(July) Prompt #3 - Playing With Fire

**Chat Noir** · 06-30-2014, 10:49 PM

The third prompt of July is the phrase, Playing With Fire.

**Chat Noir** · 06-30-2014, 10:59 PM

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Happy writing!

**Higurashi** · 07-02-2014, 02:29 AM

((Sure. Why not.))

Spoiler: Entry Uno

I was asked once, that of the pains, 'which was the worst?' The one that asked me this never clarified as to what he meant in regards to 'the pains'. For all I know, it really never had any meaning at all. Something told from the moment he'd started to speak that he'd take any meaning the phrasing would contain to his grave. I suppose that really should have been obvious to me even before that. The location really should have warned me. A lonely bridge over a small ravine in the middle of the woods. That's where he chose to blow his brains out, leaving me only able to watch and live with the results.

Days afterwards seemed to turn grey. He'd not been the best friend or even a particularly nice person. If I'm honest (though not to speak ill of the dead) he was a scumbag. Somewhere between middle school and adulthood he had simply given up on trying to grow into maturity. Every moment in his presence was an experience in arrogance and crass jokes. In spite of that, life had somehow seemed... larger with him around. There was really no telling how he'd ended up like that. His parents had been decent enough, as was our neighborhood. In fact, it was quite possible that the whole town was straight as a board. Even so, the twenty year old child that was my best friend turned out more twisted than a corkscrew.

I think he made the news one time for being the first kid to smoke pot in our Highschool for forty years. It had made me a little sick, seeing the absolutely distraught expressions of his parents while he was taken away in the police cruiser. My own parent's had wanted me to stop hanging around him for a while before that. Afterwards, they sure as hell weren't letting me anywhere near him. Not three days later my friend's dad came to our door, about to break into tears. That was the first and only time I've ever seen a man get down on his knees and beg. He begged hard enough to shame a kicked puppy; and he was begging to let me remain friends with his son.

I've never quite understood why he did that. My mom accounted for it by 'parental love.' I'm not sure about that... but if its true, I'd be more confused that I already am. No one has ever called me a 'good influence.' Since I gained the ability to identify myself as an individual, I've always felt myself to be average. I'd had many of the same worries and achievements of most other kids. I'd pulled the same stupid stunts and fought with parents that only intended good for me. Yet still there'd been a full grown -man- prostrating himself to try and keep me and his son friends. (When I say man, I mean Man with a capital M. The kind of guy who could break cinderblocks with his bare hands and discuss politics a few minutes later. Fit both physically and mentally.) To be short, it had scared the crap out of me, seeing that.

Only two months after that, I was sitting in the back of a police cruiser while they dragged my best friend's body out of a crevasse. They didn't accuse me of murdering him or anything of the sort. I guess they just needed to keep ahold of me as a witness until they sorted it all out. My friend's parents were nearby. I couldn't bare to look at them, to see that kind of grief so close in relation to my own. My own parents were... somewhere. It wasn't that they didn't care about me. Rather... my dad had a thing, a set of rules for 'Men'. The capital M kind. One of these was: "In every Man's life, there will be problems that he needs to sort out on his own."

Things had been kind of rough ever since then. The police finally came to the conclusion that it'd been a suicide. My friend's parents had taken the loss really hard and ended up moving out of town to get away from it. The community tried its best to sweep any trouble under the rug and act like nothing had happened. Unfortunately, I became part of that trouble that they wanted to hide. It had suddenly dawned on me during my highschool graduation. While waiting my turn to get a diploma, all I could think about was how my friend would be sitting next to me if he were still here. Instead there was some classmate I hardly knew.

Maybe I'd been some kind of good influence before, but after that I'd turned sour. I didn't do anything drastic like jump up on stage and tear my diploma to shreds. It made me look just a bit forgetful at the time. That was because when I recieved my diploma, I tried to walk off stage without shaking my principal's hand. He actually tapped me on the shoulder as I walked past, more or less forcing me to acknowledge him. Walking back down the stage's steps, I thought I could feel his hidden glare boring into the back of my skull.

As my parents and I walked out the front door of the school; something made me stop and turn around. Standing with her back against the door frame was the Girl. As she stared on past me while chewing some bubblegum, I couldn't help but think that the slight breeze across her auburn hair looked like the flicker of a newly kindled fire.

