The Fire

I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to start the fire. It’s all my fault. Everything is gone because of me. They think I’m dead. They think I’m burning up in the fire like everyone else, charred to a crisp.

I sat in the bushes, in the forest just behind my burning apartment buildings. I could hear the sirens and screams of the people trying to put out the flames or save loved ones from a fiery death. But it was too late. The fire was too large, it spread to fast for me to contain. I shouldn’t have been playing with those matches. I thought I knew what I was doing, like I had done a million times before. Just for one chance to the magnificent flame dance on a stick. Now that magnificent dancing flame was a roaring fire. My home engulfed in the beautiful flames, burning it to the ground. I loved fire. I thought the flame was out. I didn’t know, oh god I didn’t know it would spread so fast. I couldn’t help but gaze back at the burning apartment buildings.

“What am I going to do?” I sobbed. "I can’t go back! They wouldn’t understand!” I slumped down by a tree and quietly began to sob harder. The sirens began to fade, but I could still hear the cry’s and sobs of the people who had once lived in the now burnt up apartment, mourn for their loved ones lost. They couldn’t believe that their homes were really gone and I couldn’t believe that I was the one who took it all away. Would they understand that it was all just an accident caused by me, an eight year old boy?

I gazed back over the bushes. I could see my mom. I watched as she cried, with tears in my own eyes. My mother had come home to the site of her home a blaze and not knowing whether her son was dead or had escaped a fiery death unlike so many of her friends. She peered around as if to see me walking up to her any second, telling her that I was ok. But I knew I couldn’t do that. The weight of all the people who had died in the fire was over powering. I can’t go back. They wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t be able to take it. Going through life knowing what I have done, even if they don’t find out I was the one who started the fire. I will always know. Their deaths are on me.

I turned away from the horrible site and got up from the tree, looking around hoping that no one had seen me mourning in the bushes. I wasn’t planning on ever going back. You might not understand what I feel, but the feeling was too over bearing. You wouldn’t know, oh god you wouldn’t know what it was like to have this weight on your shoulders, this terrible, unbearable weight, just eating away at you. I began to shuffle deeper into the forest, leaving the terrible scene behind. Forever leaving my mom to think of me dead. Leaving.