Chapter 2 - Heather’s POV
When I regained consciousness, I was feeling cold even though small sparks from the hot fire still danced and twirled around me. My once unharmed, magnificent brick house was in ashes around me. I looked down. Not a scratch was present on my orange shirt, my dark blue yoga pants or my pale white skin. I could see several relics of the flames that had consumed the stone and wood. Blackened miniature statues we had collected over the three years we had lived here, the longest period of time we had lived anywhere, lay in ashes. Weird, I wondered, how am I alive? Standing up, I brushed the small flakes of ash, swirling around the completely burned mass of my house and all that it once held, off me. The small flakes swirled off me and around me as easily as if they had gone right through me. I shivered, cold despite the warm air and ran out to the front of my house, leaving behind the wreckage that was now just a stain of grey in the otherwise unharmed neighborhood with its small houses in neat rows. Around me lay all the other houses, standing innocently tall and unaware of the destruction next to them. As I walked along the sidewalk, a man in a black business suit with a navy blue tie and shiny leather shoes passed me.
“Excuse me sir? Hello?” I asked. The urgency in my voice sounded clear enough to me, but the older man just kept walking along as if he had heard nothing. I wondered briefly if it was because he thought I was asking for money. Living in a busy neighborhood, he probably had kids like me ask him for money all the time. No, not like me, I silently scolded myself, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I kind of was like them. I had no house, and minimal amounts of clothing, because our house and everything inside it had just burned to the ground. I tried to cheer myself up from these unpleasant thoughts with the joy of seeing my parents after a hard day as I continued walking, more urgently now out of eagerness to be somewhere safe away from my strange attempted murder, down the road. The grocery store was close to our house, so I decided to go there. My pointless wandering finally had a purpose, so I picked up the pace into a speed walk. My parents were in front of the old fashioned shop, crying. I ran up to them, ready to explain how our house had spontaneously caught fire. “Mom! Dad!” I yelled to them as I was running and as they were wiping away the tears in front of the wooden double doors of the store. I guess I was still too far away, because they didn’t seem to hear me, although I felt like I was standing right in front of them. “Um, hello?” I asked as I paced the rest of the distance to them so that I was close enough to stick my hand out to tap my mom on the shoulder. I stopped as I realized something was a little off. My hand had gone right through my mom’s shoulder, and I couldn’t see my fingers where they were stuck in her shoulder blade. I wiggled my fingers to see if I felt anything, but wiggling my hand into my mom felt basically like wiggling it in the warm, smoky air around me. I looked at myself again, wondering what sort of monster I had become. I had appeared to be solid when I awoke at the house, but now, in the direct light, I seemed almost transparent, like looking through a foggy window. The sidewalk was underlined beneath my feet, and when I stuck my hand out in front of my face, still facing my mom, I saw the floral pattern on my mom’s shirt, and it’s blue and pink colors mixed with the colors of my hand to form a bluish-tan color, almost the color of a bruise. The world spun around me as I realized something I hadn’t thought of when I left the burned wreckage to find my parents.
What if I’m not really alive?