**Chat Noir** · 07-03-2014, 06:31 PM

Spoiler: Entry One - "Preach & Nastia: The Pyromaniacs Pt.1"

**Juder** · 07-06-2014, 03:47 AM

Spoiler: Entry One

Play With Fire

As long as she could remember, Violet had been in love with fire, even after the accident that had led to the removal of all four of her limbs. In fact, that was probably the reason the accident had happened, despite the fact that her family members were adamant that this was not because of her pyromania and was just because something in the house had short-circuited or blown a socket rather than something being set off with a match. Other people, though, looked at her differently ever since then, and she knew what they were all thinking: That this wasn’t just an accident, and Violet had set her own house on fire just to watch the show. Maybe they were right, and she was nothing than another firebug that needed to be stopped.

It had all started when she was five years old, and her parents had lit a fire to heat up the house in wintertime because their heating system had gone haywire many years before. Her mother had sat in front of the fire, showing her and her sisters neat tricks and how to play cat’s cradle with a loop of string, but then it hadn’t been the flames Violet had been looking at; it had been the flames, and if they’d noticed then, it hadn’t shown. Perhaps they were just good at hiding things like that, or they really didn’t.

Most likely, they had noticed a few years later after they’d taken her to a couple of flame shows and she’d filched some matches, which were unnoticed until late in the evening when she gathered a few flammable things (paper, gasoline, etc.) and then started a bonfire in the school playground. She’d gotten expelled for that, and her parents had given her a scolding that she would never forget as long as she lived. Then, she’d started seeing child psychiatrists and they’d all told her the same thing: play with fire and you’ll get burned, like she would just stop.

She’d kept her head down for a while then, because she was still a little kid and heard rumors of the Chokie, a little closet where they locked naughty little children in for the night, but it wasn’t too long before even that wasn’t enough to stop her. She’d still keep a box of matches into her room and sneak off into the woods to set little fires, even though her family had told her that she would be severely punished if she was ever caught. Little children had minds of their own, and so did her case of pyromania.

Her older sister had found her on Christmas Eve in the woods, but she’d kept quiet so that Violet didn’t get in trouble and let her off with a simple warning: she wasn’t to sneak off into the deep woods ever again, or else she’d tell their parents and she’d get a scolding like no other. Whether that worked or if it was just my admiration for my older sister or that she’d actually gotten through to me, I didn’t go into the woods for years. Her parents had assumed she’d made some miraculous change in her behavior after all.

Still, she’d never outgrown it, and she’d even colored everything she owned in the colors of flames: Red, orange, and yellow, or even blue for the hottest flames of all, ones she even dreamed of at night. She’d colored her hair like flames and even made them spike up, and gotten colored contacts that were red with small flecks of orange, made to resemble sparks or something of the sort. She was twenty-four now, and although the law had seemed to forget her obsession with fire, the world on the streets never had forgotten about it, instead they’d buried it.

That was when she’d gotten caught in the act of playing with fire, when the flames had retaliated against her and her life had gone up in flames; she’d accidently dropped a match and it had fallen onto some highly flammable cleaner, and the fire had spread so quickly that she’d been trapped in the middle of her own mess. Violet had called the fire department, but by the time they’d pulled her out, all of her limbs had gotten badly burned, and she’d been in excruciating pain for the rest of the month. Weeks later, they’d told her she couldn’t keep the arm.

Apparently, it had gotten infected, despite the antibiotics they’d made her take, which apparently couldn’t stop the infection (which she thought was bullshit, wasn’t that what antibiotics are for, to stop infections?) and they’d amputated both of her arms and half of both of her legs, replacing them with a bionic arm. She felt like a robot, walking out with her electronic limbs. Maybe she was Mister Roboto, with parts made in Japan, or one of the Cybermen. Either way, she was just as much of an outcast and just as hurt as she’d been before.

Now, they’d put her in rehab, because the state had seen her as too much of a danger to herself or others to live by herself at the current moment. Which was funny, because it wasn’t like she could light a match without a real arm, right, because the fingers were too big and she wasn’t going near fire any time soon, at least not to play with it anyway. Then rehab should be real easy for you, miss, they’d said, making her bust out laughing as she agreed to go for eighteen months in order to get her life back on track.

Now she was still sitting there, being examined by a bunch of do-gooders with degrees, and she was getting absolutely nowhere. Just as she’d thought, they weren’t helping, and they were only making her want to get out of her more, making her so desperate that she would do anything to get out. Even so, she knew she couldn’t bear to leave and have people look at her like she was crazy.

Those children shrinks were right. You play with fire, you really do get burned.

