Prologue:
The sky grew dark overhead. Angie sat in the silence. It surrounded her like the thick folds of her ebony dress, heavy, and meaningless. She never wore black. Yet, she was now dead. Dead, and gone from the world that had loved her so well.
Angie could not bring herself to say her name. If she had, perhaps the world would have fallen to pieces just at that moment when the finishing syllable left her lips.
Jasmin
This would have been Angie’s sophomore year of highschool, had she not gone with Freddy Vancouver that day exactly one year ago. Yet everything. . . everything was different now. She was different. The world was different. Everything she had once found meaningful, beautiful, was gone. In its place were great burnt patches of useless dead memories. Their skeletons broken and twisted by the bleeding knives of time.
Yes, the world was different now. Filled with half truths, and whole lies, children grown, and dead, memories that swarmed her head like embers of flames who had left the burnt pastures of time long, long ago.. Responsibility, and the stolen innocence of those too young to grow up.
The bandages around her middle were tight. They felt wet with the scarlet sickness of her blood. Here though, here she was safe.
But for how long?
How long would the roof hold?
How long could the world hold?
How long would this calm before the storm last?
What Angie had forgotten was this:
The classroom was warm, sunlight filtered in through the big, thick paned windows, and she sat with her hands folded at her desk, her short second grader legs dangling just above the linoleum.
She watched the large screen intently, the other children stared in stunned silence as they watched the thick black smoke envelope an entire section of the Yellowstone National park. Orange flames licked the backs of trees, alighting moss and leaves, broken twigs and birds nests.
“Why couldn’t anyone stop it?” A little boy with thick curls asked suddenly.
Their teacher, a thinning woman with a tight black bun looked out at the room of small children.
“They didn’t stop it because fire, is a part of nature. The flames burn the wood, which makes fertilizer for the plants to grow, and the soil is good for the ecosystem.”
Angie smiled at the screen, as a narrator spoke above the din of returning birds, a family of foxes rising from a burrow, and a time-lapsed video of flowers blooming.
“And so, from the flames, the world arises anew.”
From the flames, the world will arise anew.
Fire, flame, its essence, is not meant simply for destruction. So often we forget the foxes and orchids that trot through the dust left by impetuous flames as they make way for new life. So often we forget the creature who rises from the black carbon of death to meet the world.
So often we forget the Phoenix.
