Don't Hurt Yourself

Flames, full as a forest, floor the four-acre field of fruit. Cracks from collapsing crops and roars from the fire inhaling the air thunder through the mournful morning. Seancé, sweet Seancé Javier, stands still on the street from a safe distance away, blinded by the blaze.

“Everybody in this town,” Seancé sighs, “hates me so much that they’d burn their own food just to see me starve.”

A hand hugs hers. “Not me,” consoles Kelly, calm Kelly Ashmeade. Seancé tries to smile, but the heavy air pulls it back down.

Earlier today, the cousin of this conflagration consumed Seancé’s bakery, Janie’s Tea Cakes, named after her grandmother who gifted Seancé with a little leather-bound black recipe book when she turned twelve.

“You the brightest baby in this family in years,” Janie Javier told Seancé when she gave her the book in her small kitchen that smelled of sorrel and cinnamon, “in generations. Even more than your mama, than me, and sure more than your sisters that moved on up to the city.” Janie planted the book into Seancé’s palms. “In the right hands, these recipes can bring rain to a desert.”

But they didn’t bring her love from her neighbours, who had always treated the Javiers poorly. “That’s how it is in this town and towns like this,” Janie explained one afternoon in the family’s four-acre melon patch when Seancé came home crying from school. “Don’t pay them no mind. Keep your head up and your eyes on the prize. And you still have your little classmate, Kelly. She always been nice to you. Okay? The righteous will be rewarded, and the cruel will be condemned. Let the universe take care of it. What else can you do?”

She could have moved, like her sisters did, to more accepting cities, but she stayed to be with Janie, then to take care of her, and then to honour her memory when she passed. Seancé opened Janie’s Tea Cakes—selling all of the recipes in the little black book, most of which included melons, except for the last one, “To Cook Up a Storm”, which Seancé thought was a pleasant prank, a piece of Janie’s personality—to preserve her grandmother’s perseverance in this painful place.

Starting and sustaining the bakery was strenuous. Nobody wanted to sell her their real estate at a reasonable price. Knowing her reputation in the town, the insurance companies charged her near-crippling premium rates. The townsfolk tolerated it, and barely so, only because there was no better maker of desserts and baked goods in this barren beach town. The nice customers wouldn’t say a word to Seancé; the rest would spit at her hatefully as they threw their cash on the counter. In spite of this, Seancé always smiled and said, “Good morning,” or “Good evening,” and “Have a nice day,” or “Have a nice night.” Only Kelly, who stopped by every single day for nine years to buy a honeydew muffin and catch up with her childhood friend, was remotely pleasant.

Earlier today, when nobody was in the store but Seancé, a group of teenagers, the sons of the classmates who tormented her as a child, taunted her from the front of the large shop window, knowing that nobody in the town would punish them for bothering her; in fact, they would have been patted on the back. After a minute or two, still smiling and laughing, the baleful boys blissfully sprinted away.

Stirred, but not shaken, Seancé was inexplicably compelled to read the last recipe of Janie’s book to relax. Perhaps a part of her thought she needed a laugh. “To Cook Up a Storm: one part honey, one part whisky, one part cognac, one part champagne, three parts lemonade, and three parts iced tea. Prepare more than you can handle. Drink while watching a bonfire”—

Suddenly smelling smoke, Seancé instinctively looked back at her kitchen, and, pocketing her book, ran to the room, scanning it quickly only to discover no smoke, fire, or heat.

Not expecting the worst, she returned to the front of the bakery.

But there it was, engulfing the storefront, the door, the only way in or out.

Gasping, Seancé burst into the kitchen and filled up her biggest bowls with water. She rushed to the fire and threw the water on the flames.

Nothing.

Too scared to cry, to do anything but persist, Seancé immediately ran back to the kitchen for more water.

Her second attempt at extinguishing the fire was futile.

Yet she tried again.

And again.

The flame had reached the ceiling.

She didn’t know what to do but surrender to the smoke. Her hope evaporated by the heat, Seancé’s tears condensed and trickled down the melanin of her cheek. If she could have thrown her tears into the fire, she would’ve.

From the corner of her eye, beyond the wall from hell, Seancé saw a tiny, frantic figure. Kelly, noticing that she got her friend’s attention, motioned for Seancé to back away from the storefront. Seancé complied. Holding bricks in both hands, Kelly ran towards the window and catapulted them through. When the window broke, Kelly leaped over the flames and into the bakery, picked up Seancé by the shoulders, and helped her hop over the fire to the safety of the street where a crowd of townspeople spectated.

“Let’s go home,” Kelly soothed Seancé.

They did, and that’s when they saw the four-acre Javier melon meadow melting.

With no hope of recovering her family’s farm, Seancé has no choice but to endure and continue into the future. She first stops by the police station to report the arson.

“Nobody in this town would do that,” the officer scoffs, “especially not my son and his friends. But according to your insurance company, you’re entitled to twenty-thousand dollars for your losses. Your little bakery wasn’t doing too well lately, was it?”

Seancé says her store was thriving..

