The spark on the tip of the match reflects in her eyes as she strikes it against the little box, getting it on the first strike to flare up responsively. Reaching down into the temple of twigs and wood, she releases her hold on the little wooden matchstick, the tip hitting the cache of leaves and twigs under the pyramid, flames sprouting from the collision. She kneels at the side of the bonfire, watching the flames with a sort of enigmatic intent, doing nothing more than simply staring into the inconsistent patterns of the fire. 

“I always liked fire,” she says quietly, so much so that at first I’m not really sure I heard her properly.

“You like fire?” I ask. She nods. “Why?”

She takes a deep breath, her petite frame seeming to shake a little as she remembers some unfathomable memory.

“It’s warm,” she says. 

I think for a minute, and in the end all I respond with is a simple, “sure is.”

I never was much good at conversation. She was always much better. She’d talk to me as if I was actually answering her questions and prompts, although most of the time I’d just sit there and listen without saying anything.

“You remember how my daddy used to take us up into the mountains when we were kids? And he’d settle down for the night and let us run around and play and then I got to start the fire? I always liked doing that. Starting the fire.” She brings up old memories I hadn’t thought of in a long while with those words. I hadn’t thought of the mountains in years, hadn’t let myself remember the incident where her father had…well. That was another day’s story.

“You miss him,” I say. It’s fairly obvious, and she always has. She always got along with her daddy so much better than her ma, who was the perfect picture of a domestic woman and did everything around the house, leaving the real work to her husband and her rebellious daughter. 

“Yeah. The fire always reminded me of him. When I was real little, younger than when I knew you, even, I remember him telling me, ‘you gotta know how to start a fire. If you ain’t got nothin’ in the world, you gotta know how to make a fire. Water, that’s easy to find; you can find it anywhere. But fire- you gotta know how to make your own. You do that, and you can live just about anyplace,’” she says, her hands helping her imitate her father’s rolling accent. I chuckle at the imitation and watch her eyes light up with the fire as she turns to look at me. 

“It’s kind of a silly memory,” she tells me, “but it’s one of the oldest ones I’ve got.” I nod. She always was one for not forgetting things. Memories were important to her, like little treasures. 

“That why you like starting fires so much? ‘Cause they remind you of your daddy?”

“Yeah. I guess. That and they’re pretty,” she says, pulling one of those things where you say something you don’t really mean like it’s really important so that you think she’s actually pretty shallow and you don’t know she really meant what she said before. But I’ve seen her do it a thousand times, and I see through it. I just nod, though, not wanting to let her know just how well I understand her. 

“I’m going to bed,” I say, unrolling my bedroll and crawling inside. She looks at me, nods, and starts humming softly to herself while I look up at the stars. 

Hush, hush! the horsemen are here,

Riding through the alleys,

Instilling fear.

Quiet, quiet! they’re coming for you,

They’ll break down your door for 

Breaking taboo.

Silence, silence! They’re here at your door,

And Death will chase you out

Onto the moor.

So please, please! You keep your tongue still, 

And say not a word when

It’s you they kill.  

Kisses that 
Kindled warmth in
Kindred spirits and
Killed any remnants of frosty debates now gone
Kept stemming from the couple like lit 
Kerosene, explosive and bright,
Keeping things exciting and working out
Kinks in the relationship between two unlikely participants. 

Xylophones littered the floor of the 
Xenophobic,
Xanthodont-inflicted, man’s house along with
Xenoliths collected from geological expeditions,
Xeroxed copies of graphical information, size
XL shirts only slightly too big, and his
Xanthippe of a mother’s remains in a jar on the mantle, his
Xeric eyes having remained clear of tears even at her funeral.
 

Death
Died when it
Danced across your
Doorstep and saw that
Despite all the odds you’d
Desperately clung to your
Dreams until you made them real,
Destroying many a 
Denied relationship in the process and
Delivering to yourself not the happiness
Destiny being fulfilled often brings but instead to 
Dirt-covered, cloudy imitations of that same thing,
Deleting your
Delusions of prioritizing aspirations. 

