The night air around me crackles. Crickets chirp as the summer breeze whistles through the towering trees and unkempt grass. The horizon is all shades of blue, but the fire is so bright that the sky turns pitch black in contrast. A house is burning.
I open my eyes and remember where I am. The downtown C train, just after 5:00. My wool hat is damp with melted snow. The car is nearly empty. I’m sitting, and my slowly thawing jeans crinkle against my shivering legs. The train jerks back into motion. I shove my fingertips deeper into my jacket pockets. Not much better. What I desperately want right now is a warm crackling fire. I pull my hands out of my pockets and type the scene in my head into a note on my phone.
Who started the fire? An arsonist? But I need a motive. I narrow my eyes and nearly miss the overhead speakers announcing, “…next stop is seventy-second street.” My eyes widen as I look up and swing my backpack over my shoulder. “Stand clear…” I nearly trip on my shoelaces as I catapult myself out the door and towards my writing class.
I write because I want to share my perspective of the world. I love writing about dark, twisted things because I deeply enjoy exploring the contrast between the beautiful and the wicked. It’s typical to see goodness portrayed as pretty and evil as ugly, but life is never so straightforward. In the stories I write, I want the audience to see the complexity that often gets missed around them. Each time I sit down in a subway and look about, there is so much to see: names scratched into window panes, stains of early commuters’ coffee spills, pins and buttons on strangers’ backpacks, children clutching onto their parents’ arm every time the train lurches back into motion.
All the little details I see on the train tell the stories of people I don’t know. Perhaps the kid who carved his nickname into the walls of the subway car was desperate for attention. Maybe he was just bored. Perhaps the coffee still sloshing around in the corner was spilled by a woman shaking with anxiety for an interview. The characters I create in my mind run wild, making their own stories that intertwine and fall apart over and over again. The city is full of stories of love and hate, success and failure, and every aspect of human life; I see these tales wherever I go.
As I leave the station and walk through the dark winter afternoon, I think back to the arsonist. Clearly, this man is not “good.” He is, quite literally, setting the world ablaze. He still needs a motive. All characters have motives. I’ve made up so many pieces of characters’ stories and motives on a whim just because I’ve needed to. Many have turned out petty and unrealistic, like a thick patch of unmatching fabric sewn over a jacket with a hole in it. I’ve regretted not working harder on these stories.
Perhaps the arsonist wants nothing more than to watch the house burn. Perhaps he’s destroying it with the intention to rid himself of his regrets. The crackling of the fire as his memories turn to ashes is his motivation. What will the reader think? Will they be able to sympathize with someone with so simple a motive? Perhaps the reader can forget the horror of arson because they too can understand his plight. We are all complex. As a writer, I want to show the world what life really is.
I finally reach the door and reluctantly drag my hand through the frigid air to ring the doorbell. I can’t wait to get inside, to pull my frozen cap off my head and get back to writing. I shiver. I ache for a fire.