Blue Fire

Her English teacher spoke with her after reading her latest essay. He summoned her to his desk after class let out and said, his serious grey eyes staring out from behind thick lenses, that she must learn to censor herself.

She donned her odd smile, the one that twisted her chapped bitten lips into an expression slightly resembling a leer, and replied that she would try to do better.

But afterwards, when she slipped out of the classroom, she wore a different grin. This one was laced with traces of anger, slightly saturated with defiance.

No, she would not learn to censor herself. She would rather have the teacher send another note home to her parents informing them of the excess of expletives in her writing. She would rather sit through another dinner table conference with her parents, watching her father's face slowly flush with frustration and her mother's fill with embarrassment.

"You must stop doing that!" they'd admonish her. "Scarlett, you need to stop now! You've got so much talent, dear; why can't you use it to write about something different?"

And by different, they meant pieces curse words. They meant works with lighter undertones, things that weren't centered around fatality or dark emotions. They wanted nice stories about fluffy kittens discovering the joys of responsibility. They wanted pink and ruffles and femininity.

But she couldn't identify with those things. She detested them, shook them out of her mind with the distaste of a cat shaking raindrops from the arch of its back. Because those sort of stories were many things: expected, general, accepted. But she didn't believe in them, and if she couldn't place faith in them, she refused to create them.

The pieces she wrote were well-written; not even her anal, disapproving teachers could deny that. She was obsessive about punctuation and grammar to the point of perfection; no little red marks dotted her papers like the ones that were scattered over her classmates'. She would allow a teacher to say many things about the subjects of her work, but they would never get her for something as trivial as improper capitalization. If she was going to be discounted, it would be for something she could justify as creative expression.

And creative she was. Almost every night she could be found leaning over the keyboard on her laptop, ferociously tapping away at the small black keys with her snapping eyes focused intensely on the screen, something akin to blue flame licking at her irises as she immersed herself in her writing.

Her parents were slightly frightened to disturb her while she working. Her mother had once confided to Scarlett's father that she thought that Scarlett wasn't entirely present while she was writing, that she was somewhere else and that that place might not be very safe.

Her mother wasn't too far from the truth.

The stories became much darker as the school year progressed. During the first few months, the stories had been centered around mortality, death, and other related subjects. Yes, they were far too deep for a thirteen year old girl, but they were justifiable. Many teenagers pondered their own existence. It was just a stage she would grow through, and before long she would be writing about beautiful, light-hearted things. She would grow out of it.

But judging by the direction in which the stories were going, she didn't appear to be growing out of anything. She seemed to be growing into something, becoming even more comfortable with the rawness of her own mind and becoming more adept at transferring her muses onto paper. And with each essay, her eyes became blue.

But they weren't becoming normally blue. This blue was dark and deep. This blue was amorphous, and it pooled into her eyes like liquid tongues of flame. When Scarlett's mother awoke her in the mornings to tell her that it was time to get up, those eyes would dart open and be filled with startling vehemence. The emotion would vanish seconds afterwards, and the eyes would be back to their normal pale blue so quickly that her mother would be able to dismiss them as products of her own imagination.

As soon as Scarlett's mother left the room, the blue fire would leap back into her eyes as if it had never left. And it would stay there until she went down to breakfast.

It was after Christmas vacation that the stories crossed another line. Scarlett's teacher had a conference with Scarlett's parents and the school principal and debated whether they should have Scarlett 'evaluated.'

"To see if there are any problems Scarlett needs to work through," Scarlett's English teacher said, speaking in the quiet tone grown-ups use when they are trying not to offend other grown-ups but still wish to prove their point.

Scarlett's father wasn't convinced. "Yes, my daughter writes stories that are, for want of a better word, unconventional. But she's only expressing herself. What is wrong with a child having creative expression?"

The principal pushed a file across the desk. With a hesitant glance, Scarlett's father had cracked open the file and glanced over the contents: his daughter's latest story. He'd excused himself not long after finishing, hurrying down the hallways to the restrooms with his hand clutched over his lips to hold back his retches.

The storie was different than anything he'd ever read. Scarlett's father was a hardened veteran of horror stories, devouring the works of the likes of Stephen King and Richard Matheson without batting an eyelash. But there was something different in the way his daughter wove words together that brought on a different sort of horror entirely. It wasn't a zombies-with-rotten-eyeballs-drooping-out sort of horror. It was repulsive, grotesque, hideous. It made the back of his throat prickle with the taste of something putrid.

