Branded(77)

“I know you never read none of my notes, but I wrote you one every couple of months just to tell ya how sorry I was. God is good and He made me see the light.”

The phone call he made to me suddenly makes sense now. The notes he was talking about were the ones he mailed to me in prison and the burn in hell comment clearly had to do with his newfound religion. My father did nothing but curse God my entire childhood.

I hear a groan and I look down at the kitchen floor ten feet away and scream, jumping back and throwing my hands over my mouth. Jackson opens his eyes and coughs, blood dribbling down the side of his mouth.

Just then, a fully engulfed beam from the ceiling rips away and crashes down in front of me, blocking me off from Jackson and my father. I jump back as sparks and cinders swirl around the room.

I watch through the flames as my father quickly turns around to go out the back door, but it’s now completely surrounded by fire. The ceiling above it, the frame around it and the door itself are raging out of control. He’s completely trapped. He turns back towards me and shouts over the roar of the fire.

“You go on and get out of here now, ya hear? I’ll make sure this little fucker doesn’t go anywhere,” he yells, pointing to the floor in front of him where I know Jackson still lies.

Even though I can barely see him through the smoke and fire, something makes me stay right where I am. Something makes me look at him, really look at him for the first time in fifteen years. The fire is getting too close and I feel it on my face and skin, my body dripping with sweat from the heat. I take another step back to get some relief, but keep my eyes locked on my father.

“I’m really sorry, baby. If I could take it all back, I would. You get the hell out of here and you go have a good life. You forget all about me because I’m not worth another second of your time and neither are all the bad memories in this house. You deserve to be happy. I’m gettin’ what I deserve and it’s okay. It’s okay as long as I know you’re happy.”

I sob and choke as I move back further into the living room and away from the fire. I stumble over a piece of musty furniture and fall on my ass as I watch more pieces of the burning ceiling rain down on top of Jackson and my father. I cry harder when I hear my father scream out in pain, knowing that he’s burning to death. It was what I always wanted. I wanted him to feel the burning agony of fire and ash and I wanted him to regret every time he forced me to feel the same. I hate that I want to run back into the room and try to save him, even though I know it’s useless. I can’t see anything inside the kitchen but the orange glow of angry fire. I hate that he chose now to say all the words he should have said to me a long time ago.

Flipping over on my hands and knees to try and stay below the smoke that is billowing above me, I hack and cough and cry as I crawl through the living room where I used to dream about having a father who loved me enough not to hurt me. I can barely see anything in front of me when I get to the front door and I run my palms blindly up the wood and feel for the handle. I turn the knob and fling the door open, stumbling out onto the front porch, trying to take huge gulps of fresh air.

I hear a horrifyingly loud crash behind me and I grab onto the railing, staggering down the stairs, running as fast as my legs will allow to the woods bordering our old property. I don’t know anything about house fires aside from what I’ve seen on TV. On TV, they usually explode, and I’m not going to take any chances. I clear the first cropping of trees, tripping over vines as I try to put as much distance between the burning house and myself as possible. My body wracks with coughs and I stumble over a large tree root, face-planting right into the ground. I can’t stop coughing and I can’t stop crying. My lungs burn with smoke and my eyes are so swollen I can barely see out of them. The shadowed woods quickly grow darker and darker and everything around me starts spinning like I’m on a tilt-a-whirl. I close my eyes and drop my head to the ground.





I see an orange glow of flames in the sky a few miles in the distance and panic ricochets through my body. Dax floors it, the speedometer reaching a hundred, but it’s still not fast enough. Phina’s childhood home was the furthest away from all of us when we were in school – twenty minutes by car and an hour and ten minutes by bike. Not that I was ever invited over…or rode my bike past her house a million times, searching for a glimpse of her.

Dax finally pulls up to the burning house at the same time as two additional fire trucks, joining the one that is already here fighting the fire. Dax slams on the brakes in the middle of the street and I jump out of the car before he puts it in park, racing towards the house. I’m tackled from behind halfway across the yard and my body slams against the ground as Dax shouts in my ear.