Words Like Wildfire

It wasn't until she had run several miles in the opposite direction of her front door that Serenity finally felt the release of one of the threads of tension strung across her chest; the only problem was, it felt like there were a thousand more still holding strong. God, she wanted to scream. But she knew this town and its inhabitants all too well. The judgment and gossip that would follow would be insufferable.

This town had felt like a prison for far too long. She hated the person she had to be to survive here, to have any resemblance of a life and friends. She had worked so hard to escape it, saving every penny, spending hours behind a computer screen, a cheap ass camera lens, and watching the same youtube tutorials over and over again. She had fought hard to make connections, to get any opportunity. She'd done the damn-near impossible. None of it mattered anymore with the money gone.

Her body gave part-way into the grief as a strangled sob made its way roughly out of her throat. It was gone. The twenty thousand dollars she had put away over the last few years had been ripped away from her. It was supposed to be her ticket out of here and onto the production team for the travel company that could have launched her career.

She had to give her parents credit for timing; her 18th birthday was less than two months away, she would have been able to remove them as custodians from her account. They could never have taken the money out of her account then. They cried when they told her, saying it was the only way they wouldn't lose the house, that they would pay her back as soon as they could. It wouldn't be soon enough. She'd lose the opportunity with the crew and credibility with her contacts who had helped her. They'd just set her back 5-10 years, if not indefinitely. What if she never made it out of this god-forsaken town?

Her knees crumpled slowly beneath her until they sunk into the sand. She panted out all the pain, frustration, and sadness swelling inside her. When her hot tears had finally stopped obstructing her vision, her eyes focused on something in the sand. A matte black object peaked through. She dug her hands into the soft surface enclosing it and pulled out the book. It was small and thin, with fabric that looked old but not worn. In gold lettering, the front read:

"Write your pain and find it dulled

Write pain towards others to see what you desire

Speak the words to make it that which you can hold

But know pain comes when you light such a fire.

Was this some kind of weird, morbid poetry book? She opened the book. No. Instead, she found sand spilling out of blank pages.

Serenity blew past her parents before they could pull her into another apologetic conversation and shut herself in her room. How am I supposed to live in this house with them, the house they chose over my future? Her anxious thoughts left her pacing. They had been loving parents despite all their downfalls in worldly provisions, and she could never hate them. But she didn't know how to forgive them for something like this. It felt like her heart and mind were being torn apart from every nuanced contributor to this impossible situation.

The notebook sat on her desk. She didn't know what had compelled her to take it, just as she didn't know what was compelling her eyes to flick towards it constantly. She had never been much for writing, but she felt the intrusive pull to sit down and pour out her feelings in inky waves. She abruptly stopped her pacing and yanked the back of her desk chair towards herself. She sat in front of the blank pages, took several deep breaths, and began writing.

Her parent's calls for dinner were what finally pulled her out of the vortex she had fallen into. She had written the entire afternoon away. She shut the book. There was now a calmness that allowed her to accept the idea of dining with her parents without a pit of dread coiling inside of her.

Dinner came with silence but also deeper breaths than she had experienced all day. That was until her parents tried to explain themselves once again. It was as if they had just ushered in a whole new forecast of black stormy clouds in her mind. She now sat in a stale kind of silence, rage beginning to boil once again. She shot up and retreated back to her room, hoping the slam of the door hurt her parents as much as it did the doorframe.

Her entire brain felt full of white-hot thoughts to the point of blindness. She suddenly realized she was sitting at her desk again, with the book open to the next blank page. All restraint now shattered, she began to write every word she wished she could scream in her parents' faces. Time faded away as she wrote but there finally came a moment where her attention lapsed enough to see something she couldn't explain; a Hundred dollar bill sitting on her desk. A shocked half-second passed before she jolted for the money. Her hand went right through it as if she was a ghost. No. her hands clawed for the bill a few more times before she gave up.

Maybe... maybe if I keep writing, it'll become real.

She gave into the impossible thought, and she wrote and wrote and wrote. As she wrote out all the anger and bitterness she had accumulated for this town and its occupants, more money appeared. All of it, however, remained an intangible image, a taunt.

She kept writing; she didn't know what else to do. Maybe if she reached twenty thousand, if she got back what she lost, it would become real. She forgot about sleep, frantically burned through the hours of the night. The pile of bills grew larger until it spilled off her desk and onto the ground around her. The morning had long since arrived when she finally reached her goal. Two hundred unspoken conflicts aired out over what had once been a blank book.