**Kylie** · 07-10-2014, 06:56 PM

Spoiler: Entry One

When I was a child my parents told me not to play with fire, for I would get burned.

I listened to them of course, they are my parents, after all. If only they knew that the matches wouldn't end up being my problem. It isn't my physical health they should worry about, it's my mental health that needs mending. To be completely honest, I am a wreck mentally, but hey, at least those matches didn't burn my skin. I mean, how could they burn my skin when the fire isn't on me, but inside of me. They thought that they could protect me from fire by telling me not to mess with it, so I didn't touch anything related to fire from that day on, but what if I told them that fire touched me. What if I told them that fire was playing with me, with my soul?

It wasn't my fault, Dad, I didn't light a match to start this one. I swear, Mom, the fire is inside of me, please help me.

This fire was not started by a mere match, no this fire is different, it's fueled by the darkness within me. My deepest, saddest, most despairing thoughts are the culprit behind this fire, and it is slowly burning any hope of happiness in my life. It's burning all of the good left inside of me, leaving me to deal with the bad. I'm struggling to breathe with all this smoke. I'm struggling to see past these flames. I'm struggling not to scream at the pain it's leaving in it's wake. If I don't put it out soon it will win, but I can't put it out alone.

Mom! Dad! I desperately need your help. How have you not noticed the smoke wafting around me? How have you not noticed that I smell of the char from my burned soul? How have you not noticed that your beloved daughter is dying right in front of you?

This fire threatens to burn me alive, consume me into it's darkness, take me to hell with all of the other tortured souls, and I can't find a way to stop it. No one will help me, no one will notice that I'm in pain. The only thing I can do is sit by and watch my happiness slowly wither away, until it is nothing but ash.

No one can see that I am dying inside, they're too oblivious to notice the heat radiating off of me. I've tried telling them that I'm in pain, but I keep choking on the smoke of what is burning inside of me. I don't know how I am going to escape this fire. Someone save me, I've lost myself in the flames and I can't find my way back.

I listened to my parents when they told me not to play with fire, so why did fire decide to play with me?

**Mihkul** · 07-14-2014, 07:03 PM

Spoiler: Prompt#3

Let’s Play

Would you really like to play with me? Do you just have that deep-down desire to try your luck, like maybe jumping from a barn roof to see if you hit that haystack? Before you decide let me tell you a little about myself.
Legends say that early man discovered me, maybe from a lightning strike or something. But, if the truth were known, I have existed since the beginning. Many suggest I came from Hell and I can’t argue that point at all. I can only say that I’ve always been here and always will be here. No, I’m not some god that should be worshipped as many people have done before. I should be respected, though
I was there in the Garden of Eden as a behind-the-scenes character but when man was expelled I was there…a flaming sword was what they said, guarding a tree. I was there when Moses was a mere goat herder, calling to him from a bush. While Nero played his fiddle I danced through his city. Body after plague-infested body was fed into my hungry jaws during the Dark Ages.
I’ve played in every major city of the world…London…Moscow…Amsterdam…Constantinople…New York City…Boston…the list is unending. I destroyed Chicago, although it was the cow that got the credit. I levelled Atlanta, yet it was General Sherman that got the mention in the history books. I climbed the World Trade Center and filled the air with my exhaled breath on the Persian Gulf.
Man foolishly takes credit for controlling me but I am under no man’s control. My appetite is so great that when I devour all that is there I simply move on. I cannot be extinguished and lie in wait in a glowing ember, waiting for the conditions for me to awaken and eat again. No man can create me because I already exist. He may feed my voracious appetite or he may move me from place to place. He may use me for his purpose yet he is unknowingly serving my purpose. He uses me to cook his food yet I savor the drippings as the trickle into my fingers. He may use me to warm his lodgings while filling my belly with his fossil fuels.
I belch the dark clouds of my polluted breath into the air, poisoning every living organism in the world. It eats the atmosphere above, warming the planet with my warmth. I leave a charred trail in my aftermath as a reminder of my power. This is not arrogance, only fact.
They call me an element along with the wind, the earth, and water, yet I am more powerful than all of these. I can scorch the earth into something unrecognizable. I can boil the waters until they whisper away in a vapor. And my heat can change the course of the winds, bringing a blasting breeze of heat with it.
I hope that doesn’t change your mind and you still want to play. Forget those old wives’ tales about if you play with fire you will get burnt. I won’t hurt you…..much!