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LEAH
Leah remembered a time when she was nine and the world wasn't on fire yet.
She remembered the sun shining on her shoulders as her mother ran a hand through her long hair as she cut them in the backyard. She remembered her father's arms picking her up the few times he came home.
She didn't remember the scowl on her mother's face at the sight of her father's bruised face, nor did she remember that her father always had a bruised face in the first place. How could she? The world wasn't on fire yet.
That wasn't going to last forever. Not even a few years later her whole house would catch fire -literally, metaphorically it had already burned down a long time before- and when a child watches their house torn down by the dancing tongues of fire they think the whole world will be like that. But it won't -or at least in most cases.
In Leah's case the world would never stop burning and her with it.
And now she's twenty two and the burning flames have taken everything that there was to take, only leaving thick black smoke and the sour taste of it in Leah's mouth.
Now a man raised by dogs and guns claimed to be in love with her and Leah wondered how long it would take for the fire inside of her to eat him too. She wondered what would consume him first: the fire or her? Or was that the same thing?
She remembered when another man was in love with her, only that he wasn't the son of dogs and guns, he was the product of white picket fences, casserole dishes and tiny needles stuck in his arms, but he was hurting just the same. She remembered watching him burn and walking away.
That was what she did, it was her specialty. To walk away and pretend nothing ever happened. Because she had seen her house burning for years before she could finally walk away and now she didn't want to make the same error. So she walked away, metaphorically or physically -who cares?
Her skin held fire under it, that was why it was so hot to the touch. But it could also become cold, so cold that it would make her wonder if she was dead already. When she swallowed too many pills and her throat would swell and her pupils would dilate, when she would get so violently drunk that she threw up until it was hard to breathe and the world lost a bit of its fire -that was when she became cold like a porcelain doll.
