The Flame

• Shannon Burns, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2017

There’s fire. I hear it, even though fire is usually silent. Because I don’t hear the sound of licking flames, as they pound against bricks, and mortar. Instead I hear the screaming. And I know that fire doesn’t scream. But my sister does.

I run up the street, in my thin, little nightgown, and feet I haven't had time to clothe with slippers. The night is starless. I run to my only light in the flame.

“Alexis!” I shout. She spins around, her hair tied in a braid that’s started to come loose, her arms hanging limp by her sides. She runs to me.

“Casey!” She shouts back. She grabs at my wrist, and starts pulling.
“No,” I tell her, “it’s too late”. Tears well in her eyes, and I am scared to look at them, because they do not usually hold hatred, but tonight I expect that they will. I avert mine.

Alexis struggles against me, she tries to make for the flames. I grab at her, hold her tightly whilst she punches me.
“We have to go in!” She hollers, again and again, breaking my heart a little further every time her voice cracks, “we have to go in there!”

I’m about to remind her that it is too late, but my asthma is playing up in the smoke, and my words are taking too long, an inevitable waste of little breath I can find. My grip must slacken when I open my mouth. Alexis slips out of it. She darts away like a shadow on the wind, and I follow after her.

“Alexis,” I cough and splutter, and hold my t-shirt to my mouth in the hope I will filter some air through it. “Alexis!” I say again. Maybe she doesn’t hear me, or maybe she refuses to answer, or maybe the oxygen deprivation is getting too much, and my hearing doesn’t notice her speaking. Either way, my own name does not pound back to my ears.

I’ve never been so hot. Are people supposed to sweat like this? I drop to my hands and knees, I remember something vague about smoke rising.

I find Alexis in the lounge room, but it’s not a lounge room anymore. Now it’s just a shell of ashes. Alexis is clambering along the floor. In this orange flicker I catch a glimpse of her hand, blistered from where she is groping.

“Ah!” I strike gold. I find the necklace, the stupid necklace I never understood why Alexis liked so much anyway, ugly thing it is. This necklace that was my grandmother’s. It leaves holes in my skin from holding it, but I will not let it go. “Come on!” I shout with my last breath, but it is she who makes my request a reality.

I wake up a few days later, in a sterile white room, with a bandaged empty fist. Alexis sits at my bedside, that stupid gem hanging round her neck.
“Thank you,” she says. It’s enough.