The beginning had been fairly normal, if anything. Strict, but still. Fairly normal. Sure, she wasn’t like the other children, playing boys’ games instead of with the other girls, though she tried her best to fit in. She got in fights and spoke at a level far above that of her age and argued with even the most strong-willed of the adults (though that often got her in trouble). She cried, when she was at her youngest, when her mother wasn’t home, and when her father left, and anytime she had to be alone, because more than anything, that terrified her. 

When she’d grown up a little bit she still asserted herself over her peers (easy, as she was intellectually superior to them by a considerable measure), which, as it always had, got her in trouble. But most of the time her sweet looks and silver tongue could get her out of such situations, and she would be freed without any sort of reprimand from  the authority figures. 

She was, in all forms of the word, a self-righteous princess. She’d never tried, never taken anything seriously except for the iron hand of her mother, which she’d eventually grown to fight against. But that changed when the one person she looked up to above all others reached a crisis. It wasn’t just her; it was her beloved playmate, and her relatives, and everything. A problem distant enough not to weaken her, but close enough to place her in a position where she was a part of something. Something big, and life-changing. And she had to be the strong one while the girl she loved cried. 

It still hadn’t been much of a shock. After all, they had always gotten the worst end of the stick, the one she deserved infinitely more than they did. And in the end it ended up being her and her family who had, for the second time, saved the ruins of a family that life had taken its toll on. 

She hadn’t ever expected it to happen to her. But 7/31/07. She would never forget the day that had taken all she’d built herself to be and smashed it, sent her spiraling into something she was scared of, as it involved pain and a lot of loneliness, which she hated most of all. 

Funny, how the 
Frailest and most
Fragile of things aren’t always the ones to
Fracture first,
For as one would expect the
Fissures life provides to
Fuse lives with such misery to make them
Fall, the
Fickle nature of the
Fates most often picks the strongest to
Forget the lives they once had lead. 

Gravity-defying
Goddess of a
Girl, whose
Great and widespread ambitions
Got her no farther than
God willed when he
Granted her with life, for
Gestures she had once made and
Gullible children she had deceived had her
Getting locked up and sentenced to the
Guillotine. 

A venture

Into the wilds of imagination;

A voyage

Into the seas of thought;

A journey,

Established by the Nobleman,

Designed to break the very mind

Down into something comprehensible

For even the smallest of beings.

The process by which

(though it is complicated indeed)

All will be known to everyone,

With no secrets nor concealed disclosures

Hidden from the world outside 

The confines

Of one’s own mind.

Is it even imaginable to the wiser among us,

A world where there can be no secrets?

Where a thought police can actually exist,

In the most literal of ways?

How terrifying,

The travels we could make

Into that sort of land.

I, for one,

Am quite happy where I am in the safety

Of my mental walls and barriers

And will make no such move

To let the outside tear them down.

“Is there a chance I could…?”

“No. Get out of here, kid. You can’t expect me to let someone like you around all this dangerous equipment. Now shoo. Shouldn’t you be in bed by now, anyways?”

“I know what’s wrong! You can’t just not let me in, not when I could save them!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the cops, and your parents can come bail you out at the station.”

“Bastard,” the boy mutters and turns to walk away, fingering the bag over his shoulder, contemplating killing the guard in the casual sort of way that people tend to when their wishes are denied.

So maybe he’d played up the valiant part a bit. The boiler in the factory did have a small leak in it, and it was his fault (all part of the master plan and all that), but evidently it wasn’t enough of a problem for them to be taking anyone’s help. Which was unfortunate, because despite his young age, the boy really was the most qualified to be working around machinery.

Of course, no one believes you when you’re a kid, no matter how smart or qualified you are. The adults automatically get to be right, no matter what their beliefs are. The boy kicks a stone into a tree as he walks out of view of the guard at the factory entrance. He fully intends to enter the building, but it’s always so much easier to be allowed in legally, because then the police aren’t a problem when someone sees you, and you don’t have to run and hide from the very people you’re pretending to help. 

