The Day I Burned
Flash Fiction
I wrote this piece for a Storyletter prompt, Exploring the Unknown. Of course my little morbid brain went directly to the ultimate unknown: Death. I hope you enjoy.
The first time I saw a body, they pulled a white sheet over it to hide her face. She lay motionless, lips blue and parted like she was drowning on the universe, taking in worlds within worlds. But the image was just that: illusion. She was gone.
I only had a minute, but I recalled her face. The color of her hair, swept back against the white of the hospital sheet, before the paramedics lifted at once and pushed her, not kicking and screaming, into the ambulance. They were too late.
It was the same as mine, brown and long, but the blood did something strange at her hairline. It was like grease, slick and sticky against the scalp. Her skin was paler than mine had been when I last stared at myself in the mirror and left for work. Poor thing.
I looked around to see if anyone else was noticing this, taking the time to stop and look at this girl. Alive one minute and gone the next. But they were earthbound, two feet planted on the ground, and I was, as I noticed for the first time, floating above.
I waited for panic that didn’t come, and looked down. The girl was hidden, tucked into the back of the ambulance, but the car wasn’t. The sedan, blue and cracked open like her lips by the jaws of life that had sawed to make a way for rescue, only too late, was mine. I didn’t know it at first, but the little skull, painted neon and black for the Day of the Dead, was unmistakable. A gift from my dad.
He was always doing things like that. Buying me odds and ends from city festivals and county fairs. Now look at it. I shook my head. He should have it, that trinket, to remind him of me. A firefighter, dressed in a yellow suit and heavy helmet stood near my car.
“Sir!” I yelled to him, but the words didn’t travel.
I tried to move towards him, to tell him to give the skull to my dad. He would need it in the coming days. I stretched my arms out like superman, then whipped them back. The motion propelled me up, so high that I could barely make out the windshield.
The ambulance started. They didn’t bother turning the lights on. It meandered onto busy road, interrupting a line of speeding drivers. The cars shot around it like pinballs, little ants endlessly running until the circuitry busted.
It picked up speed, and I felt something. A tug, hard and cool against my belly. When I looked down, there was a cord. I hadn’t noticed it nestled just above my navel, in the curving butterfly wing where my sternum flowered into rib cage. I touched it. It was woven, the fibers of it sinewy and cream colored like bone.
The ambulance lurched forward and I did too, the cord taut beneath my fingertips. It headed for the highway, and I braced myself for speed. The city lights below were a chorus of yellows and whites, broken up now and again by the blinking eye of a radio tower. The sound of cars roared beneath me, their engines a knife edge against the crisp air that I moved through, a leaf in the autumn wind.
Wind whipped against my face as I was pulled onward, a postmortem parasail in the moonlight. I looked up and saw a wall of grey-blue cloud racing towards me and closed my eyes, my hands grasping onto the cord to brace myself for the hit. But instead of the blow, I felt a sudden chill, the softness of morning dew.
Work had been all consuming. And before that it had been school. How long had it been since I had wandered outside to feel that sensation against my skin? Morning was chaos, the pain of tired muscles, the train engine of traffic pushing me job-ward.
The cord slackened as the ambulance stopped in front of the big red letters spelling EMERGENCY. They opened the back doors and pulled the shrouded body from the ambulance. The cord was attached to her.
I pulled my way down on the strange rope, fighting my newfound buoyancy, to get a better look at her dead face. I sat on the edge of the bed as they pushed it through automatic doors, and glimpsed the waiting room before they rushed into an elevator. A little girl was sitting in her mother’s lap, her thumb stuck in her mouth as we passed through, and into the wing where they carried the dead. I waved, and she stared at the body under the sheet.
When we got to the room, people were waiting. A young woman pulled the sheet down and stared at my face. I leaned over to get a better look. As I reached up to touch my cheek, my fingertips started to disintegrate, the skin turning into speckled embers of dusty light. A doctor put a stethoscope to my chest, waited, then shook his head. His face was blurred behind floating embers of light, my outstretched fingertips fading and churning up towards the ceiling.
Voices outside, and then the doors ripped open. My dad, standing wide-eyed in the doorway. I tried to reach for him, but the invisible flame consumed my forearms. I had no hand to caress his cheek. I watched as shock and grief filled in the space I used to hold.
“Sir?” a voice said from behind him.
My dad turned. It was the fireman, holding up a gloved hand. My dad’s shoulders trembled. A little skull, painted brilliant hues of red and pink and green, sat in his upturned palm, a trinket for my passing.
A sound like crackling wood fills my ears, and I rise into the air. The cord lays black and dying, broken against the white of the sheet, ashy wood in the spent remains of a fire pit. The last thing tethering me to this world. And with its break, I burst into flame, the essence of me spreading up and up in a thousand different directions, rising above my father’s shaking sobs. A flaming flower blooming in winter soil.
A stunning achievement!
Wow. Got a Kleenex handy? 🥹. Really, really well told story.