by E K Bennett
I arrange the logs around the fire pit and Sam comes out with a bottle of lighter fluid and the stack of papers from on my bed. “Where did you get that lighter fluid?” I ask her.
She smiles deviously. “From my own personal stash…”
“Sam,” I say, shaking my head. “I have lighter fluid here, you know.”
She twists the cap and starts pouring the fire juice onto the logs. “No way, babycakes. I’m using my own for this job. It’s a special occasion.”
I roll my eyes and we each light a match.
“Let’s go to town!” I yell and we throw the matches into the fire pit all at once.
Sam starts dancing when it instantly goes up in flames, then she starts passing out papers.
“You okay?” Josh asks, squeezing my hand when I look down at the ripped-out sketchbook page.
“Yeah,” I reassure him, grasping it tightly. “It’s just that this was the first one I drew.”
The paper is flimsy from all the times that I’ve folded and unfolded it, admiring how well I’d sketched the nine-year-old demon with a bloody black dress. It makes me angry just to look at it, how at one point I was almost obsessed with the portrait. Lotty had tricked me into thinking that she was an innocent murder-victim who wanted company. I was so excited to figure out what her story was, and in the end it bit me in the ass.
I ball up the paper. “The little bitch,” I mutter and throw it into the flames.
After that we pass around more sketches until they’re all completely reduced to ashes in the fire, and Sam does the honors of cremating the Ouija board. I throw in the note Lotty stole as the sun starts to set.
As much as I’d love to erase the past six months from my memory, my eyes won’t let me. My complete colorblindness is a constant reminder of what happened to me, my family, and my friends. The White Lady was right- the doctors think I’m a miracle. They couldn’t find a single scar on me and by the time they got a chance to do the routine tests, the White Lady had already healed me completely. Then, of course, she was expelled from my body and into nonexistence. But still, only a handful of people know what really happened to me, and the doctors are left to ponder the girl who died and mysteriously came back. They didn’t let me out of the hospital for a month and even now they call me back every month to see if I’m stable. They think I have heart problems or brain damage; they used some big words that I didn’t care about at the time and still don’t because I know the truth. Yet they cannot for the life of them figure out why I’m colorblind.
There’s no way I’d tell them that I’ve seen death, and it’s all black and white there. They’d lock me up for sure.
I stare at the black smoke rising up from the flames, and it looks almost like the smoke itself is darkening the sky, not the sunset.
“It’s finally over,” Sam says, poking the fire.
I lean back on the grass and close my eyes.
“Yes, but it’ll never be gone.”
-The End-
