Page 13 of Like A Moth To A Flame

“You are absolutely not a bitch.”

“There are men in this town that would disagree with that.”

“Fuck the men in this town. They can eat my ass.”

“Give any of ‘em the chance, and I’m sure someone would take you up on that.”

I laughed again, moving from the foyer and into the hallway. Picture frames lined the walls, with old, sun-bleached pictures nestled within. Me on my first day of school, my mom pregnant with me. My graduation pictures—high school and college.

I sighed.

“I just… got a lot of work to do.” I could hear the crackle in my voice, and I hated it. I hated the weakness.

“I’ll be there in about thirty minutes. I’ll grab a pizza.”

“Thanks, Barrett,” I said, but the line had already clicked off.

Pushing my phone into my back pocket, I looked around the hallway, at the walls of picture frames hung higher than I could reach.

Well. This was as good a place to start as any, I guessed.

Stepping out of the hall and into the kitchen, I found a box near the trashcan where my dad always kept them. He was an obsessive recycler, even if it meant he had to drive to the next town over every single week to do it. Reusing it was the same as recycling, right?

I moved into the hallway, box held against my hip, and pulled down the first picture, nearest the back door. It hung on a nail, carefully tapped into the plaster. I’d have to take those down and patch the holes as well.

Placing the box on the floor at my feet, I wiped the dust off the frame, and instantly my eyes filled with tears. It was a picture of me and Mom, all the way back when I was six or seven years old. We took it at a local park bench before she got sick. She had the same blue eyes I saw every time I looked in the mirror and thewide-lipped smile I remembered so fondly. Her red hair cascaded over one shoulder, reaching down almost to her waist.

I’d gotten my hair color from Dad.

‘And that stubborn attitude and thirst for adrenaline,’ she would always say. After studying it for a minute, I sighed and plopped the picture into the box. This box would be going in my ‘keep’ pile.

Slowly, one after one, I took the pictures down. They held so many memories. A picture of Dad in his uniform. He always looked so proud. Mom and Dad’s wedding picture. A picture of mom, her early ’90s hair almost wider than she was, wearing a hospital gown and holding a newborn me.

There was picture after picture of just me, from newborn to thirteen… and then the pictures just stopped. I had never really been the same after the incident. It changed me in a way that made me darker, and anger was my first and foremost emotion.

What would have become of this little girl if she hadn’t been traumatized?

I heard the front door pop open and turned to see Barrett walk in, kicking his cowboy boots off by the door, holding a pizza box in one hand, and a paper bag in the other.

“I brought wings and beer, too.”

He sighed, looking around the house much like I had earlier. I saw his shoulders drop and his chest deflate in a deep exhale, the same as I had. He had to be thinking exactly what I had been earlier.

“I figured this was gonna be a lot of work. I was right.”

Yep. He was.

We spent the whole day cleaning. By the time we took a break, night was falling, and there was a sizeable pile at the bottom of the driveway near the road for the trashman to pick up. Even despite that, there was still an astronomical amount of stuff to go through.

We sat on the couch, and the pizza box was empty beside a box of bones that were all that was left of the wings. We lay there like a couple of beached whales, nursing our warm beer and watching TV—or trying to, anyway. Out here in the boonies, we didn’t get a lot of channels, and Dad had never sprung for cable or Netflix.

Flipping through the channels, Barrett stopped at the local news station. On the screen, a fire flickered behind the reporter as she spoke into the camera. She was a tall blonde woman, with nicely muscular arms and purple lipstick that didn’t quite fit her complexion.

How was it the same reporter I remembered from years ago, and it looked like she hadn’t aged a single day?

“…yet another one of the mysterious fires here in Cottonwood Falls. Police believe it to be the work of the Firefly, the nickname given to a local arsonist that has yet to be caught.”

Barrett looked over at me, excitement burning behind his green eyes, and I rolled mine.

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