Jeremiah 29:11

• Madeline Mcmurray, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2021

For I know the plans I have for you…
Some days I forget how to live in a world where tomorrow is not promised. The fire burns too much, and takes too little. Tedious work taking years to fall apart and only seconds to end. But it never does. End.
All that is seen through every window, every flickering eye, is the ash of the fallen, falling, running, but never winning the race that is to protect yourself from the catching fire. All that is audible are the shrieks of agony, then the peaceful nanosecond where the setting becomes Heaven, or the hourly minute where this world diverges from a scratch on the knee to a bullet in the heart.
Every metre of this earth is slowly being devoured as I am paralysed into position. Somehow it started, some time away it will engulf the world, some time it will stop. But not after the world is declared soulless, and the Heavens are filled with worshipping souls. The depths of the universe being pulled in by a demeaning force.
The heat against my skin encourages me to sweat beads of the tears I feel I need to let out. The fleeing temporary custodians on earth split into groups, running every which way that is every which way from the eruption spewing from the centre of my momentary home.
The horizon I’ve known to be purple-pink is now the sort of colours a sunset would portray, but the colours are darker and rimmed with smoke and rising ashes.
The cobble stone roads melting into a metallic solid, although rupturing and filling with acids only fabricated from human blood, sweat, and tears.

Plans to prosper you and not to harm you…
The fire is split into two walls like that of a oceanic wave, flickering but not moving, as light beams sprout from the ground, painfully turning into animals with horns and red spikes. The master of deception. The master of love still to come.
Searing pain shoots through my body, electrocuting my bones, pushing me to the ground as I rise up, seeing every other soul rise with me. The saved split away from the damned and float higher, to the left. The damned to the right.

Plans to give you a hope and a future…
After a jolt passing through the spine, we all gravitate towards the ground, silencing the screams of the damned, landing on the fire walls.
Feeling no pain, and having no fear live within me, my eyes snap shut, and I feel the sensation of weighted droplets on my skin.
Footsteps the only distressed sound audible above the rain drenching me in love. Once upon a time Jeremiah would have held me close, when he wrote the encouragement on the 29th of the 11th, only this morning. Somehow he knew I would need it before he said goodbye to me in the first awakenings of the destructive power of the fire.