It was only a week later that Scarlett's mother realized she hadn't heard Scarlett's laptop keys clicking like she normally did. The sound was very prominent, as Scarlett didn't make a habit of typing delicately; she brought her fingers down hard on the keys, almost pounding them down as if added spirit while typing would instill more emotion into her work.

"John," she said quietly, "I think something might be wrong with Scarlett. She's not typing up there. She always types up there. Do you think we should check on her?"

Scarlett's father hesitated. But then he set his book down on the coffee table and climbed up the stairs. There was no need to answer. Scarlett's mother followed suit, and together they crept up the stairs as soundlessly as they could until they were outside Scarlett's bedroom door.

"Scarlett?" John said gently. "Is everything all right?" There was no answer, only a rustling of paper and, John thought, a quiet, thick dripping sound.

"Scarlett?" Scarlett's mother repeated. "Are you all right, honey?" Again, no answer. She reached down and jiggled the doorhandle, but it was locked.

Scarlett's father's face was flushed. "Scarlett, let us in now, or I'm going to open this door myself and come in." No answer. After a moment, he turned and went downstairs. Scarlett's mother heard the clanking sounds of him rustling around in the catch-all drawer, and when he came back up the door with the bedroom key, she was relieved. She wasn't sure why, but she didn't like being all alone upstairs without knowing what was going on in that room, not at all.

He inserted the key into the lock. "Scarlett, I'm coming in now," he warned. He twisted the key, the doorknob clicked, and the door swung slowly open.

Scarlett was sitting in the middle of her floor, an open spiral notebook spread-eagled on the floor in front of her. She was swaying back and forth, her mouth, shredded by the imprints of her sharp small teeth, working silently, forming inaudible words. Her right arm was stuck straight out in front of her at an unnatural angle, dark blood oozing from her wrist and trickling onto the blue-lined paper. Something sharp was clutched in her left hand: her mother's mother-of-pearl letter opener streaked with Scarlett's scarlet blood.

The blue flames were sweltering in her eye sockets, but the flames didn't stop there. They were licking down over her cheekbones and singeing her bangs; her eyebrows were charred and nearly gone. Her flesh was melting down her skull in clumps, clots of skin embedded with hair follicles falling from her skull and onto the floor with small thudding sounds. The room smelled of burning hair and flesh and the new-penny smell both of Scarlett's parents instantly recognized as fresh blood.

There is a horror that knows no words, a fear beyond screams and tears that seizes its victims between its cold teeth and holds them silent, immobile. It was this fear that took Scarlett's parents then. They stood in the doorway to their daughter's bedroom, Scarlett's father holding the bedroom key in one blotchy hand, and did nothing as blue flame devoured their daughter. There were no words of comfort or screams or shivers of grief. There was only the crackling of fire and shallow breaths as they helplessly looked on.

But afterwards, when Scarlett's father walked to the middle of the room, to the singed circle on the floor where he'd watched his only daughter burn to death, there were screams. When he picked up the only thing that remained, a piece of notebook paper with his daughter's handwriting across the front, the room was silent no longer.

The neighbors called the police, and the policemen carted Scarlett's hysterical parents off to the hospital. One of the policeman, a thin, short, moustached officer, confiscated a piece of paper from Scarlett's father.

"What's that?" said another policeman, this one bald and stout.

"I don't know," said the policeman with the moustache, watching as the ambulance transporting Scarlett's parents to the hospital rushed away in a flurry of sirens. "The father was holding it."

"Anything on it?" the chubby policeman asked.

"Yeah," the thin policeman said. "A couple of paragraphs. Written in dark red ink. Never seen ink like this. It smells like pennies."

"Read it," said the other policeman. "Can't hurt, right? Might even be important."

"You're probably right about that," said the policeman as he began to read the paper.

Another ambulance followed Scarlett's parents to the hospital, but this one contained a thin police officer with a moustache. When hospital officials asked the reason for his admittance, the driver of the ambulance said as follows:

"Tried to turn his own weapon on himself. Don't know why. He was rambling about blue fire and letter-openers the whole way over here. Take good care of him, won't you?"