When everything around you is falling apart, all you can do is wait. Wait for something to happen. Wait for someone to save you. Wait for a miracle. Because as I've been told my whole life, I can't save myself. And I'm starting to believe the assholes that told me so, because I've tried to.
The first occurrence was the fire. The flames had licked the base of my parents' home, a hungry beast starved and thirsty for blood. I could hear their screams, staring up at the house that currently resembled a very large and very fancy torch with tears in my eyes, clutching onto the pail of water they'd asked me to fetch from the well across the field from our family's old estate. The rust on the pail had climbed its way up over the years we'd owned it. Now when I look at it, I'm reminded of the fire clawing its way into our house. Devouring. Killing. Ending. Not even my closest friends are allowed to call me Kassie anymore. Not like my brother did. Because now when I hear that name, it's screamed in my mind like how my brother screamed it when the flames reached his muscles.
I don't go there anymore, to that house. It's all crumbly and toasted. Kind of like the toast you eat in the mornings with warm, soft butter, or a sweet, sticky fruit jam. But the difference is that my home is burnt. Burnt to a crisp. Put toast in the fire for too long, and you'll have a pretty accurate replica of my old home. My neighbors from a few acres down the field were the first responders to the disaster, being the sweet young couple they were. Miranda, the wife of our friend Georgia, had run over as quickly as possible while Georgia went to get the firefighters over. It didn't fix the problem. It took those firefighters all of one hour to put the fire out completely, and they said it was the large amount of paper in the attic that disrupted their work. The paper caught on fire faster than anything else and it made the catastrophe spread as if a large phoenix had wrapped its wings around our house, devouring it. By the time the smoke had cleared, and the firefighters deemed it safe enough to enter, Georgia and Miranda, their hands resting gently on my shoulders in consolation, led me throughout the house to see if anyone had survived. The sights that I saw I knew I could never recover from, so I embraced it. I saw my dog, Yuma, first. Her bones covered in blood and exposed with the flesh underneath her previously soft fur, I threw up behind a pile of ash that sat beside me. We moved on to what was the living room before the fire where I saw my little five year old brother's limp body resting under a collapsed and blackened desk. He was probably trying to escape the flames, not knowing he was leading himself to his demise. I tried holding back tears to show that I could handle this, that I could be strong, but with Georgia and Miranda both crying their eyes out behind me, I knew I wasn't alone in the hopelessness. Even if I'd tried to hold anything back, the sight that befell my eyes next would've been too much to handle anyways. My mother, as still as a cold hard stone, clutching my father who was like stone just the same. They were poised in a finite hug, disrupted by the fire, ironically by the fireplace we used to tell scary stories around and tell each other about our days in the cold hard months of winter. I fell to my knees, knowing my life would never be the same from here on out. The last words I heard were Georgia telling me everything would be okay and that I could live with them. And then all I saw were stars flashing beneath my eyelids before I passed out.
I got a job at the bakery close to Georgia and Miranda's house so I could help support them with their new baby and with the bills. I was smart enough to figure out how to handle selling things, and my boss noticed. As soon as she passed an order down to the front of the store so I could hand it to the customer and count the money they gave in return, I would get in position for yet another bun or bread loaf or pastry. Mira, my boss, was loving my hard work and dedication. One day I heard her and her husband speaking quietly together in the back room of the bakery, and I caught little snippets of their conversation. "Doing well" and "promotion if she keeps this up." Soon enough, I was told I was going to be promoted and my paycheck was raised. I was taught how to knead dough, how to make the fruit filling for pastries and when to make the yeast in our bread stop rising. I was now positioned in the back of the kitchen, mixing and kneading all day long. My coworker and new friend, Jerry, ran the oven. Soon enough, we made a team out of our work, and we got everything done twice as fast as before. Our boss loved it. We'd hand each other things, me giving finished masterpieces to him and him giving both ingredients and fully cooked items to me. I loved my job, and I know my boss and coworkers loved having me there too. Unfortunately, working in a bakery means working with fire at times in order to get the job done. And if your whole family has died in a fire you witnessed not even one whole year ago, it's not easy to stare directly into an enclosed flame while being very close to it. Another promotion later and I found myself in that exact situation. My face illuminated by the fire lit in the oven of the bakery, I found myself drowning out my boss' words as she explained how long to leave bread in versus pastries and smaller buns. I could see Jerry looking at me with concern out of the corner of my eye, and I knew Mira could tell I wasn't paying attention. As annoyed as she was, she told me to just take the day off and assumed it was just because I was so tired from doing so much hard work. I was in a daze as she took my apron from my open hands, and all I could focus on was Jerry and her standing next to each other with the flames illuminating Jerry's pasty face and Mira's warm darker one. With a small squeak, a flushed and embarrassed version of myself ran out of the shop without letting Mira or Jerry say another word to me.
The next day I returned to work after having had a very long and peaceful day off filled with sleeping under soft floral bedsheets and reading in the breeze on that sunny day under the willow tree in Georgia and Miranda's backyard.
