Chapter 2 - The Night of the Crimson Sky
As the tension in the church boiled over,
my mind fled back to the night that had defined my existence.
I was twelve years old,
and the world was made of dreams and the smell of toasted marshmallows.
Then,
the smell changed to acrid smoke and the roar of a monster living in the walls.
I remembered the heat,
a physical weight that pressed against my lungs,
making every breath feel like inhaling molten lead.
I remembered the sound of our father screaming for us to get out,
and the sight of our mother held back by neighbors as the front porch collapsed into a mountain of orange embers.
But most of all,
I remembered Emily’s voice.
She was only ten,
trapped in the bedroom at the end of the hall,
calling for me because I was her big sister.
I didn't think about the risk,
or the pain,
or the future I was about to lose.
I only thought about the little girl who still slept with a nightlight and a stuffed rabbit.
I ran back into the house,
the wood beneath my feet screaming as it disintegrated.
When I found her,
she was huddled in the closet,
her eyes wide with a terror that I can still see when I close my eyes at night.
"Hold onto me,"
I had told her,
wrapping my body around hers as a shield.
The ceiling had groaned then,
dropping a heavy,
flaming beam across my back and legs.
I didn't let go.
I crawled,
inch by agonizing inch,
feeling the fire lick at my skin,
listening to the sound of my own hair singeing away.
The pain was a white-hot light that blinded me,
but her heartbeat against my chest was the only thing that mattered.
When the firefighters finally pulled us from the wreckage,
she was untouched,
saved by the cocoon of my own flesh.
The years that followed were a blur of skin grafts,
pressure garments,
and the smell of hospital antiseptic.
While I learned to live with the stares and the chronic pain,
Emily grew into a beauty that everyone praised.
She became the "lucky" sister,
the one who escaped the tragedy without a scratch.
But as her beauty grew,
her memory seemed to fade.
She stopped talking about the fire.
She stopped looking at my scars.
Eventually,
she started looking through me,
as if I were a ghost haunting her perfect life.
Our parents,
broken by the sight of their eldest daughter’s suffering,
found it easier to focus on Emily’s light than my shadow.
They allowed her to believe that she owed me nothing,
that my sacrifice was just a thing that happened,
rather than a choice I had made.
Standing in the back of the church,
May you like
I realized that I hadn't just saved her life that night;
I had given her the power to destroy mine.
