I'll Burn With You (MXM)

Chapter 15 : More Exchanged Letters

Ben stepped off the train at Norton to a town winding down for the night. Quiet. Deathly silent compared to Mill Creek. The traffic, the pace, the breaths were all slower. The air was colder, crisp, burning against his skin. Durmont and Norton glowed under a dull gold haze compared to the bright, white light at Mill Creek. Above stretched an endless necklace of stars against an inky black sky.

Where he glanced felt foreign, unfamiliar, like the whole world around him had shifted, crooked, thrown in disarray. He did not know why.

By the time Ben arrived at the house, his parents would not look at each other. His siblings could say nothing of their parents' further-strained behavior. In the presence of their grandparents, a forced joviality passed between them – Mr. and Mrs. Price met him at the door with kind words and gentle touches – ignoring the tension for the entirety of the senior's visit. Mr. and Mrs. Price took to separate rooms at the end of their days, not speaking even after their grandparents had departed.

That night, he dreamt again of the fire that threatened to consume him. Panicked, screaming, no matter what he did, the fire burned slightly harder, slightly brighter. People watched; they did nothing. Always he would see his skin fleck off his body like water-stained wallpaper before he could wake up. Always Theodore or Beatrice or Douglas would come to his aid, their actions looped like a stutterer's words. Always he would wake up before they could help, his breath steady but his body tingling with nonexistent pain.

He could not sleep. Ben did not sleep for the next several nights.

J. Byrd's postcard arrived first, though it appeared in Ben's hands some days after. The letter – on one side a marvelous watercolor of Mill Creek's Union Station – already felt so worn with age and duress.

July 8, 1894

Dearest B,

I was at Mill Creek, the postcard proof I had come to see you. I waited for as long as I could before I needed to return home. I am sorry. Writing this now, heart heavy with the disappointment of having missed you, please know there will be another letter to follow that blames myself for being so self-assured in our meeting.

Yrs,
J.

He tucked it away with the rest of the letters, his reaction unresponsive; he moved on with his day.

Once the moon had fully risen, Ben left the house, trekking to the general store, and pulled out paper to start writing a reply, yet as he readied his pen, the words escaped him. A numbing emptiness sat inside him, one he could not brush away. Ben started writing. Each word he wrote felt hollow, worthless. He crumpled the page and tossed it away. He started again. Again. Ben sat back, angry but unfeeling.

"I should write back," he told himself, willing himself to write just "Dear J,".

He stashed the letter away for the night.

A day later, once Father Michaels released his congregation for the remainder of the day, news finally reached Durmont that much of the World's Fair in Allisport burned to the ground. Newspapers showed the desolation in black and white, what had stood before mere ghosts of greatness.

Ben held his pressed coin a little tighter as he worked. He could only imagine such a look on Miss Byrd's face, and his heart broke.

He revisited the letter the next night, but wrote nothing. The next night, he wrote nothing, staring at a mocking blank page. Ben, finally accepting the emptiness of his words, sat down to write...something. He begged for her forgiveness in not writing back sooner, asking to share the blame in their failed meeting, words flowing like spring water. As the page count grew, so did his own frustrated tears dotting the page. "Why can't you just ignore me?" he nearly wrote countless times, wishing for that time when he was invisible.