Free Write - Scrap

A scrap was all that was left. Of her home, of her past, of her life, honestly. It looked like it had once been a part of a dish towel – it was a horrible muddy green color that she and her brother had always given their mom a hard time about. It didn’t match the rest of her perfect kitchen. Between the pristine white tile backsplash and the live edge counter tops, the splotchy mess that was those hand towels had always been out of place. Mom had just smiled though, whenever they made fun of her. Those towels had been dyed by her two babies and they hadn’t been allowed to go anywhere else.

Daphne clutched the charred corner in her hand. It was still warm. Edges slightly smoking and deeply blackened from the flames that had consumed everything else. Her eyes burned. They were too dry and cloudy from smoke and grief to let any of the tears that wanted out to fall, but she felt them there. Waiting. Until the moment she had recovered enough, her body from the trauma and her mind from the shock, to feel the truth of what had happened to her over the past hour.

It felt like it should have taken longer. She didn’t know what started it, just that she had woken up with a gasp and felt heat radiating from the wall behind her headboard. Instinctively she had scrambled out her open window, she never could sleep with it closed, and dropped down to the insultingly dewy grass of their front yard. When she turned around the house was already up in flames. Great spouts seeming to surround the back of the house, making it flowy and shadow-like as they crept along, eating everything in their path. In mere moments her window had shattered from the heat. Daphne had run, screaming back to the front door, pulling on the locked handle as though it would somehow yield in the face of her blind panic. She tugged and slammed her shoulder against the door, screaming their names.

“Mom!” Her forearms ached as she threw herself at the door over and over.

“Dad!” Her fingernails broke and bled as she dug for a rock to break a window.

“Derek!” Her lungs cried out as smoke filled them, pouring between broken glass as she fought to find a way in.

Daphne crashed her away across the grass, coughing and hacking, the black of the smoke in her lungs mixing with the red on her hands. She heard the sirens, faint, but there they were. A fierce hope rose in her chest. There was a chance. Until she heard a great crash, and turned wide eyes back to the house in time to see the second part of the roof, the one right over Derek’s bedroom, break and fall and crush anything that could have been underneath it. Bringing her hands up to her mouth in dismay, she realized the worst.

If they had still had a chance, she would have seen them by now. Would have heard them by now. They would have been banging on their windows, signaling for help, hell they could have gone out the front door until just a few minutes ago. No, for them not to be out there with her meant, that it had already taken them from her. The fire had to have consumed them already, smoke taking their lungs and their life, before the fire took the rest of them, her home and happiness along with it.

The wind had picked up as the fire engines came closer, sirens blaring. It had blown soot, heat, and this scrap of fabric her way. She hit her knees in the wet grass, clutching it to her chest, watching it all burn away.