Every New Year’s Eve, they had a bonfire. Synthia would just stare into the flames, letting the marshmallow on her stick char and burn until her dad would yell at her, pull the fiery stick out of her hands and throw the whole thing into the fire.
No one saw the worlds inside the fire except Synthia. Synthia grew up believing she just had an overactive imagination. Just like seeing shapes in the clouds, she could see shapes in the dancing flames. But unlike shapes in the clouds, the shapes she saw in the flames were vivid, detailed and contained whole worlds.
She never meant to do anything but watch, always from a safe distance. But she became fascinated with the visions in the fire. And when she went to college, and her roommate left a lighter out one day, and she took it and hid it, she realized she could ignite a flame whenever she wanted and watch whatever it chose to show her each time. Even the small lighter's flames revealed more than they should. She saw worlds. She saw moons. She saw space ships and space whales caressed by flames but unharmed.
She didn’t mean to drop the lighter. She didn’t mean to drop the flame on the bottle of nail-polish remover her roommate had spilled on the carpet. But as the flames spread and the smoke detectors went off, she chose to stay and watch as the world in the flames encompassed the room in panoramic view.
She was in her dorm room, standing on the carpet. But she was, simultaneously, on an alien world, standing on sand, surrounded by the rocky dunes of an alien desert. The scene was rendered in hot, vivid orange. It seemed so real, not just a figment of her overactive imagination.
The next moment happened in a split second, and yet, it seemed to last forever. The overhead sprinklers hissed as they came to life. And in that same moment, she gasped, heart in her throat, cried, “No!” and leapt – not over the flames, but into them.
When the water smothered the flames and the firefighters surged in, searching for survivors, they found none in that room. Synthia had vanished along with the fire.
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Image Source: jd_art_x on Instagram
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