“I can tell when someone’s lying,” the officer replies, “and your story doesn’t add up. Do you know that it’s a crime to file a false police report? Now, we’ll let you go free...if you hand over that insurance money.”

Seancé requests a trial.

Laughing, the officer snarls, “Do you really think a jury from this town would be kind to you and your kind?”

Seething, Seancé storms out of the station onto the street, having settled to sacrifice her twenty-thousand-dollar insurance for her freedom.

“At least I still have the book,” she tries reassuring herself.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Vindictive and vengeful thoughts, thoughts of wreaking her wrath onto those who wronged her, begin to poison her perspective. But, what can she do?

Moping in her melancholy, Seancé reads her recipe book to reminisce, each page only adding to her agonizing anguish. She savours the sadness, but when she sees the last page, the recipe for a storm, the image of a tornado juxtaposed with the faces of the boys who burned down her bakery, the officer who blackmailed her, and the men who made her life intolerable since she was born. intrigues her and fuels her fury, fanning the fire in her gut. Incensed, she senses the smoke and the heat rise to her heart, to her eyes, and to the crown of her head, and now, nothing could carry a more elating antidote, a more electric adrenaline through her veins.

“To Cook Up a Storm.”

Seancé promptly purchases the ingredients needed for the potion, concocts it, and pours it into a mason jar. She brings it to the beach, where she can complete the steps of this spell. “Prepare more than you can handle. Drink while watching a bonfire built on the sand. Drink while you hold your holy book and your instrument of retribution. Drink while you let the dark clouds consume your consciousness.”

Her thoughts are already turbulent, and Janie’s little leather-bound black book is both her holy book and weapon of brash destruction. Confident that she meets the criteria, Seancé swallows burning gulp after burning gulp, focused on the fire, squinting at its stinging smoke. What can she do now but wait? Reveling in the rage as the minutes go by, Seancé begins to enjoy the warmth of her anger, as if the potion’s chemical properties are a catalyst for the combustion of the blaze in her belly boiling her blood. .

She stays up all night, sulking and soaking in her temper. At dawn, the darkness continues as clouds of a tempest slowly surge towards the town. The temperature rises rapidly. Seancé smiles while she watches the rain clouds loom over the town, anxiously anticipating the attack of the hurricane.

Finally, it comes. First, she feels a raindrop trickling down the melanin of her cheek. The drizzle doesn’t dampen the bonfire, which still hasn’t gone out since she started it the night before. Neither do the downpour or the wind.

Wanting to gloat, wanting to see her tormentors run and hide and scream and cry, wanting to see their houses reduced to rubble, their clothes and their food and their life’s work ruined, and wanting to see twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of melancholia. Seancé starts to stroll into town, bringing the flood at her feet. At the remnants of Janie’s Tea Cakes, she turns her back to the storefront and eyes to the street, to watch the wind and water drown this sinful town. Serenely she stands still in the splendour of the storm like a sinister sorceress, like a guardian ghost, like the angel of death.

Over the next hour, she watches branches, boards, boxes, books, and bread all lifelessly whisk away in the waist-high flood water.

“There you are!” she faintly hears amidst the shrieking wind and shouting rain. “What are you doing out here?!” Seancé turns and sees Kelly wading through the water. The storm suddenly feels unsettling. Against the overwhelming wind, Seancé tries maneuvering to meet her friend in the middle, but she physically can’t.

By the time Kelly swims to where Janie’s Tea Cakes used to stand, the flood has risen to their chests. “Let’s get inside,” says Kelly, who has scarlet scratches and scrapes across her face. She takes Seancé by the hand to head into the bakery. Cuts, some deep, are on her arm, too.

Seancé doesn’t move.

“I’m stuck!” Seancé shouts. The murky water is now up to her neck. Without hesitation, Kelly dives under the water to free the fabric from whatever hook is preventing her from escaping to safety.

Violent, the flood, carrying now roofs and doors and furniture, has reached Seancé’s mouth. It’s been a minute since Kelly submerged under the water.

“Kelly?!” Seancé screams.

“Kelly!” Seancé kicks her legs, hoping it can signal to her friend to come back up for air.

“Kelly!” Another few seconds pour down over the spot where Kelly dove..

Seancé looks in horror at the absence of her friend.

“No, no, no…”

Then, Kelly resurfaces. “You almost kicked me!” she laughs.

Dragging Seancé along by the hand, Kelly swims into the store. They make it to the counter and stand on it. Their torsos are out of the water.

“I tried looking for you at your house,” Kelly gasps to Seancé. “What were you doing out in the middle of the storm?”

Seancé can’t answer her, and she will never get the chance to. A few days after the flood—the rain will not have stopped falling—Kelly will pass away, having contracted cholera in the water from saving Seancé’s life for the second time.

Following her funeral, Seancé will visit her family’s decimated four-acre melon patch in the same spot where she and Kelly stood when they watched it burn. She’ll take out the little leather-bound black book that her grandma Janie gave her, somehow undamaged by the floodwater, and she’ll read the recipes, which will stay unsoiled by her tears falling onto the page and by the rain replenishing the soil where her fruit was felled by flames.