KIKWANG POV

Ignoring the yells and laughs floating down the street, I burrowed myself deeper, if possible, into my room. Door closed, curtain snapped shut, earphones in. It had been another generally horrible day at school, and I just wanted to forget it. I just wanted to forget that my father was long gone, moved away after the verbal battles with my mom got too much, moved away from my heart with the amount of minutes I had seen him since, which was currently zero. Forget that I was failing two of my subjects in school, not to mention the two other C's, and another D to round out the count. Forget how my mom was too busy to talk to me, to even look at me, like I wasn't enough for her, like I was doing something wrong, when I don't know what I'm doing that makes her so upset. Forget that I had no one, even when I looked and looked until I got dizzy from spinning. 

Forget everything.

Below me, I could hear my mom, as she walked around the downstairs, the old house creaking as she steps. Making dinner, maybe, although I wasn't willing to bet on it. She didn't have that kind of time lately. I sighed, closing my eyes, and shrank down even more on my bed, like trying to disappear, trying to be folded in with the sheets, and never seen again.

I wish I could disappear.

It's not like anyone wold notice, anyway.

I woke up a couple hours later, groggy with sleep, but suprised that I had managed to fall asleep at all. I shook my head, squinting my eyes against the glare of my headlamp, and unplugged my earphones, turning off the ever-replaying music. It was hot, I registered, as I walked across my room to plug into my phone. My mom never the heat, especially in early fall, like it was now. There isn't any need to waste money, she would say, whenever the temperature plunged below 0 and I came in, wearing a couple jackets and a coat, to complain about the freezing-ness of the house. Just wear a hat.

So why was it so hot? 

I opened my door, intending to go downstairs for some dinner, but stopped in my tracks when, with the gust of new air came in, a sharp, distinctive scent came with it. Ashy and clotting and dreary and the kind of scent that makes your lungs hurt and your eyes water and your throat dry to dust.

Something was wrong.

As I adjusted to the silence of the usual world with music, what I noticed, as my panic grew, was the noise. Something was noisy downstairs. It sounded like... crackling. Crackling, but the hungry snap of a starved beast.

I had never heard the noise before, at least not inside.

It sounded kind of like a campfire, the kind of campfire your dad brought to life while camping with a piece of flint and a pile of branches. 

A campfire. 

A fire.

Oh god, a fire. 

Abandoning whatever else I was going to do, which now seems so redundant, I rushed down the stairs, almost tripping in my panicked haste.

A fire.

But I didn't get all the way down the stairs, because my mother was there, gripping my elbow, her hands reddened with burns and blackened with soot, and her eyes, as focused and as wide and as afraid as I had ever seen them. 

"Go," she hissed, her voice scratched and hoarse, but I heard it like it was a gunshot over the orange, and red, and yellow, and blue that is invading the room below, so all I saw was a wall of fire, and devouring and crackling and spitting and advancing fire. 

A fire. 

There was a fire, in my home, and my mother was there, and we were both about to be trapped, and we were both about to be eaten by the hissing, growling flames. 

"Go!" She yelled, when I only stood there, trapped in my realization that we were about to die. "Go! Run downstairs, get out the front door. You know how to do this. I will be behind you. Run, Kikwang, I don't want my only son to die!" 

A fire. 

And I ran. I ran down the stairs, and I took a breath of the clogged up air, and I sent up a prayer, and I fought down the fear, and I stepped into the flames of the fire of my home.

Fire at my clothes at first, found them, and started chewing, hungry, the thin fabric as thin as dried seaweed and about as filling to the reaching mouthes.

I stumbled, and then stretched out my hand to catch myself, and the disintegrating wall caught me, but fire latched onto me instead. My eyes grew blurry, my feet tripped and my throat in air that only made me cough and retch, and yet I still tried to breath. Panic softened the edges of my vision, and, in return, sharpened my fear until it was a spike, stabbing me in the stomach, again, and again, as if I needed more pain.

Now, I am encased in the fire. I am a Phoenix, rising in flames, but I am a weak Phoenix, for I will die. I will die, I will consume myself, with the fire that has become my heart, my lungs, my eyes, my tongue, my everything. My everything will eat my all, and I will become my everything, and I will become a living person no more. 

And yet I walked. 

And yet I fought.

And I fought, becuase I remembered what my mother had said, before I had become fire, become the one that was only trying to eat, only trying to live. I don't want my only son to die.

Mom, I don't want to die. 

Mom, I love you. 

I love you so much.

I don't want you to die. 

I don't want anyone to die. 

I don't want to die.

I want to live, because you gave your life to me.

Mom, I love you so much.

I love you so much.

I love you.

I love you.

And then I felt a gust of air, air that is too cold, and I'm a Phoenix, and then I fade into black.

I woke up two days in a hospital bed, my skin crispy red, my house burned to the ground, and my mother gone forever.