Chapter Two:

There are mistakes, and then there are the worst mistakes of your life. There are the mistakes that make you who you are today. Later on you can stand and idly wonder, who’d have thought what the significance of just dropping a little match would be?

Dropping it, you lost everything – and you still remember every last detail and you know that it’s really killing you from the inside. You’re just keeping up appearances, but however hard you try to forget, you always remember what started you down your road…

As soon as the match hits, you know you’ve gone so far that you can’t ever go back and it stings you but there’s nothing you can do.

There are screams, shouts, mayhem. Everything is hectic. You’re shocked and can feel the hatred radiating from around you, but all you can see is a wall of red.

Flames and heat flares up in front of you in a wall, and you find yourself being forced backwards. Your fire dies down. You stare and then run, not overjoyed enough to stay and watch its effects. You hear screams, you hear shouts; you hear a lot of things.

Your tears are dried up.

You just ruined a person’s life, and you’re not even feeling guilty. You hate yourself. You want to swear not to do it again, but you can’t.

You feel nothing; your emotions are being traitorous and not for the first time.

You know that you’ll end up hurting them more. You need the vengeance, but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

And it’s so easy that it’s tempting… you find half of yourself playing devil’s advocate and you believing it.

Most of all, you find yourself loving it. It’s your pleasurable sin, something you can never lament, making you an ultimate sinner.

You don’t really care. Nothing seems to matter. You feel like you’re flying in elation, you’re just so pleased with what you’ve done. You’re disgusted with your pleasure, guilty about your actions, but the feelings won’t seem to come through. You feel like your soul has been captured and somebody else is controlling your emotions. It’s easier to believe this to stop yourself seeming like such a monster.

The monster inside you is still there, though – it seems dominant and you seem to stick back, just feeling the tickles of a chillingly cold, dormant seeming fire that seems to have led you to your impending doom.

This, you know, is the beginning of a long, winding trek to the top – but not a good one. It’s a lot easier to remember how horrible people can be, how you can never really rely on anyone, how people always lie to you… It makes some things so much easier until you reach the much-needed immunity to certain feelings – to where you really do become the personification as a monster. You can see it happening, but it seems so far away, something you can turn your back on, a fate never needing to be fulfilled…

The reality of the matter is, you’ve already built your own path with that one mistake.

And of course, the thing that’s easiest to forget, circumstances can occur than can seem to propel a timeline forward… and things happen far sooner than you want and expect them too.

The cost of everything is mistakes.

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Melissa was walking home from school like usual – her routine was that every day, she and her friends would walk down the street, go into the shop and buy some sweets and then walk home together. She was nearly home, now, her friend having turned away towards the street to her own house.

She was sucking a cherry lollipop and skipping along the path. She was only eight years old, but her mother trusted her to walk home alone. She did this because she was supposedly mature for her age and her mummy worked overtime in a massive office block, often not coming in until late at night and just leaving her tea to be warmed in the microwave. However annoying this was, Melissa knew that her mother had to pay the bills and since her father had walked out before she was born, that was no easy task.

She loved her mummy to no end, despite rarely seeing her except on Sundays.

She swung around the bag containing her yellow and white games kit, giggling as she continued skipping on her way. When she was older, she wanted to be a singer: her singing teacher told her she’d be good at it and it was a big hobby of hers. She sang whenever she could and whenever she was in a good mood, and both circumstances applied now.

She started humming a song that she’d heard the previous day – she didn’t know the lyrics, but the tune had been catchy. She was still humming and skipping as she turned into her front gate, closing it behind her and headed to the front door. She took a key out of her navy blue school cardigan, grinning, and inserted it in the keyhole, turning it, then closing the door behind her and placing the key on the nearby table.

Strolling through the hall, she walked into the kitchen and got some milk out of the fridge, climbing on the side to get a glass and then pouring it carefully. She then slid down and put the milk back in the fridge, grabbing the drink and opening the door to her living room to watch her favourite TV show.

What she found was not what she expected, which was a warm, inviting-looking, bare lounge. And the difference wasn’t for the better.

She froze, her glass of milk crashing to the floor and shattering but she didn’t notice. She just screamed.

She ran out of the room, wanting to turn away from it all and raise the image from her mind but knew it couldn’t happen. She ran to her place of refuge just in time to fall weakly onto her knees lean over the toilet and be horribly sick several times.

Shaking, panting and wiping her mouth, she wailed and got to her feet, clutching her queasy stomach. Her face was now milk white, and she found her feet leading her back to the living room. Having seen the sight before, she was now prepared and could refrain from being sick at the sight, but it was still hard.

After staring, transfixed, for a few moments, she walked over to her mother who was lying on the floor, glassy eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling. Her hair and clothes were covered in a red, sticky substance: blood.

Staring at her mother, Melissa reached out a small hand and stroked her mummy’s hair the way she could remember her mummy doing whenever she upset. Her fingers caught in small curls and the hair felt horrible under the mass of sticky blood, but she carried on, almost automatically. Withdrawing her hands, she noticed they were covered in her mother’s blood.

She reached out with the hand again, this time for her mummy’s hand. It was stone cold. It made Melissa shudder and feel very, very frightened. Though she knew her mummy was hurt, she was convinced she’d be able to help her, but it was just a child’s delusion.

“Mummy,” she whispered in a very quiet, mournful voice, staring beseechingly at her. As no reply was given, she shook her mummy’s body. “Mummy? Mummy, I’m so scared, please be okay, mummy… Mummy…?”

Children are known from their impatience, particularly in desperate situations.

Melissa now knew that her mummy wasn’t answering because she couldn’t. She knew that she wasn’t there and had maybe gone to sleep forever – she’d been told about that. She began to sniffle before sobbing loudly, cheers dripping down her cheeks and falling onto her mother and mixing with her blood.

“I love you, mummy…” she said quietly, hugging her arms around herself and wiping blood on her clothes in the process. She stood up numbly and winced at the pain in her feet, falling back to the floor, she stared at the soles of her feet that now had jagged pieces of glass sticking out of them. The pain was throbbing, now, and blood had pooled around her feet. There was a lot of blood, but she didn’t think the cuts were very deep. She certainly hoped not. She’d seen too much blood for one day, she thought, wiping her eyes and also managing to streak her face with a combination of her mummy’s and her own blood.

Her shock recovering, she remembered what she’d been told to do when someone was hurt and she dashed off as quickly as she could without forcing the glass further into her feet (she had no idea how to remove it) to the phone to call the emergency services. By the time she was at the phone, the images of her dead mummy kept flashing in her head and the pain seemed to have increased ten-fold and she was hysterical, while miles away, another man had been watching the same image and simply smiled at the seemingly bad move and then turned away, uninterested, simply chuckling, “and now it’s my move.”