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Sarah Banks knows fire.
At the ripe old age of twenty-six, she honestly feels they’re the closest of friends, most assuredly best friends forever. She will tell you, and it doesn’t even have to be a day that’s good, that fire has saved her very soul. And Sarah, well, she’s confident that the saving of souls is tricky business, only for those worthy of medals and whatnots she views on tv.
Days drag by and problems, oh but Sarah can feel her soul as surely as she can the too tight rubberband maintaining her great mop of hair in the bounciest of ponytails. No matter her attempts, it seems her soul has merely eeked by in horrid disrepair for as long as she has memory. Toddler memories – Sarah Banks knows all about the brackish filth that threatens to retake her prized possession. It crawls beneath her skin, wracking her nerves with tension; Sarah recognizes when her soul is stretched taut, ready to snap and trial and error have taught her that fire is the only balm to soothe the ache.
There’s ritual, of course - an order of touch and sight that requires vigilance; a strict discipline so that all remains right between her and her best of friends. Sarah has visited counselors aplenty, her mother carting her back and forth after the last goddamned time, and even those persons, with their black ballpoint pens scribbling her inner most innards all over their office papers, they agree.
They agree that yes, there is a definitve rightness in her need (how her mother’s shoes looked divine, thickest heel to spiky), that ache for order. They forever stop though, never leaping on towards the next logical step. Remarkably lazy to her that not one of the social workers would free fall with her - graduate on to see that fire would be the inevitable outcome. That salvation, beautifully hypnotic waves of heated chaos, can only happen should she set the proper wheels in motion.
Those turbulent years past now, Sarah’s grown, hair falling in soft brown curls (they reek of sulfur, and race to a frizzy end when she lights the strands one by one) and long, toned legs. She’s intelligent, gifted even, and is proud of the matter. Sarah let her mother in on her smarts that first time, far back and long ago. She pilfered her mother’s beloved purse during one of the woman’s many smoking breaks (disgusting mayhem as there’s no flames upon inhale, only a pathetic scorching heat that scars the airway) and found her extra lighter.
Gwen Banks wore neon blue eyeshadow to match the ring on her right pointer finger, the color contrasting dramatically against the woman’s porcelain skin. Her porcelain skin with her yellow-stained fingertips gripping the flaking, white-trimmed doorjamb upon finding Sarah kneeling by the ancient blue commode, toilet paper wrapped around her teeny, tiny neck.
Her mother frozen and open-mouthed, painted red lips stretched in a silent scream of something Sarah could not identify but knew from that moment on, she instantly craved. Sarah whispered, visualized her words, saw them thick and funny shaped just as they were in her favorite bear books (thin pages curl so delicately upwards in the flames). She saw them float to her mother, giving detail on the mechanics behind a lighter, her thumb’s skin abraded and raw as she flicked, flicked, flicked the cold metal wheel.
Sarah remembers panting for breath as her mother’s scream tore loose - the scream deafened by the dizzying woosh of the fabric shower curtain catching fire. Crayon blues and oranges rapidly changing the toothy white of the toilet paper into the hue of toasted marshmallow. Toasted marshmallow charring quickly into floating embers that landed on her mother’s toes and reddened the skin as Gwen Banks came to life, a whir of spit and fuming hate.
"Just a phase," her mother would say, "something she'll would grow out of when some teenaged punk comes along to occupy her time."
Little white lies meant as reassurance Sarah heard told to the many, many, many, and varied boyfriends her mother brought home. Those men, they'd never understood the friendship she’d established, could never understand why it was of utmost importance for Sarah to rummage through their things, list their items weaves and color - touch before she lit her match. Give it life. Spark it awake and fuel their friendship with a healthy dose of fuzzy dryer lint or, perhaps, a torn pair of brown stockings.
None of them, not a one, ever understood and all those many, many, many boyfriends would holler at Gwen Banks about bratty goodfornothings (except for that) not touching what didn’t belong to them (Sarah Banks always wondered about the pots complaining about the kettle) but they would finally leave. Every one of those many, many, many men sure did leave Sarah alone when she let her best of friends come out to play.
Sarah can tell you that fire, it wants to understand her too. After all, it recognized the chipped, itchy soul oozing through her veins when she was the littlest of little. The flames danced for her, courted her on tiny oceans of light gold that cleansed all the scabs deeply encased – locked away where she couldn’t see. The flames put on plays, stage theatrics of inner blue heat that decimated whatever she deemed the perfect examples to frame as her untouchable bruises. Each item, each token lit and destroyed, further purified her. Solid proof made real to her in falling ashes, blackened soot that caked her hair and painted her cheeks.
The fire isn’t patient in redeeming her, always eager to take control and spread wild with abandon. Once lit, flashpoints ignite in a delicate balance of her own making, items burning, curling and smelling heady (burnt skin), powerful, with the flames taking flight. Staggering in height, blanketing her in warmth, snapping colors across her pupils (Gwen Banks’s flailing form in front of her, sadly not relishing this unique bond) until all she can see for eternity are oranges, yellows, blues, and…