Dill had never meant to let everything get out of hand.

She quite simply was just enjoying a bonfire. Until she felt the way the embers flourished in the air, the way the fire ate up the earth beneath it. It sucked the air from the atmosphere, the resources from the ones who started it.

Then it was too much to ask of her to not do anything stupid. After that night, she lit matches and burned things for the thrill of it. And then she had a brilliant idea: She could burn herself, feel the fire the way she longed to.

So she did, and with each scar came a bigger thrill, she hid them of course, but she created art with her skin. Designs snaked up her wrists, her arms, her collarbones.

She thought them gorgeous, the pain a small price to pay.

Until that price became too much, until the pain ignited something in her: rage.

She was as angry as the blood that trickled down from the blistering skin. Angry as the words that spit from her mouth.

Her anger and the flame were one.

And when people whispered about her in the stores and salons, they couldn’t seem to escape the smoke. The smell of burning flesh was one of her favorites.

But then one bit of revenge went too far. A simple cremation became a forest fire, then a full out town destroyed. And she did nothing. She felt nothing.

The only thing she felt was the doctors trying to decide what was wrong with her. Not the burns scaling her body (they covered those) and not the burns scaling that marred her skin for eternity. They tried to tell her she was unstable,

psychotic, or in blunter terms: insane.

And Dill, she really didn’t like that. But she couldn’t do anything. They worked on her body, trying to remove the scars she worked so hard to create. They tried to return her art to the plain skin she had before. They didn’t succeed, not fully at least. She kept the scars. She was glad.

But before she could avenge herself, she was tied down after the fire inside her killed only a few patients. Truly, she didn’t think it that bad. Apparently it was.

They put her in a psychiatric facility. It was a jail for the ones they couldnt contain. Her hands always cuffed, her sleeves always long.

Nobody knew her. Nobody knew what she did. A fresh forest to burn to the ground.

She looked forward to it.