The Arson - written 6 years ago by 15yo me
She suffocated every second, burning inside and out. The lights popped, and the untouched carpet didn't look as clean and unmarked as before. Hot tears evaporating off of her face, sweat covering her clothes, and an agonizing, muted scream leaving her stinging throat, crawling slowly from dry, pale lips. Thinking through her actions would've kept her safe and sound, but now she stood in the middle of a burning building, emptied minutes before the crime. Elena crawled across the previously well-decorated living room that was now covered in ashes and violent flames, breaking her pink — ever-so-carefully painted acrylics, forcing her natural brittle nails to crack at the ends, bleeding onto wherever they touched. Everything at that moment seemed to match; the cracks on the nails and the walls, Elena’s slow crawling that mimicked the trajectory of her hot tears, which almost refused to vanish with the burning fire, and the most disturbing of it all, her screams of remorse ghoulishly harmonizing with the fearful yelling she could hear from the neighbours.
Her skin was feeling softer; she could feel it melting and sticking, and her fingertips hurt, but she was blinded by the black smoke that now intertwined with her hair, lungs, and bloodshot eyes. She flung herself on walls she sensed not to be ablaze, her instincts struggling to cling to her will to live. Every time she'd hit a wall and feel the future bruises, -- if there'd be any future at all -- her lips would outline a smile, as she knew that feeling pain meant that she was still feeling, which consequently meant she was still living. What was she thinking, what had she done, why did she do it, those and a thousand more questions swirled through her mind like a violent hurricane, whipping permanent scars onto her conscience, her moral compass, the memories of everything that led her to that moment. But there was no time to have meaningful insights of why had she had set that place on fire, and why had she done it in such a random place, no means to kill, no will driven by a plan or a grudge held long past, because now Elena Lopez was not a woman, or an architect, or any other meaningless label she had held such regard for, for now, she was a criminal and a lost figure in the middle of a fire.
The door couldn’t have been more than two meters away from Elena, it seemed far but for a fraction of a second she could almost feel her fingers tightening around the old brass knob, her hopes were higher than before, her chapped lips started bleeding on consequence of the smile she drew out of momentaneous joy; at that moment the tears that left her eyes were not solely from the aching smoke but from relief. But all of that took her energy away, and then there, so close to the door, to her freedom breath, she fell, chest facing up, on the floor. She could still feel, and she was still conscious, but for how long? She turned her stomach to the carpet and started crawling again. Her arms were shaking, and her crying became louder, desperate even. She started once again screaming, calling her mother, praying for God to spare her from such miserable self-inflicted death. The door, blurred in her sight, was getting closer when she felt her left ring finger nail snap out of her. She looked down and saw the bloody, broken nail on the carpet, a little attached to the nerves that once belonged embedded onto her now disgustingly ensanguined finger. She opened her mouth and widened her eyes to release an agonizing scream, desperate, in excruciating pain. The anguishing feeling rushed through her veins and made her curl up for a couple of seconds, and the amount of blood she saw leaving her own body made her want to vomit, but she could not give up so close to the door that could determine her future -- or the lack of it all.