Cold Fire [SAMPLE]

[1]

CHAPTER ONE

It's early in the night when I find myself walking down a seemingly abandoned street. The rain thunders down, a wall of water seeping into my clothing, filling up my shoes, flowing down my arms and dripping off my fingertips. My eyes glimpse an open window on the second floor of a modern building. It's illuminated with a lamp, and even though the light is dim, it shoots out into the darkness, coating everything in a soft glow and casting ominous shadows. Someone appears in the window and I whip my head around and focus on my feet. With any luck, I'll blend into the rain and the dark and I won't be noticed.

The cold air swirls around me every now and then, but other than that, it remains still, like it's tip-toeing through a sleeping house and pausing every few seconds when something moves. I can feel the rain dribbling and dancing on my arms, but I don't feel the icy touch that leaves everyone else shivering. Correction: I can't feel its icy touch. Just like I can't feel when something's too sharp or too hot. I experience life in shades of grey: mild weather, dull colours, muted sounds, stifled scents, bland flavours. I still remember the time I leant on the stove top, not realising it was on, and melted the skin off my arm before mum noticed and screamed at me to move away. And just like extreme heat, extreme cold fails to win my notice.

But the rain at least is better than those apparently freezing days that I can survive without even needing to wear a jumper – the cold air doesn't even raise a hair on my arm. At least this rain triggers involuntary shivers that slither through my body, making me feel, for once, alive. And normal. But even now I walk with bare arms and bare legs, wearing nothing but a loose t-shirt and a pair of denim shorts. I will the ice to seep into my skin even though I know it's hopeless. Nothing I do now will change who I am.

There is someone walking down the street ahead of me, heading god-knows where, and I step further into the shadow of the trees lining the road as I walk. The person passes me by without even sparing a glance in my direction and I wonder if they know that I'm the one who has caused these freezing temperatures – if they know that the person responsible for this early winter is standing only a few feet away. Probably not.

They disappear into the darkness behind me, just another nameless face that I'll never remember, another life that I've turned upside down.

Stepping out of the shadows, I turn left onto my street. From here, my home looks dilapidated. The grass lawn is unkempt and overgrown, the curtains are all drawn tightly shut, and our 'garden' is a mess of dying flowers and leafless bushes. The tall metal fence surrounding my house on three sides is coated heavily in graffiti, not all of it pleasant. The most common phrase is, go back to hell, closely followed by murderer and demon. I think my favourite is, die, satanic saucerer. Whatever their intentions, it always makes me laugh.

I recall when we first moved to Sydney and our neighbours did us the 'favour' of petitioning the council for a new fence. "Privacy," my mum had said as we watched the local council workers tear the old fence out of the ground and replace it with a taller, thicker and stronger version of the old one. "The old fence was too short – we could see into each-others homes." And yet, everywhere else, the same short fence remained and no one seemed to mind.

My mum doesn't use the word home anymore, and nor do I. At the moment, our 'home' is more of a cold empty house playing dress ups, pretending to be something that it isn't by hanging family pictures on the walls and turning the television on to fill the silences. Some mornings when I wake to my room, I catch myself wondering where I am, as if I haven't lived there for six months but only one day – as if all the memories of waking up and getting dressed in that very spot are alien, belonging to a different person in a different time. Nothing there is familiar. Nothing there feels like home. My house is a fake – a forgery – and my family is simply going along with the act.