In The Dead of the Night

11 | fire-lit rain

Who would win? I pondered through my third night awake in the nighttime blackout. It was still snowing, snowflakes coming through the bullet holes in the roof, though less so now that we were over 20 hours across the continent of North America. But the blizzards worth of ice and snow didn't make them hesitate to set the land aflame. 

Pouring from the open slashes in the sky, spreading across the rough surface of the frost bitten land, the fire struggled to escape the icy clutches of the piled and frozen snow while the new flakes burned through themselves before they even reached 10 feet above the ground, melting and falling victim to the flames once more. I had no idea how close they had to have been to set these flames. Anywhere we drove seemed to be ablaze with the flames, which made me wonder how long it would be until we ourselves were mere fuel for the fire. 

But every time, we found a way out. And that was all it took for me to take the slightest sliver of hope of making it to the warm, beachy West coast and tear open that sliver until it was large enough for my body to slip through and my daydreams were filled with a comfortable warmth.

Or maybe that was just the flames licking their way up the sides of the car while I wasn't paying attention.

"Are you hurt?" I had asked the dark haired boy, only a few minutes after we'd driven from the parking lot onto the main road.

"It stings," Shawn had admitted, reaching for the top of his ear but stopping before he could feel the hot, sticky blood. "It hurts like hell. But I don't think I'm hurt. The bullet barely touched me."

Staring at the shattered rear view mirror, I had brushed my finger against the bullet lodged in the remaining glass, checking if it was still blazing hot. When it wasn't, I wrapped my fingers around the small cylinder of metal and pulled it from the mirror, pieces of the shattered glass falling into my palm beside the bullet. I had thought about how much I despised it, how it dared to break the only perfect pane of glass in the car, how it had the nerve to even come close to the boy I couldn't help but hold so dearly to my heart.

After only a second holding the freezing cold, icy grey bullet between my fingertips, I dropped it to the ground near my feet and grabbed Shawn's hand instead.

Shawn tried to tell me to sleep. He ran his warm hand up and down my arm and hummed quiet love songs through the sound of pounding snow and roaring fires as if I could sleep through the drowning, burning fear that made my body ache. I told him I wasn't going to fall asleep, even if I wanted to, and instead we talked. For hours.

I had never met someone who could talk the way someone would write, whose lips dripped with poetry every time they spoke. He would tell me about his childhood and the few in-between kind of moments that were his safe place in his dreamscapes, and I would tell him about my childhood and the places I'd gone and the things I'd witnessed. And, in the same way, I had never met someone who listened the way he did, with his gaze so intent on my skin even when mine were wandering somewhere out the window, with his attention seeming to be promised to me until the day I never saw him again.

On the morning after what I had come to term the shattered glass incident, we finally escaped the fires, if only for a short moment. Shawn pulled into a back alleyway, dark and damp and coated with a thin layer of grey ash, of a since deserted city and whispered for me to come out with him. Together, we risked it to climb the filthy ladder to the top of the closest building, which must've been some sort of warehouse similar to our own, and watched for a short few minutes as the sun rose. Shawn pulled me close to him with his arm around my shoulders and I leaned into his comforting hold.

Although it was far from smart, we stayed and swung our legs through the quiet December breeze and shook our heads as we wondered where help was when you needed it and stared at the small, twinkling glimmers of stars slowly fading in the shadow of the sun. We only spent minutes up there, from the time that lavender line appeared above the horizon to the time when the sky was painted with purples and blues, but it felt like hours, or seconds. When he was with me, time seemed to bend and twist and fold until it was merely a concept I had twisted around my finger. The more he stared at me, the more something in me sank and fell until it was far too deep to pull it out again.