LJ Idol Week 19: Kindling

She had always been afraid of fire. Her brothers, on the other hand, loved it. They never stopped sticking their fingers into lit candles or making campfires in the woods. They played with matches and once even set their bedroom on fire.

But that didn’t stop them. They were wild and out of control, and they never played by the rules.

She did, though. She was the good child, the dependable child, the one her parents could always count on. She went to school and did her homework and got good grades. She sewed dresses and shirts for the neighbors down the street to earn extra money to help ends meet. She met a nice boy when she was sixteen and married him at eighteen. She was a good wife — she stayed at home and gave him three children before she turned twenty-three, and she took care of those children while he worked nine to five.

Her life wasn’t exciting, but it was stable.

Her brothers’ lives were the opposite. They played with fire, and they often got burned. Tommy got caught in the wrong crosshairs when he was nineteen and never came home. Billy threw it all away when he was thirty-two because he was too far under to come back out.

“You were always the good one,” her parents told her at Billy’s funeral.

But now, sitting in her lonely, cold room, she sometimes wondered if her brothers had been the ones who’d had it right all along. They’d seen more in their short years than she had seen in her ninety-seven.

All those years and what had they amounted to? Just a stack of photos lying on an otherwise empty desk, and a few nurses who came by to check on her at regular intervals.

Her husband had never come back from the war. Two of her children were gone, their lives lived much like their uncles, their fates remarkably similar. Her third child was out there somewhere, but he had long stopped visiting. She doubted she would be able to find him even if she tried.

The only thing she had for constant company was the clock. It ticked on, every second of every day, always doing the right thing, revealing to her that her time was coming, too.

Slow and steady. Her whole life slow and steady.

Maybe it wasn’t too late.

She summoned a strength she didn’t know she had and scooted to the edge of the bed, her whole body protesting, her every movement sending searing pain through joints that no longer wanted to move. Her bare feet slid off the sheets and on to the floor, and she gasped at the feel of the coldness she found.

Her hands gripped the walker that sat by her bed, and she pulled herself up. The world spun slightly, but she pressed on, putting one foot in front of the other until it became just a little bit easier.

She found what she was looking for in a drawer. Lying there on top of old documents, as if it had been waiting for her all along.

She pulled it all out and hobbled over to the stack of photos, lying the documents down just beside them.

Her whole life, boiled down to kindling.

She lit the lighter and made her decision.

It was time to stop being afraid.



The above is all fiction and was written for Week 19 of therealljidol.