Flame

Zee

He sits, one hand holding a pen and the other gripping the paper upon which he writes. His motions are frantic, paper torn from the harsh movements of the pen. He has to write, has to spill these boiling ideas onto something outside of his mind. The words he’s grown to keep neatly tucked inside had grown to be too much of a burden, too much to keep locked within their weary mental prison. The pen called to him, and soon paper loomed in towers around him, dangerously close to toppling onto the single candle, the single source of light he writes by.

When he first grabbed the pen, the candle had been untouched. A pristine wax cylinder with a wick straight as an arrow. Now, what remained of the candle sagged in its holder, offering only a few more minutes worth of pulsing orange glow. He kept writing, unaware of his limited time. He had no more candles. He had many more words. Words that spoke of hope and dreams and blossoms bursting through frost. Words of a tightly coiled wire, forever moments away from unraveling. He wrote and wrote and wrote, relieving himself of years, decades, centuries of words. Prose and verse mixing and spiraling and filling the paper like a tidal wave. The pen had not yet run dry. The tower of empty pages, still taller than the tower of filled ones. The candle dropped, barely more than a puddle. One page from atop the tower of words fell, almost in slow motion, down to the floor. It fell, and it fell upon the flame just before it would have died. The room did not fall into darkness, instead, it burst into light, gold, and orange and screaming scarlet. He was unaware of the words he had worked so hard to preserve burning around him, for there he sat in the middle of the inferno. Writing.