The hydrant spewed, downing the angry flames of the burning house. The neighbors whispered and looked on in a horrified almost silence. The firefighters ran hither and nigh, their yellow and black outfits smeared against the orange of arson.
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And yet, the surviving victim, staring at his flame-consumed home, was not thinking about his burnt dwelling, or the belongings he had lost.
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He thought about his daughter. Her innocent eyes, smiling at him with a child’s joy. Skipping to school and singing in the kitchen. Her light hair and quick step, always a pace behind him.
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She was dead now.
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Her bright life snuffed, darkened, gone.
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She would never know the lasting victim was also the instigator.
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He got up, shaking the shock blanket off his shoulders and folding the small stool they had given him, departed. His wide shoulders, outlined, sharp; his shadow flickering in the dying rush of fire.
~~~
Out of the flames emerges a fighter. His face brighter than the others. “I have found another surviver!” He shouts.
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The attention turned to the child in his arms, her face and arms burned, her yellow hair singed, and darkened with soot. Arms limp. But living at least.
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Beside her rescuer stands another, carrying the form of her lifeless mother, the joy of the others is not present on his face.
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They carry the child’s doll-like body to the EMS, and rush to tell her father of his great fortune, only he is not there. The folded stool leans against the truck, the blanket, dropped on the ground from when he stood, the soot that he shook of his body. All these things are there, but not him.
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~~~
Two weeks later they discover his responsibility. The gasoline and lighter under his name, the plan written in his notebook, almost artfully situated by the woods outside the remains of his home. His child is transferred to foster care, his case buried under the murder that spreads like a rogue flame over the country. Thousands of people die that day, in a cult murder. And so a war is started, the war of fire, the war of arson. Starting with the girl who was to die, the girl who survived the flame.
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