Perscribed Burning Part 1 - Inklings Challenge
Eleanor had fire-fingers and the rains weren’t coming.
But that’s a lot to throw at you in one go, so let’s back up.
When Eleanor took her first steps as a toddler, tiny baby footprints of fire sprung to life beneath her heels, trailing across the room. They caught the carpet and spread, licking up the walls until the room was an inferno. No one but Eleanor ever noticed.
That room was never put out and the fire soon spread through the house as she wandered back and forth, growing in its constant flickering light. As soon as she could she tried to talk about it, but every time her parents made funny expressions at each other across the table so she soon learnt to laugh it off as a joke. She was young when she figured out to keep secrets, to avoid staring too long at the flames even as they consumed the chair she was sitting in. She wished they would go out inside the house, even just so she could see her way around the rooms clearly, but it never got wet enough in there to douse it.
Outside was a different matter, things still caught alight but Eleanor lived in a rainy part of the world so her footprints didn’t matter much. It was her fingers that were the danger – a sharp dark knot would form just below her heart and flames would begin to swirl down her arms, flashing out from her fingertips. She could have burnt the city down if she tried, she thought sometimes. She didn’t want to try but sometimes it was hard, content never came easy to her. Although, she thought often, no one else ever noticed, maybe if she set the whole world alight they’d just keep on with their lives, hardly looking up as the ash cascaded around them.
Despite the fire, Eleanor had a fairly uneventful childhood – she quite liked Chemistry, hated History, learnt to swim fairly decently but did it rarely because it gave her chills (she expected the fire didn’t like to be put out), dyed her hair red in her teen years, and eventually, as we meet her now, went to university. Unfortunately, to go to university, she moved further south. And most of the year the south wasn’t that much more dry than the north, but it got hotter in the summer and the doom of a drought was bandied about regularly. And then this year there was the problem of Liam.
It should probably be said first that Liam was Not Interested, although (he promised) he still wanted to be friends. It should probably be said second that Eleanor nodded and agreed and said it was for the best and went home and sobbed her heart out on the phone to her mother.
“Oh, sweetheart! Oh no, he sounds horrible.”
“But he’s not,” Eleanor somehow choked out through her tears. “He’s so interesting and he laughs at all my jokes! And he cares so much about like, being mentally healthy, y’know, he said we can still be friends but he needs space but he’ll let me know when that sort of changes, he doesn’t know but it probably will! I mean can you imagine dad saying all those kinds of things?” (Eleanor and her mother both loved her father deeply, but he had very little grasp on self-reflection.) The flames on the girl’s fingers quivered in sympathy.
“Alright, I’m sure he’s very nice if you say so,” replied Eleanor’s mother with a little sigh. She trusted her daughter, but she did always worry for her – something about Eleanor had always been a little away with the fairies.
The third thing you most definitely should know is something Eleanor most certainly would never tell her mother: she had noticed Liam first because he was on fire.
It wasn’t the same as with her, fire from her feet and arms. He was wrapped up in a ball of fire, a great swathe of flame covering his body and a globe of it circling his head. She didn’t know what he looked like. She had mentioned the fire a little once or twice, but he had seemed confused so she passed it off as a joke. She loved him for the reasons she said, of course, but the fire was intriguing; she thought she had seen everything before in the way that young women often do, but this was most certainly new. (And her friends assured her he was attractive, which was always a bonus).
And so, of course, the heartbreak hit her hard, but more than that there was the worry about the fire: grief added to the knot, made it worse, she kept accidentally setting her notes on fire in lecture and having to bat them out without anyone noticing. Sure, no one had ever seen the flames, sometimes she wondered if they even existed at all or she was just hallucinating them (ok, a lot of the time. She wondered that a lot of the time). But she saw them burning things, her home in a constant state of almost-but-not-quite-ash, leaves charring and curling under her toes and when she picked them up they crumbled into the wind. So of course she was terrified that one day they might be strong enough to actually hurt someone else, and the dry spell lasting into late September wasn’t helping one bit.
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The tap makes a horrid squeak as it forcibly turns, Khare gritting her teeth at the sound - and sight - of murky water pouring forth into the too-small bathtub. The one for hot water goes untouched as well as ignored - it doesn't work anyway and the cold feels much more refreshing even in the tiny unheated apartment she now calls home.
Sinking her lower half into the depths, the waitress breathes a sigh of relief as the chilly liquid hits her skin, instantly soothing the throbbing ache pulsating in her hip. At once the eyes growing there calm, no longer swivelling blindly in non-existent sockets at whatever caught their foul gaze. She sighs again, picking up a bar of cheap soap and debates whether or not it's even worth using before the eyes in her shoulder squirm, vying to be drenched next.
It disgusts her, the way they move but more than that she disgusts herself, Khare doing her best to hold back bile while peeling off the bandage protecting her forearm. Already the eyes there have grown back, looking angry and red as they too squirm to which she obliges, dunking her aching forelimb into the watery depths until they settle down.
After she'd soaked for a couple of hours, she'd take the pumice stone to them again, scrubbing and scrubbing until they'd all rubbed off and turned the murky water an even filthier shade than it was to start with.
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