SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“This place isn’t fun anymore,” she said.

I got up from the pool’s edge and so did Smokey. We all started walking home. In a moment, she had her arm through Smokey’s. She knew what this did to him.

“Warm me up, Arson?” she said, all business. My skin crawled.

It didn’t matter to Smokey. His hand settled on hers, trembling. My sister and I walked home.

Smokey though, he flew.

Her arm was wrapped in bandages, great clumps of flame missing in her hair. She ran through the hallway, assaulted on all sides by eyes. I hadn’t seen her all summer.

Something had happened to Rebecca. I set out after her.

She looked over her shoulder, saw me coming. On any other day, she would stand her ground and drive me back with her voice.

But today, she ran. I let her. Runners would scratch your eyes out before being caught.

I saw Smokey striding towards me. He stood tall and he wore a wide smile. I knew something was wrong.

His thumb flicked, twitched against a phantom lighter shell. We both knew he lacked the control needed to have it in school.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, taking a step back.

The smile did not move. His eyes were glazed, like he’d been huffing paint thinner. He reeked of nicotine and women’s perfume. “Guy can’t be happy?” he asked, his voice dopey, slow.

“Not you, Smokey. Cause when you’re happy, it means someone else is miserable. Where’s the body?”

His eyes widened, flicked to me. “Hiding in the girl’s bathroom. She’s crying right now. She worries no one will love her, not even a squeeze under the bleachers. She’s right. Her heat is fading fast.”

My heart went cold. I couldn’t feel my bones. When I spoke, I heard the grating of my teeth and jaw. “What did you do to Rebecca?”

His smile was a black crescent moon. His eyes held a dark, hot light. “Breath is the soul trapped in the skin. It took me a while, but the principle is the same. Skin could burn too, couldn’t it? I can’t breathe her soul, but I can transform it, like turning the wine into blood.”

Pulled from thin air, he held up the ivory lighter. My heart skipped a beat. “It was a harmless thing,” he said, his speech slurring. “While she was sleeping, I’d go to her. In the heat of June, I transformed her clothes, inhaled their memories. I just wanted to know so badly. But it wasn’t enough. Not by half. By July, I was burning clumps of her hair. I started knowing things, friend. Her shames. Her passions. Her joys. Secret things. I was scared it wouldn’t work, but it did. So I kept going. By August, the ropes were tight. They’d hold her fast. I worked my way up, from nail to elbow.”

His eyes were shining and he stood on the edge of something beyond ecstasy. “I transformed the flesh and breathed in the soul through the smoke of her body. I know her so well, friend. I know her so, so well. I know her like I know the grass and the trees and the winter. I know her. And she will never be so close to somebody again, as she is to me now.”

All I could see was red, red like her hair. A sickness howled in my guts.

“You see?” Smokey said through his sickle smile, pleading, “This is the answer! This is the beginning of something wonderful! Don’t you see what I’ve done?”

“Yes,” I said. I felt every knuckle crack, every tendon pop and snap as my hands clenched into fists. “Yes, I can finally see you, Smokey.”

My hands were around his throat in a moment. I was operating on instinct, the same instinct that drives men to crush insects beneath their heel.

Smokey did not fight back. He was not so stupid. But he did not submit.

My hands came away from his throat. They snapped out and struck him in the chest, once, twice, three times. There was a screaming all around me, but I’d be lying if I told you I cared.

His feet remained on the ground. Short of breath, eyes lolling in his head, he smiled that sharp smile meant for wolves. He smiled to see my anger.

Fist to eye, kidney, and nose, temple, tooth and heart. Dropping my center of gravity, I struck him below the sternum. My hair fluttered as his breath was torn from him and finally, he fell to the ground where he belonged.

The whole thing took less than thirty seconds.

Smokey looked up at me from the ground, and although he was bleeding, he was not crying. He looked at me with those wide eyes, not with anger, but with disappointment.

“You’re sick,” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, the truth of it now dawning on me. “You’re a spider, trying to trick us into letting you live in the light. You don’t deserve light.” I spotted the ivory lighter before his feet. He had dropped it. “You don’t deserve fire,” I said as I brought my combat boots down onto it.

A wordless scream ripped through Smokey, his back arching in agony. Here then were the tears: none for his mutilated sister, but an ocean’s worth for his cheap, plastic god.

“Get out of here,” I said, my voice ragged and raw. “If I ever hear that you’re hurting her again, I’ll kill you. If you try to talk to me again, I’ll kill you. I have a bullet with your name on it. You know this.”

“I’m sorry,” he said in a whisper of wind through tombstones, still high on his sister’s smoke, “I’m sorry you’ll never understand. I’m sorry you won’t be coming with me.”

“That makes one of us.”

He did not look back as he crawled away. He only pushed and pulled himself forward, leaving behind a slug’s trail of blood. I felt hollowed out. I could not keep my hands from shaking.

I walked away from school that day, but not before making sure that Smokey crawled away first.

I could sense it in the air around me. As autumn shed its skin and left us to winter, it grew stronger. When winter cried itself away and spring came laughing, only then I knew it for what it was.

Smoke on the wind, blinding my eyes, stinging my nostrils. I had been the one thing stopping Smokey from setting the world on fire just to breathe it all in.

But I wasn’t there anymore, and knew that whatever fire Smokey had started, it was blowing down wind and headed right towards all of us.

“I have her.”

“I know, Smokey.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because she hasn’t been home in a day and you’re not creative. Because ending your own life isn’t good enough.”

“If you think this is an ending,” he said, “Then you don’t know me at all.”

He told me where they were and hung up.

The gun was a comforting weight as I took it out from under the pillow. I had all four bullets loaded just in case. It was a special occasion.

The smell of gasoline clawed at my nostrils. It spilled out past me as I edged open the factory door.

In the center of the room sat my sister. He had dressed her in a white gown, soaked in lighter fluid. The only sound was the slow drip of it onto the floor, also shining with the colorless liquid.

She had fought back, the bruises and gashes were evidence enough. Still, her hands were tied behind her, and she looked at me, shouting muffled words through the tape across her mouth. Her legs were splayed out at terrible angles, broken and bent. He had finally found a way to stop her running and it made me shake with rage.

“You came.”

Smokey emerged from the shadows behind my sister. He wore a white shirt and khakis, soaked through with the same gasoline as my sister. His face was red and bleeding from where my sister had clawed at him, but he did not notice.

“You’ve come to watch our baptism by fire,” he said through bloody, blackened teeth.