Look at the Stars, Look How They Shine for You...

She’s ten years old, and climbing up onto the roof of her house in Portugal to smoke her stolen cigarettes while her mother is downstairs holding another important party that she wants to show Em off at. And she’s in a dress that’s too fancy for a 10 year old, and too constricting, so she rips the hem and climbs up across the scalloped roofing, and traces the constellations with the cigarette in her hand; because even if her Da is dead and she’s a thousand miles away from where she was when he taught her to find the shapes in the stars, they’re the same stars and the same sky, somehow, and that always brings her comfort.


A few years later, she’s lying on the grass with Ian under that same sky, another few hundred miles away, and their fingers are lightly entwined. And while she’s trying to teach him the same constellations and tell him their stories, he only has eyes for her, and for her eyes glinting with joy and reflected moonlight and the freckles on her face that are like her own constellations he wants to map out, and her lips moving (and he really, really starts to feel like he wants to kiss her and oh, that’s a new feeling.)


And when she laughs at him for not paying attention at all, he wants to tell her that she’s so much more interesting than the star-shapes in the sky, but just as mysterious and hard to map, but he’d gladly spend a lifetime in the study of her.

So Light 'Em Up

Sometimes, she thinks, she can see the embers sparking under her nails as she drags them across soft skin, or cold stone.

If you catch her eyes in the right light, you might see more than the reflection of the flames. You’ll see them start to become the flames themselves. You might notice that there's no fire at all for them to reflect, but it's there anyway. 

Sometimes, she wonders if anyone else notices the flames licking at her skin, crawling up her spine; feels the heat around her, radiating from her, like she does. If they can feel the primal, consuming fire that’s always hovering just under her skin.

And she can always tell the exact instant that she sets someone else on fire, for better or worse. She can see the flames transfer, watch them begin to burn, and wonder if they know it, too. Some of them can handle it. Learn to adapt, can handle the heat, the ones that are already burning themselves. Some quench it. Some are set ablaze and burned up like a long extinct sun.

But at least she can say she’s never afraid of getting burned.
She’s already burning.