Timothy Griffin never felt like luck was in his favour. At the age of eight, his parents died in a fire and he went to live with his great-uncle John Griffin, a retired doctor who had no way with children. But just when he managed to become fond of...
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The first thing Timothy Griffin saw when he woke up was fire.
Flames grew and licked the walls of his room as if coming from hell. They spread across the carpet and consumed everything in their path, eating up the curtains and going up to the ceiling, which was beginning to peel.
Panic seized his heart at the sound of them crackling, their heat soared his skin and smoke stung his nostrils. He held his breath as long as he could, but his urge to cough would not let him. His chest hurt, he felt like he would die at any moment.
He ran to the door and turned the handle, but it wouldn’t open.
“Mother, father!” he screamed in desperation as he pushed hard against the door. “Somebody! Please, someone get me out of here!”
The fire was reaching his feet, Tim was pushing the door with his whole body while tears kept flowing down his face.
Where were his parents? Had they really left him there to die?
He pounded on the door once more. Strangely, the room seemed to grow increasingly dark and blurry as the fire spread. His eyes were closing, arms and legs softened as he let his body slowly fall to the ground, he no longer found the strength to stand up again.
And then, in a lapse of consciousness, Tim remembered:
His parents would not save him. How could they?
His parents were dead.
Tim got up from the bed panting, wiping the water flowing from his forehead to his hot neck. He lifted the sleeves of his pajamas to see if there were any burned scars from the fire, but there were none. He was back in his bedroom again, everything had happened only in his head.
In fact, there was indeed a scar, the one on his right arm that had been there for years, sometimes he could almost forget it existed, but it was always there.
And that one was very real.
In the wardrobe mirror, he could see his red eyes lightened only by the lamp next to the bed, the tears mixed with the sweat he had shed while sleeping.
It had been a while since he had this kind of dream, they were much more frequent when he was little, and he used to wake up from them in the same way: all sweaty and hot, as if he had really just come out of a fire.
These dreams weren’t always the same. Sometimes his parents would show up in them, other times he was all alone. Even his best friend at that time appeared in some of them, although he wasn’t even there that night, Tim never saw him again after that day.
