosphere, strengthening it. An internal glow has washed over the girl’s eyes, and just when you obtain a sliver of hope, the unthinkable happens.
The girl begins to cry. Before a single tear hits her face, you can tell what is happening, because the girl’s own sorrow has leapt up and joined the rest. When the tears do show themselves, they are far from the expected.
The girl cries flames. The tears spurt out, they sizzle. They burn her cheeks and melt away her defenses, soaking into her very being. They ignite it. Fiery rage ensues, charring her soul and engulfing her mind. The smoke is suffocating, and you cough. It is very hungry, this fire, so the girl fuels it with hate and rage, sadness and pain. The fire licks at your feeble conscience, wrapping the crackling fingertips around its throat and choking it. The swirling inferno consumes all in its path, and you can feel the structure around you begin to creak from the heat. It burns and burns, free to roam in the space sheltered from moisture by the cocoon.
Now the people notice. Joined with the crying is the screaming, and it all blends into one continuous wail as all pandemonium breaks loose. Your eyes dart around the confused yet terrified crowd, until you tear your gaze away from them and back to the little girl, who keeps crying regardless. Everything else is fading away into blackness, until it is only you and the little girl with the terrible fire. Everything is no more. Soon, you come to register, you will be no more as well.
Even the blackness has faded by now, and you are left in a flaming world of nothingness with your tiny onlooker. For she hasn’t taken her eyes off you, as blurred as you may appear in the midst of the tears and accompanying smoke that must cloud her eyes. All that you know is being eaten away, and the girl stops crying. She disappears then as well, until you truly are in pure nothing, soon to be pure nothing yourself. You can feel it happening. As the flames begin to nibble at you, to snatch you in their capable fingers and take you away forever, you express one last flicker of gratitude, in its entirety intended for the little girl. For the boats and kayaks may have buoyed some. The cars with bags lashed on top may have transported others. But this little girl, this little girl with her fire, she has accomplished the impossible. For the desperation, the suffering, the pain—all that has vanished. She has saved you. She has saved you all.