Beautiful Burns

" There weren't always dragons in the valley, no darkness ever blinded my view, my heart yearned to be burned in the flames, a fire started by you...". Asya sang in a semi-sweet, water-logged voice from behind the translucent blue shower curtain. She closed her eyes and allowed the hard water of the shower to hit her face and distort the sounds of the words coming from her plum-shaded, full lips. She really enjoyed her long showers although her grandparents would often get on her about “taking entirely too damn long and using up all the hot water in there.” She didn’t care one bit about that though, she loved being in the water and often fantasized about being some fairy creature, blissfully bathing under an enchanted moonlit waterfall somewhere in the woods. She often got lost in her imagination like that and would sometimes spend an hour or more just standing in the tub pretending to be anywhere but there. She bobbed her head back & forth and used the soap as a microphone while serenading the rusty old shower head on the wall with her raspy vocals and nude performance. She knew she was not much of a singer, but that didn't stop her from singing at the top of her lungs when she thought no one was around. By this point her long locks of black hair had become a tangled mass of soapsuds and bubbles that started to leak down her long eyelashes and eventually into her large brown eyes. She painstakingly tried to wipe the soap from her eyes while fiddling around the sudsy smooth tiles of the wall to find the shower knob. Had it not been for the metal guard rail on the shower wall her Grandpa installed earlier that year, Asya would have slipped on all that soap and surely bust her ass in the shower by now.

“I see why you wanted this ugly old thing in here now Grandpa…” Asya softly uttered as she grasped the shower bar to regain her footing and remove the remaining soap from her hair and eyes. She briefly wondered if her Grandmother would be alive right now if her Grandpa would’ve put one of those bars on the stairs last year. Sadly, her Grandmother tripped and fell down the steps one morning last year while no one was home and lay bleeding from her head for hours at the bottom of the stairs. She had lost so much blood from the open wound on her head that the doctor said it was a miracle she hadn’t died immediately after the fall. Asya’s 8-year-old cousin Gage lived with her Grandparents as well but was at school at the time it happened. He was always under his Grandmother but was in school that day blissfully unaware of the tragedy at home. Since that day Gage hasn’t really smiled much and when he did smile, it never lasted longer than a moment. By the time Asya and her Grandpa got home from their jobs in town, their neighbors across the street had heard her Grandma’s cries from their porch and immediately called the ambulance to take her to the hospital. When they finally arrived at her hospital room, Asya hurried to her Grandmother’s bedside and caressed her cold frail hands. Tears streamed down Asya’s cheeks and fell like shower droplets of hard water on the cold marbled tiles of the hospital floor. “Grandma I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to help you.,” she said as she stared at the large, bandaged wound on her Grandmother’s forehead. As Asya started to move closer to the hospital bed, her Grandma took a loud, deep breath with closed eyes and said, “Don’t worry baby, y’all will be just fine.” She then let out a long-winded sigh and the EKG machine she was on abruptly flatlined. Her heart just stopped beating right there, just a few seconds after they had gotten to the room. It’s almost like she waited on them to get there just to say those last few words before she passed on. No one cried in that moment except Gage, who sobbed uncontrollably into his Grandpa’s pants leg the entire way home.

Asya’s Grandma died on the eve of her 76th birthday, everyone at the funeral said it seemed like such a shame for her to have lived so long and been through so much just to meet her fate at the bottom of some old stairs Granddad should have fixed years ago. Asya always knew it wasn’t her Grandpa’s fault and never blamed him for it, but her Grandpa took it extremely hard and would not forgive himself for not putting one there. She figured her Granddad blamed himself so much for the honest mistake that he eventually made himself sick with guilt to the point where he could no longer work at the steel factory. At only 18 Asya took the responsibilities of the household by getting two jobs: one as a cashier at the grocery store and another as a server at a small restaurant on the other side of town. She barely made ends meet but at least she had Granddad’s old truck and those two jobs; they managed the mortgage and the gas to work but no more than that, so there were sometimes days and nights without water or lights. She figured she would only have to do this until Spring when the insurance money from her Grandma was supposed to come or at least up until her Granddad got better, whichever came first. Asya was taught well by her Grandparents that troubled times did not last forever so she buried the stress of her life into her songs. The untimely passing of her Grandma impacted her strongly though because she felt she never got to ask her some important things; things like why Asya’s parents gave her away at such an early age and why they never came back to get her.

A cool draft blew in from between the splintered gaps in the old bathroom door reminding Asya that it was time to finally get out the shower. She pulled back the foggy shower curtain and reached for her towel but it wasn’t there; her clothes, shoes, phone, everything was gone. She stood there, highly irritated and dripping wet trying to think of what she should do next. She had an idea of what had happened to all of her things though, and she also knew exactly who had done it. As she looked around the faintly lit bathroom, she noticed several small wet footprints lining the length of the bathroom to and from the door. “That little bastard…” she murmured to herself once she realized that her little cousin had struck again with one of his little pranks he so often liked to do. “Bring me back my clothes you little shit!” she shouted out the now slightly ajar bathroom door. She expected her Granddad to yell out at this point for her to watch her mouth or at least something to that measure but he didn’t say a word. She called out again a few more times but no one said anything. She’d have to run down that long creaky hallway butterball naked to get to her room. She swore on her Grandma’s row of yellow petunias in the garden out front that she’d ring her little cousin’s neck when this was over.

“No one’s home so you might as well go…” she silently sung to herself as she opened the bathroom door and carefully stepped out into the hallway. The light from the stained-glass window at the top of the stairs threw beautiful rainbow-colored rays of sunlight on her already sun-kissed skin, the light reflected off of her body like tiny shimmering crystals on a new glass chandelier. As she got close to the door of her room, she briefly stopped in front of the huge antique mirror at the end of the hall to gaze at her reflection. As beautiful and youthful as her body was, Asya only paid attention to the large dark marks that extended up and down her copper-colored back. She was most conscious about the burned-looking patches of skin that lined both sides of her spine, they reminded you of wings when you got up close enough to see them. But Asya rarely let anyone get that close, she stayed away from certain types of clothing just to keep her marks a secret. It didn’t matter how hot it was out either, she would opt for sweaters and long-sleeved shirts so no one would have to ask about it. All her Grandma would say about them is that they must be some type of birthmark because they were there since the day she was dropped off as a baby. As she finished gazing at the long stretch of dark skin lining her back, she imagined they were a set of beautiful fairy wings brightly shimmering in the sunlit hallway. She danced and twirled in front of the mirror completely forgetting she was naked and allowed herself to just let go for a moment. She may not have liked the marks that lined her back, but they were hers and they made her unique. In a boring, little village like Whispery Pines, different was the best way to be.