As you round the corner the boy immediately walks into the cover of the building’s shadow and kneels, removing the cover on one of the ventilation ducts. His small, lithe body fits easily inside, and he wriggles his way through the metal tube with relative ease. This is why the Resistance employs children; not only are they as competent as adults, but also more willing to take risks, taken less seriously by civilians and therefore easier to hide, and also generally more compliant.

The boy looks through the slits on the other end of the ventilation pipe and, seeing no one, flips over and kicks out the grate. It clangs against the opposite wall and then the floor with what, in the empty hallway, is a humongous clatter, but the boy knows that it is not as loud as it seems, because of the way that sound moves in vibrations and waves, making it seem louder inside the vent than outside of it. But he also knows that any noise works as an alarm for the paranoid, foreign invaders, and leaps out of the shaft with a practiced ease before replacing the vent as best he can with the assistance of some extra-strength superglue. Dashing out of the corridor and towards the heart of the factory (which, if the blueprints were accurate, is where he will find the machine central to weapons production which he has been told to plant the timed Semtex on in order to halt enemy efficiency for as long as he can). The boy has memorized a series of stairwells to go down, the location of multiple security cameras, and the guards’ routines, having been in this factory for reconnaissance purposes  many a time before. But even one screw up, and he could die. Of course, being but a child, this thought hardly crosses his mind. 

The core processing room (i.e. The Target) is one filled with blinking lights and flashing machinery. The cylindrical bit of machinery hooked up to tubes that come from a heating/cooling system driven by pistons and sits in a pool of circulating water. There is a diversion being staged just outside the monitoring station with the help of an R.C. helicopter, and as soon as the guards leave, he is to run to the joint between the heating/cooling piston system and the copper tubing which leads to the duel source in order to plant the bomb. He is to plant it on the opposite side of the monitoring station, and then move on to the secondary target, which is the reactor itself. Upon throwing the bomb into the cistern that contains the fuel rods, he will, if time allows, try to hit the pistons with a final bomb before evacuating immediately. Several hiding places have been shown to the boy, all of which locations where he can wait for the initial blast to cause a big enough diversion for the guards to flock to the central processing room, leaving him clear to escape. 

The boy, in accordance with his orders, waits for the diversion and follows the plan to a T, managing to hit all three of the targets before fleeing and hiding in a nearby  janitors’ closet. He waits for sixty seconds, watching them tick by on his wrist watch, and hears a resounding boom and the faint sound of water. Twenty seconds later the core bomb will go off, and as the smell of smoke infiltrates his hiding place, he hears the next blast, and glances at his watch only to notice that it was seven seconds early on detonation. He knows something is wrong, and things over his minimal science knowledge. The heating/cooling system had been keeping the fuel rods cooled down. In order to destroy them, it had had to be disconnected. If disconnected, it wasn’t keeping the fuel rods cool, and if they were truly thousands of degrees Fahrenheit in temperature… oh god. The bomb had been melted through and set aflame, detonating it early, likely destroying the concrete cistern and containment tank. The piston detonation would stop the remains of cooling water from circulating, and it would evaporate in seconds, leaving the rods exposed and giving him only seconds before they exploded. That would do more than stop the machinery running off of the reactor; it would kill and vaporize a huge amount of people and land. Oh god, what had he done!? Surely when his orders had been issued this had not been what they had meant for him to do? He opened the janitor’s closet door, hearing the Semtex on the pistons go off, knowing that it had been the third bomb because of the minute mark his watch had hit, and running as hard as he could away from the core processing room because he knew he was going to die and only taking all of thirteen steps before the ground shook and a blinding light paired with a whooshing noise followed by incredible pain and the hugest sound he had ever heard were the last sensations he felt as the blast of his mistakes took him out forever. 

On the nearby hilltop, his sponsor saw the blast, turned, and walked away, knowing full well the sacrifice he had made for the destruction of the factory, believing with all his being that, for killing a massive number of his enemies and their resources, one naive child’s life was worth it.