I Caused It

• Yesmina Chen, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2021

His piercing screams filled the smoky air. Thick scarlet lashes swallowed him as he fell, like a frozen statue, into the feasting flames until he disappeared. His frightened face was stamped on my mind, not believing that happened. Not believing I caused it.
I woke up, sweaty and panting. “I caused it. I caused it.” I whispered as tears streamed down my damp face. I pushed my brother into it. Simply because I was foolish and childish a few years ago when I didn’t know how to appreciate people. Simply because he annoyed me before it happened and I pushed him into the fire.
It hurt to think about him and even more to think about the reason why it did. No one alive knew what actually happened in the large bush near our house, no one but me. Everyone just assumed after one glance at my tear streaked face that night without a similar one by my side that he fell into the flames that destroyed millions of homes without even asking.
I swept the fluffy white blanket off my long legs and hugged it close to my welling eyes, calming and soothing me a bit. I’ve never really healed from the scar that came with missing him, my brother. My brother that I always used to claim that I hated. My brother that I really loved, deep in my heart. I just never appreciated him until he drifted away so quickly from this world.
I just plainly sat lamenting there in the dark, thinking about Andy, my dead brother. My parents cried too but not in this way. I knew that they too had been scarred when he died. But no one had a cut as deep as mine. Nobody could ever have pain such as mine because I murdered someone I loved who was in my family.
I dropped the blanket I was holding onto the soft surface of my bedsheets and slipped out of my dusky room and out into the living room. My brother had been swallowed by the rampaging flames fuelled by hunger when we were trying to hurry away from the bushfire that almost surrounded our old house when we were separated. The wall of furious red burned in front of us when Andy ran way too slowly. I blamed him and just meant to shove him till he fell to the ashes on the floor but he never reached it but fell in ear-piercing screams into the fire.
I would remember that until I died in what I hoped would be jail, like I deserved.
“I wish I didn’t do what I did, I was so foolish.” I breathed into the darkness, tears overflowing from my eyes to my dark hair. I curled into a ball on the cool timber, sobbing silently into my lank hair. I would stay like that every night for the rest of my life.