She took a deep breath, hoping, wishing, praying, manifesting, whatever it took, that it had worked. Then, slowly she reached her hand towards the pile, clenching her eyes tightly right before trying to grab the top of the pile. Her hand passed right through.

"NO!" she screamed as helplessness set in even harder than it had before.

Her parents burst into her room.

"What's wrong?!" Her mother asked frantically.

"Are you hurt? What happened?!" her father had rushed to her side.

Serenity just sat there, numb, angry, silent, eyes transfixed on the imaginary money that mocked her.

"Honey…" the panic had left her dad's voice, and he tried to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder.

"No!" She screamed again, shoving him away. "This is all your fault! Both of you! You're making your fucking kid pay for the mistakes you've made! You stole my future from me because you failed in ever securing one for yourselves!" she hated herself for saying it, but at the same time, it was freeing to speak the words that had been torturing her for hours.

She could see the shattering heartbreak in their faces, that was until it turned to utter horror. Her mother's screams pierced the crushing silence, her father doubled over, and Serenity watched in shock as the skin around her parents' arms blistered and smoked as red marks that looked like letters burned into their flesh.

She rushed towards them as they instinctively backed out of her room. They looked up at her with questioning gazes, and she almost dove towards them. She wanted to hug them, cry and apologize for whatever it was she had just done, but something stopped her, and she shut the door instead. She leaned on her desk as her mind went dizzy.

Her right hand was resting on one of the fantom bills, except she now could feel the crisp edge to the paper against her palm. She snatched up the bill and the one next to it. Real! They were real. She went to grab a fistful from the pile, but her hand passed through them. What? She quickly closed the notebook to study the words on the front.

"Speak the words to turn images into things to hold."

There it was; it had been staring her in the face the whole time. She opened the first few pages she had written in and started saying all the terrible things she had written out loud, trying to keep the last line of the inscription and the smell of burning flesh out of her mind. After a few minutes, she began searching through the bills trying to find others that had been transformed. None had.

Something clicked in her mind. Maybe it was fed by desperation, maybe something worse. She quickly began setting up her camera equipment in her room. Before she knew it, she was live-streaming straight to the screens of everyone she knew in town. Reality felt less real as she began to pour out every word she had written. She spat out years of harbored feelings in what felt like a fever dream. She burned through the lines she had written and watched the view number grow on her screen, even as the pile of now very real money grew beside her. Now in a trance, she had one goal: finish, get the money.

Finally, her eyes came to empty lines. She'd done it. She quickly hit the "send" button, glaring red at her, and plunged her hands into the pile of money where every bill now crinkled under the pressure of her fingers. It was there, every dollar that had been stolen from her. The money that would buy her future was her's again. Giddy laughter of unbelief spilled out of her.

But suddenly, it wasn't her laughter falling on her ears. What was that sound? Was it… screaming? Her bones iced over with the realization that the screams belonged to her parents. She bolted for her bedroom door, but it was suddenly unopenable. She was trapped inside. The screaming grew. It wasn't just two screams anymore but the sound of dozens, maybe hundreds, of screams in different volumes coming from all around her. That's when she saw them, blazing silhouettes running out of homes and throwing themselves on the ground.

Dear God, what was happening?! Suddenly it was her own front door that swung open, and she saw her parents escape outside, doing everything they could to extinguish themselves. Nothing worked. Serenity pounded against her window, trying to smash it, pull it off, anything. She had to get to them. She had to save them from the… the fire. She grabbed the book and re-read that damned inscription.

"But know pain comes when you light such a fire."

This was her doing—the burns on her parents— the money materializing— the horror show her town had become. It was all her fault.

She tried pulling the book apart to no avail. She grabbed the scissors from her desk drawer, but they inflicted no damage to the pages. The book was indestructible, but she knew in her gut that destroying it was the only way to stop this wildfire she had ignited. Her eyes suddenly fell on the pin that had written her cursed inky words, and one last idea entered her head.

Three new words suddenly took up one of the few empty pages left. She ran to her vanity by her door, looked her reflection dead in the eye, and read the desperately sloppy lettering out loud.

"You're a monster."

Hot bursts of yellow, orange and red sparked out of her fingertips and quickly climbed up her arms. She held the notebook in the center of it until it finally caught, shriveling and sinking into its own blackness. Every word she had written burned out of existence until finally, all was quiet. She watched her arm and all the flaming bodies suddenly extinguish. Her parents rose from the ground. They were ok. She saw more movement from the surrounding lawns and streets. Everyone was ok. Finally, her eyes moved back to her desk. The money was gone.