Iwas old enough to do bad things.
I was old enough to do a lot of good, bad, and pointless shit.
Twenty-one was like this ceremonial age where you could officially do all the mindless activities society aligned with being an adult. I could drive, vote, drink, and fuck whoever I wanted.
Cheap thrills for a morally cheap world.
I didn’t care about any of it living in a universe rigged by the Devil, and make no mistake, that’s exactly what the fuck was going on. No all-loving God would want this for his ‘children’, no matter what my brother said.
Life was the Devil’s bag of tricks.
I guess that made me his plaything.
A role I was determined to never reprise after today, precisely why I was smirking like an asshole and backing away on quick feet, sealing the deal with my latest display of ‘go fuck yourself’ to a world that didn’t want me anyway.
Flames screamed like victims of its own torture through the windows of the house. For such a huge house, it took surprisingly little time for the whole thing to catch fire. The blaze was as furious and as vengeful as I was at every waking moment of the day.
It roared like it was alive just as I was, experiencing the pain of being alive just like I did.
It blew out the windows, scorched the high-reaching front doors, melted the house of lies to soot and ash to match my innocence its resident destroyed. It would be irreparable, and maybe I’d finally get a good night's sleep.
Oranges and reds danced in the broad daylight, creating an explosive midday sunset. I stopped for just a moment to admire the pillows of smoke lifting into the sky. They drifted up to crease the clouds, suffocating their white to an ashen gray, and a smile twitched on my lips.
That was enough proof for me.
That goddamn house was built on blocks of horrors and naïve cries for help. The pleas stretched out into the air as the mansion burned, heard at last as they morphed into laughter to see the wreckage they were leaving behind.
He deserved it. He fucking deserved it, and no one would ever convince me otherwise. He was a bad man, and he made me into a bad woman.
“Tit for tat, motherfucker,” I spat.
Over the thunderstorm of flames, a uniquely familiar sound permeated the air. My eyes flashed towards the sound down the street, the plumes of burnt orange bleeding red and blue. A crack snapped my attention back to the house in time to watch the roof that covered up all of his secrets cave in and level the second story.
Ha. Cool.
Standing dead center in the middle of the suburban street, strobes of red and blue and the promise of two-to-six years jail time closed in. The pleasant sting of heat on my face drew back as I did, moving further away from Governor Rick’s house as the structure trembled and crashed again.
The sirens wailed and threatened, and I looked for a fuck to give but came up empty handed.
That wasn’t unusual. Most of me was empty nowadays. My body was an hourglass shell, holding nothing but my organs and enduring anger. I was made up of it, and without that fury to keep me going, I might drop dead at any moment.
Which was fine by me.
Burning this asshole’s house to the ground was the last hurrah I had to get out of the way before I went searching for the Grim Reaper.
In poetic irony, my dying wish was just to die.
To die was to be free, like the rain fire of embers floating through the air. They were free-falling, drifting wherever they liked. One wafted in front of my face, my eyes crossing to watch it fall. Its light burned so brightly until it didn’t.
One second there, and the next, that tiny speck of fire turned black, fizzling out into something I envied…
Nothing. It was just nothing.
A resounding, permanent, beautiful nothing.
As the sirens closed in, I kicked my foot back into my hand, stretching before the chase. That was the best part for them after all.
A few lunges here, a few ankle rolls there, and finally, two police vehicles screeched to a halt in front of me. Four officers shot out of the cars, shouting at me over the thunderstorm of flames.
I gave them a little wave, a little wink, and then I was off.
Running to be caught. Running to die.
Running towards that great and beautiful nothing.