Brown Paper Box

I stared down at the brown paper box sitting on the kitchen table. I had been living in the forest for sometime now—I had lost track of how long exactly, but I’m guessing it had been a decade or two at least. I had lost all contact with the outside world at this point.

So why would a mysterious box appear on my doorstep?

I was foolish to have brought it inside, I knew. But I had always been a curious creature, and had let it get the better of me. I would be lying if I said I tried to talk some sense into myself as I tore away the paper and opened the box.

My only wish is that I wasn’t so senseless.

When I peered into the box, I was disappointed to see nothing inside. All that anticipation, wasted! I remember being so upset, I had thrown it into the fireplace and went into my bedroom in the back of the cabin to sulk. As I reflect on this, I can’t really be sure as to why my reaction was so extreme. Maybe I missed human contact more than I had realised.

That all seems silly now.

I had awoken in the middle of the night, beads of sweat dripping down my face. The sense of unexplainable dread consumed me, burning in my veins. I just played it off as nerves left over from a nightmare forgotten and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

On the trip back, I stopped in front of the fire, feeling drawn to it.

I have no explanation for what happened next—one minute I was entranced by the fire; the next, lying on the floor. The morning light was flooding in through the roof crumbling around me. One of the beams had fallen on me, and it had taken some effort to get out. I wandered around my ruined cabin, completely lost as to what could have happened.

I can’t remember what led me to this decision, but I found my car keys in the rubble and drove in the direction where I thought the nearest town was. It took a few hours, but eventually I reached it, except it was nothing like what I remembered. Fire had encased it, leaving everything scorched and ash. The only evidence that anyone lived there was the possessions they left behind—there were no survivors, not even corpses.

That was somehow more chilling.

I drove on, passing town after town, all with the same effect. At some point, I ran out of gas, stopping in the middle of the highway. That didn’t deter me, and I continued on foot, occasionally resting until I couldn’t continue anymore and collapsed.

As my memories fade with the time, what happened next has always held strong: it was a clear night. The moon was high in the sky, and as I laid on the asphalt, I had a thought that it was trying to warn me.

Or possibly to mock me.

I began to feel heat on my body that only strengthened until all I felt was searing white pain. Nothing would escape my lips as I struggled. But then it began to be clear to me. The box I had opened wasn’t empty: at all—there was a creature in there. I had freed it. The fire gave it its powers, and it had been devouring anything that came in its path.

It whispered all of this in my ear as I sobbed. It had wanted to spare me, since I had saved it. I felt it’s hand caress my face, and the pain began to ease.

Then, it was gone, and it was just me and the moon once more. I tried to stand, but I found I couldn’t. I squirmed to get into a position where I could see my body, only to realise I didn’t have one anymore—or, not one I recognized as such. What had once been flesh and bones had been replaced with flames. My sobbing grew as I expected to become ash, but that never happened. I became a being of fire, unable to be extinguished.

Unable to die.

The creature had wanted to spare me, but this is not the life I ever wanted, even when I craved isolation. Anything about my humanity—anything about me—has been stripped from me. My own name is a mystery to me, long since forgotten. I can no longer remember what I looked like, what was important to me, why I had lived in the cabin in the first place.

My memory now is beginning to fade. Soon, I will just be a flame, all semblance of who I once was, gone.

Until the flame creature runs out of humans to eat, that is.