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ONE

Jamie

The fire started in the kitchen.

Just like the last one.

The flames licked up the drapes, each faded flower vanishing in white sparks. I stood there, still holding the used match, and watched the edge of the fabric curl inwards, blackening, then opening with a hiss of release. The smoke thickened fast—it always did. Greedy. Hungry.

I didn’t run.

I waited until the heat reached the hallway, caught the old linoleum, the newspaper bundles, and the cracked, piss-yellow chair, until the air turned hostile, burning my throat.

Then, I walked out of the front door.

It was early. The street was quiet but not peaceful.

Rows of tired brick apartments lined the block, tagged with graffiti and sagging with disrepair.

Trash rustled in the gutters, and a broken streetlamp still flickered behind me, casting everything in a sick, pale glow.

A busted bike frame leaned beside the stop sign as if even it had given up.

Shitty neighborhood. The kind no one cared about. The kind no one came looking in unless they wanted something worse than answers.

But quiet.

Not like the house.

The house was screaming now.

Wood groaning. Glass cracking. That beautiful, chaotic roar meant nothing could be saved.

I sat on the curb across the street staring at the fire. No shoes. Smoke on my clothes. My uncle was still inside. Passed out on the couch, maybe. Maybe, he woke up trapped and terrified. Didn’t fucking matter. I knew he hadn’t gotten out. That was the point.

By the time the sirens came, I was calm but didn’t know what to do with the silence. No belt snapping through the air, no fists, and no lock sliding into place behind me.

I was free.

When the fire crew arrived, I clutched my laptop close and didn’t move. One firefighter tried to grab me, shouting something I didn’t catch. His gloves smeared soot across my bare arms. He looked scared. Or maybe confused.

They always are.

The ambulance came next. Someone wrapped a blanket around me. I let them. A woman crouched beside me, her voice gentle, as though I was fragile.

“What happened?” she asked.

I looked past her to the smoke billowing into the sky. “It burned,” I said.

She blinked. “How did it start?”

I shrugged. “Match, I guess.”

Her expression changed. Not fear, exactly. Just the beginning of understanding. The moment when people realize I’m not the victim they thought I was.

“What’s your name?”

“Jamie Maddox.”

Then, the cops came with their questions, and when they searched my name and the other fire was flagged, the inevitable happened.

There’s a body, trapped, couldn’t get out, burned.

“…you’re under arrest for suspicion of arson and homicide.”

I didn’t fight them. I didn’t cry. I didn’t ask why.

They took my laptop away from me, but that was okay.

I’d hidden everything in the cloud, and no one would find it.

All my tools and things I used to steal were gone.

I walked to the cruiser barefoot, fingers twitching for another match I didn’t have.

My skin itched for the flick of sulfur, the sharp tang of smoke.

I could still taste the fire on the back of my tongue, feel the way heat had kissed my face.

It wasn’t only the burn I missed—it was the control, the silence it gave me, the way everything else fell away when flames were dancing.

If I could watch something fall apart correctly, the world could be wiped clean and made simple.

The cuffs were too tight, but I didn’t complain. The pain felt real. Felt deserved.

I remember watching the dark smoke and the firefighters from the back seat. The house collapsed in on itself as if it had been waiting to die.

I knew that feeling.

They took me to a white room with plastic chairs and a table bolted to the floor. I waited. Eventually, someone came in and read me my rights. I asked for a cold soda, but they didn’t give me one, handing me water in a plastic bottle with no lid.

They called it an accident at first. They suggested it could have been faulty wiring, an electrical short in the kitchen, or maybe the old microwave gave out. One neighbor swore they heard a pop. Another said they smelled gas.

But I was too calm.

Too clean at first glance.

No soot on my face. No burns. Just a folded blanket around my shoulders and hands that didn’t shake. I hadn’t asked questions. I hadn’t cried then, and I hadn’t cried when I watched the smoke curl upward as if it was writing my name across the sky.

And when they’d checked me for injuries and found the marks on my back and thighs, the cigarette burns and the cuts, and they asked me what happened, all I said was that I’d been in the kitchen.

I heard them talking about abuse, and they handed me pity in one hand and accusation in the other.

It didn’t matter how badly someone hurt me.

That wasn’t justification for burning them to death, and hell, no one walks out of a house fire that began in the kitchen without a mark on them. Not unless they’d set the fire.

They started looking closer.

And when they asked how the fire spread so fast, I said, “Accelerant helps.”

Eventually, they stopped calling it an accident.

They sent me to a facility outside Los Angeles.

Not jail. Not at first. Psychiatric observation, they called it.

I played the game—quiet, cooperative, unreadable.

The diagnosis was difficult when pretending to be someone else was so easy.

They looked for remorse, for cracks in the story, but I gave them blank calm and vague sadness.

I could mimic empathy, mirror fear, and drip trauma in rehearsed doses until they believed what I needed them to.

The doctors said I didn’t appear to understand guilt the way others did.

I agreed with them. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt nothing.

Eighteen months of docs poking and prodding, of white padded rooms and meds.

After that, it was prison—two more years. I was under minimum security once the court accepted the diminished capacity argument, which I sold like a motherfucker. I kept my head down, memorized the schedules, worked in the auto shop they had there, and didn’t light a match in all that time.

It didn’t mean I’d stopped wanting to. I’d dream of it—heat curling under my skin, flames reaching for the sky.

Sometimes, I’d close my eyes and imagine it: the sharp snap of a match, the whoosh of ignition, the way light flickered against the walls as if it were alive.

Fire never judged. It didn’t ask questions.

It simply consumed. It gave me power when everything else made me powerless.

It took things away, but only the things I never wanted to keep .

Fire made sense in a way nothing else did.

It was simple. Pure. I didn’t need to justify why I liked how it moved or why watching something burn down to its bones gave me a kind of peace nothing else ever did.

Not even Tudor at Redcars, with all his calm and second chances, ever really saw the craving underneath—how it wasn’t just about destruction. It was about clarity and silence.

I didn’t understand either. I only knew that when things burned, my brain was quiet.

And for a moment, I could breathe.

I’d worked in the auto shop inside. Learned just enough not to look stupid and lied about the rest. Said the right things, kept my head down, let them think I was trying.

I wasn’t.

The plan was simple—stay long enough to get off the radar, then vanish. Tudor came to my room, told me about Redcars, said it was the kind of place that gave second chances to the worst of us. I didn’t believe in second chances. I believed in escape.

Tudor opened the garage door that first morning with oil on his hands and a don’t-fuck-with-me stare. He looked me over like I was a car wreck—twisted metal, something he couldn’t walk past. Then he gripped my chin, hard enough that I felt it in my jaw.

“You’re faking this shit,” he said. “I see the fire in your eyes. That thing that wants to burn it all down just to feel something. You so much as fuck up on my doorstep, you’re gone.

You understand?”I didn’t answer. I stared back, let him see it—the fury, the heat, the part of me that didn’t give a damn.

But he didn’t flinch.

“Fuck kid, you’re trouble.” He sighed.

“Whatever,” I snapped. Fuck this bullshit.

“I’m not here to fix you,” he said. “I’m here to give you the tools to fix yourself. You learn to control the fire, or it’ll eat you alive. Your choice.”

Then he turned his back on me and disappeared into the shadows of the garage, like he already knew I’d follow.

And I did.

Not because I believed a word he said.

Because I figured he’d be easy to play—just another bleeding-heart idiot with a savior complex.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.