✍ they must burn → self-para
He’s ten, and the flames that engulf his arms and lick his skin like old friends scare him. They terrify him — he’s always been taught not to play with fire, that it’s dangerous and not to be fooled with by young children. When he comes home from school and tells his mother that he can no longer practise his ability, she kneels in front of him and rests her hands on his cheeks, palms calloused from gripping tight around the biting metal of a gun, their ridges scratching against his flesh. He’s never simply playing with fire, she replies; playing implies something simple, a game — his pyrokinesis is no tomfoolery, no joke to be laughed about, mocked, satirized as anything besides the dangerous, infinite power that it is.
Aspen stops questioning his ability.
He’s ten, and his mother excitedly informs him that the Elders want to speak with him — he’s not in trouble, she assures, her cheeks coloured a bright hue of pink he’s never seen on her before — he names the shade “happiness.” They have a job for him, she says. Aspen’s wide, blue eyes swim with confusion; he’s young, but old enough to know that children like him aren’t often recruited to do the gang’s dirty work. His chest swells with pride, a swagger to his walk the next time he meets his friends, hair sparking with enthusiasm. Perhaps he shouldn’t tell, but controlling his hubris doesn’t come naturally to him at such a ripe age — it never will be a skill of his. His companions stare at him with envious eyes, their faces blushing green with jealousy as he brags on about his assignment; he insists he’s been sworn to secrecy, unable to elaborate on the plans, and the lie slips from his tongue like his throat’s been greased.
This is how Aspen learns to lie his way around things — by fifteen, he almost has himself convinced of his own fibs: the Elders need you, he tells himself, watching the playground sand melt to glass beneath his extended fingers: you’re powerful. Mommy wishes she could spend more time with you, he whispers, a fort of sheets enveloping him as the clock hits half midnight and he wonders when she’ll come home: she thinks about you everyday. Daddy is dead to us, he died the day the Elders sent him away, he sobs into his pillow, petite body wracked inside by holes and missing parts where his family should have made their home: he deserved his fate. Windsor is a traitor, he reminds himself, eyes purposefully avoiding the empty chair across from him at the dinner table where a full, now-cold bowl of soup sits, no one there to share the meal: you have no brother.
He’s ten, and he’s killed before. Never humans — not yet — but birds that fly overhead, lizards that scuttle underfoot; they become ash so easily, with a mere flick of his wrist. The power fuels him, and Aspen, aged like an old soul, decides that the only real God exists within him, dancing wickedly in the reds and oranges of the divine flames he releases like hellfire. Religion, he comes to believe, is for the weak who cannot find a celestial being within themselves.
When the other kids at school attempt to tease him for the holes in the toes of his shoes, the frayed and dingy fabric of his t-shirts, they lose their homework in a ball of flame. By the time his mother grants him fifty dollars for a few new additions to his wardrobe, the detention monitor knows him by name, and the teases have subsided in favour of wary looks and fearful respect. Aspen purchases a single outfit at the local mall and buys a small knife with the leftover money, sliding the bills over the counter with a fire in his eyes that puts his conjured flames to shame.
He’s ten, and the Elders ask him to kill. It’s simple, they assure him: they must burn. They must burn like the Comity scum they are, and die a death fitting of the hell they belong in. Aspen does not blink when they tell him, does not allow himself to break the stony, steeled-off mask that covers his face, does not permit himself to feel afraid nor reluctant. It’s your responsibility, they remind him. Prove that you have earned the position your blood entitles you to.
Aspen burns a dollhouse for practice, twisting his fingers to enlarge the flames that dance along the faux-shingled roof. Plastic drips down the faces of the miniature family inside, twisting their features into agonized, comedically mutated versions of the painted smiles they once bore. He melts the father first, the mother last. Ash attaches itself to his velcro-strapped tennis shoes when he steps through the remains of what he’s destroyed, and he does not look back on the ruins.
He’s ten, and brick does not burn as easily as he’d hoped. He’s ten, and he does not flinch when smoke pours from openings in their home, does not attempt to imagine the agony of flames caressing his skin. He’s ten, and he stoically watches the face of a boy who tutored him in math class press up against the window, tiny fists banging against the glass, his features a mask of pure fear and mouth open wide in a silent wail for the pain to end. He’s ten, and his heart does not pound a beat faster when he hears a mother’s voice screaming for God’s mercy. He’s ten, and it’s his responsibility.
When the firefighters arrive at the scene, there is no trace of an adolescent Aspen Blake, not a single shoe-print left in the ashes of what once was. They sift through the black dust on the ground and do not find a single memory; there will be no funeral for this forgotten family. Evidence cannot be unearthed. The trail goes cold within hours.
He does not dream of that moment, does not wake in cold sweats in the wee hours of the morning with guilt and regret filling his stomach. He sleeps like the child he is, limbs splayed across his sheets, subconsciously taking up as much space as possible.
