Fiction from Alexis Jamilee Carter

Photo: Kind and Curious

You’ve Left a Candle Burning, and It Seeks Revenge

Henrietta St. Claire’s home is going up in flames. The fire department isn’t on the way. Neighbors huddle together across the street, whispering their horror and pity. They do not speak of their gratitude for detached housing. They all think the other has called the proper authorities. None of them has.

All the firefighters are busy across town anyway. They are consulting the media on how to remove a child’s head from between the stair bannisters. The media has a lot to say about this.

Henrietta slips between their many elbows and opinions. She doesn’t know anything about the child across town or about media competency. Her arms are loaded down with more bags of groceries than she knew it was possible to carry all the way from the corner store. She doesn’t turn around when Mrs. Balinsky from two houses down starts to panic. Henrietta’s steps do not falter as hysteria spreads through the crowd as they notice her.

She slips her key into the lock, the one that she always double-checks because even in a neighborhood as safe as this, crime has the potential to run rampant. The key starts to melt as it disappears inside the lock. The door swings open, and the air that gushes from the house singes Henrietta’s eyebrows. Before she slips inside, she finally lets the neighbors’ pleas for sanity settle in her mind.

“I just have to grab the important things!” Henrietta calls over her shoulder as she rushes inside.

The plastic of the bags holding her groceries starts to liquify. It drips down her arms, sticks to her skin and sizzles. The grapes that she picked up are now white and smoldering. They fall through what remains of the bag, as do the rest of her hard-won items. The more heat resistant items seem to hold up well enough.

Still, it’s good to be home. She’s comfortable here.

Taking a deep breath, she sinks into her favorite chair. There’s really no use putting the groceries up when the house won’t be here long. She lets the smoke settle in her lungs and only relishes it a little bit. She gave up cigarettes years ago, but she remembers it with a nostalgic fondness. Shame that the best sins tend to be unhealthy.

The house is screaming.

Wood is splintering, and embers burst from the ceiling with every shift of the bones. Places like this weren’t meant to burn. Not when they were built through years and years of casual correspondence. And Henrietta had corresponded often with her home. She patched the hole in the wall that one of her ex-boyfriends left. She scraped away the generations of wallpaper in the dining room, and she planted herself through every piece of furniture that she cultivated with intention after intention.

But the infrastructure’s compromised. Henrietta knows this. She considers making an emergency call, to her therapist. She’s just never been good in a crisis. She would really appreciate the calm, soothing voice of someone in position of authority. She would really appreciate someone she could trust giving her step-by-step instructions of exactly what to do.

But Henrietta doesn’t call her therapist. She’s been practicing her independence. And what’s burned flesh in comparison to autonomy? Instead, she crawls into the kitchen.

The cool tiles are a godsend. Henrietta presses her cheek to the ground. She swears fealty to the gods of renovation that convinced her the kitchen deserved a new floorplan. She digs her nails into the counter as she pulls herself up to the sink. She digs them into the granite until three of them splinter. She doesn’t mind. She feels that a sacrifice here is fitting.

The kitchen sink hasn’t realized yet that an end is near. Henrietta submits her head under the running faucet. The water is warm, but it can’t be helped. Baptisms are rarely comfortable.

She isn’t sure if she can save herself, but a little spiritual assurance seems important at a time like this.

Mrs. Balinsky is tapping on the window. She must have jumped the fence in the backyard. This would not be her first time doing so.

“Sorry to bother you, dear,” she calls loudly, her voice carrying through the window, “but I do think it would be good for you to get out of the house now.”

Henrietta shakes her head. “Thanks for your concern, Mrs. Balinsky, but everything is under control.”

“If you’re sure that you’re okay then,” Mrs. Balinsky mutters, backing away enthusiastically from the heat. Henrietta always thought she’d be the type to believe lies if they make life easier for her. Henrietta doesn’t hold that against her. Lies are an important faith to cling to.

Henrietta sighs as she watches her leave, watches as the woman edges her way back towards the sunlight. They hold each other’s gaze until the smoke burns Henrietta’s eyes and water streams down her soot-covered face. When she can see again, Mrs. Balinsky is gone.

The firemen across town can see the smoke rising. It’s turning the sky dark, and they look at each other only for a second too long.

“Looks like someone’s barbequing,” the captain says.

Under most circumstances, he is a good person and an okay fireman. Today, though, he has been with a screaming child for twelve hours and a gaggle of unhinged, feral reporters for ten. He keeps saying the wrong thing in front of the cameras because this was not what he was trained for, and sound bites are not something that come natural to practical men like him.

The reporters prefer the wrong thing to be said anyway, and they keep asking him questions he doesn’t have the answers to. What he wants more than anything is to go home to his wife and tell her how awful of a day he has had. He does not want to have another situation on his hands. If the problem is still there tomorrow, after he’s had his coffee, then he’ll consider looking into it.

The firemen across town try not to look at the smoke again.

Henrietta has left the kitchen and is climbing the stairs. The charred wood of the handrail crumbles when she touches it. She climbs the stairs anyway. The fire has spread. It’s invaded each room and taken a survey of the potential destruction it could cause. Sparks glitter as they rain down from the ceiling.

The photos she’s hung in the hallway are not holding up well. The flames are eating at them, their edges curling. Her face, and her face only, is burned out of each picture, but she tries to tell herself the fire doesn’t consider it to be personal.

In her room, the bed is aflame. Henrietta tries to think of a joke about passion and how it heats the sheets, but she must acknowledge that now is not the time. Instead, she staggers into the closet. It’s a walk-in, the realtor had been very proud to point this out. A tiny, fire-proof safe sits in the corner.

It takes a couple tries to unlock it. Each time, the metal burns her fingertips and angry blisters bubble on her skin. Inside, there are three papers. One is her birth certificate. One is her will. The last is a copy of her insurance. It expires at five today, but she hopes that she’ll still be able to renew it. She thinks placing something as delicate as her life in the hands of the insurance agents must be approached with optimism or not at all.

She starts to leave. She tries. She really does try now that the paperwork is in hand. Understandably, she collapses before she makes it to the hallway. The only thing she thinks of is that her groceries are probably still laying around on the floor. She hates for anyone to see her home is such a state.

A shadow falls, dances in the light of the fire. Someone is standing in front of her, and the heat dulls gloriously for a moment.

It’s Mrs. Balinsky, and she has an ax. She must’ve chopped her way through the front door. She had to have forced her way through the rubble and let the fire sear her dress and her dearly beloved hair on the way up the stairs. She stands in the doorway. The flames lick her shoulders, and the light of hell forms a halo around her.

“Sorry to keep troubling you, sweetie, but this fire is really outside of the guidelines of the Homeowner’s Association.”

Then, Henrietta’s hand is in hers, and she’s hauling Henrietta to her feet. Mrs. Balinsky does not give her the option to not get up.

And they leave. Because the house is on fire. It’s collapsing, all the necessary support beams crumbling. All that will be left is a pile of rotten wood and ash that’ll settle on strangers’ tongues, heavy and thick. It’ll taste like nostalgia when the wind blows in the wrong direction, and the neighbors will brush their teeth a little too hard with a little too much enthusiasm to scrub the memory away. The charred remains of Henrietta’s house will sit on the street and people will avert their eyes. It’ll be its own sort of ghost and will tell a story of absolute destruction.

But, these women, they can escape, if they leave together, and they leave right now.
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Alexis Jamilee Carter is a software engineer in Denver with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She wants to create, in every sense of the word and as much as possible, but writing has always been her home. Her work has also appeared in Okay Donkey, Grim & Gilded, and Runestone.