"What should I write about?" I had asked one of my younger brothers. For me, younger brothers are like locusts. There are too many to count and they're always eating my food.
"Write about a pyromaniac," he replied without hesitation.
I'd never written about a pyro, but figured it couldn't be that difficult. I imagined someone with a fascination that became an addiction. Then I started researching interesting ways to create fire. Well, I researched a little, and then I started to recall some of the ways that I had created fire when I was a kid. So maybe it wasn't too much of a stretch for me to connect with the character in Pyro, which was probably why it's told as a first person narrative.
The story flowed rather easily, wrapping itself up in just two writing sessions. I polished it up and let some people read it. Though it was one of my earlier short stories, it's still one of my favorites, which probably says some things about me.
Anyway, when I was ten, the new digit birthday (the only time in life when your age gets another digit unless you live to be a hundred) my mom lit the candles on my cake just before she realized the camera was in the other room. She ran off to fetch her aged Canon to snap a shot of me blowing out my candles, and for thirty seconds I was there with my friends, unsupervised.
To this day I'm not sure why I did it, but as soon as she turned around, I slid the cake over, pushing it across the table, allowing it to settle beneath the white drapes. Before she had the camera in her hands, the cloth was flaming and my friends were laughing, most of them at least. The others gasped, then screamed.
Mom rushed in, some of my friends rushed out and I just sat there. She ran to the table, dropping her camera on the floor, then ran over to the sink to grab the fire extinguisher. As soon as her hand touched the red cylinder, she ran back to the table to evacuate us from the area. Jerking me up by the arm, she flung me back. She panicked for another few seconds, then returned to the sink to actually pick up the fire extinguisher this time.
After fumbling with the pin for God only knows how long, she managed to spray down the table, the cake, the wall, the floor and the window. Only the last little bit even hit the drapes that were almost burnt out by that time.
Of course she beat the hell out of me for that stunt, but despite the fact that I couldn't sit down for almost an hour, I didn't regret it. Not after realizing the power I had over order and chaos, creation and destruction. With no more effort than it takes to pass the peas, I managed to unravel two days of planning, an hour and a half of baking cake and cookies and six dollars worth of ice cream. I don't even know how much those curtains were worth, but we had a black spot on the ceiling that wouldn't come off for four years.
When the air conditioner went out and the whole trailer turned into an oven, if you stood beside the window, you could smell that birthday fire, even though it had been painted over.
After that I was hooked.
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