Micro Monday - December 2, 2024
The Burn
Happy Monday! Here’s your weekly 100-word story:
The Burn
They called you a monster. Showed your picture on TV beside dead firefighters. Drove by your house to toss their burned pets into the yard.
I remember you differently. The way you convinced me to run away from home, how you built a fire so we wouldn’t be cold.
Out here, we’ve started to rebuild. Volunteering gets me out of the house, away from Dad, and it looks good on college applications (my next ticket out of here).
But mostly.
Mostly.
I want everyone to forget the monster. I want the world to be green when you see it again.
I live in a wildfire state, which means I see pictures like this a few times a year. Once everyone is out of harm’s way and the fire is contained, we inevitably ask why it happened. If it’s a bolt of lightning or an underground coal fire, we chalk it up to bad luck. If a person caused the fire, we devote a short news cycle to what they did and how we’re going to hold them responsible for it.
That’s all fine, but one of my favorite things in horror is the hidden villain. Stephen King’s It is a famous example. To steal a line from James Smythe of The Guardian:
“Pennywise isn't the novel's biggest terror. The most prominent notions of fear in the novel come from the Losers' Club themselves: their home lives, the things that have made them pariahs.”
To me, that’s horror at its most instructive: exposing the true horrors of society through the context of a disastrous event. And so I wrote a story where we got it wrong, where we punished the criminal and let the real monster go free. At 100 words, it’s a lot more efficient than King’s 1,000-page novel, but I’m not expecting a Hollywood adaptation any time soon.