Angel Fire, Valmore Daniels [rosie project txt] 📗

and sprawled headlong into the middle of the aisle. The priest stopped in mid-word, and everyone stared at me—they all knew my terrible secret! Father Tomas only resumed his sermon when I got to my feet and hurried out of the church.

A torrent of emotions swirled through me. There had to be a meaning to all this. A cause. A logical explanation. Curses weren’t real. Hellfire and brimstone weren’t real. God didn’t shower the wicked with lightning bolts. Or did He? There weren’t such things as fallen angels. Or were there? If so, did they want to punish us for our sins?

But it wasn’t my fault! There was nothing I could have done differently to save my baby and my parents!

By the time I got down to Main Street, I was shivering from the cold; I had left my jacket at church, and the wind had picked up.

I couldn’t go back there, not after the show I had put on, and I wasn’t ready to return home. There was no other place for me to go. I was sure Beth wouldn’t appreciate me showing up unannounced. When I passed by a coffee shop, the windows were filled with gawking faces. It was as if every person who looked at me could see all the terrible things I had done.

I found my way to the park running along Canyon Creek, just off Main Street. I sat down on the nearest bench and wrapped my arms around myself.

I stared at the hypnotic running water of the creek. A duck flew down and landed on the surface. It let the current carry it along a few moments, and then it shot its beak under the water, I assume for a lunch of minnows or a trout. It came up empty, and with a flap of its wings, took to the air once more.

I needed to think about this logically. Maybe there was a clue in the incidents themselves that would reveal the reason they occurred. It was difficult to remember everything that had happened that night with my parents because I had blacked out, but throughout my stay in jail I’d had two more flare-ups, and both were in the first few years. I remembered the initial incident quite clearly.

* * *

The first night in the penitentiary had been the worst. I think that was the roughest moment of my life. When those prison doors swung closed and the electronic locks shut me in that cold cell, the reality of how low my life had fallen struck home. I didn’t think I would make it through the night.

The misery was a thick paste in my mind. I had no friends, my parents were dead and everyone thought I had killed them. The child I’d had growing inside me was also dead because I had failed to protect it. What was left for me to live for?

I just wanted the world to stop; I wanted the pain in my heart to go away.

“Would you shut the hell up,” someone growled at me. I hadn’t even been aware there was someone else in the cell. Disoriented, I looked up through teary eyes at a woman standing over my bed. As with every other person I had seen lately, she glared at me, condemnation etched on her face like a mask.

So completely wrapped up in my own misery, I grabbed my pillow and held it like a life preserver. I tried to stop, but the tears had a mind of their own. I cried louder.

She shouted, “You just stop that right now, you little bitch, or I’ll knock your teeth out.”

“Leave me alone!” I yelled back at her, and sat up on one elbow. “You’re all the same. You all hate me.”

“Yeah, you’re right, I hate you. You’re the little psycho that killed her parents aren’t you? Should’ve let yourself get burned up while you were at it.”

“I didn’t kill them!” I screamed, and lunged at her.

She swung her fist. It connected with my jaw and stars exploded in my head. I fell back to the bed, reeling, and the woman—I didn’t even know her name—jumped on me and cocked her fist for another blow.

I had a sudden flashback of my last night with Barry.

The force inside, for the second time, took control of me. Before I knew it, the mattress was on fire. My cellmate jumped off with a cry of alarm.

“Fire! Help! The little psychopathic bitch tried to set me on fire!”

I was a psychopath. Instead of jumping off the bed, I threw myself in the flames and rolled around. I think for a short time, I was insane. I wanted to die. I wanted the fire to consume me as it had consumed my parents, my past and my future.

The fire grew higher, the flames licking the ceiling. My cellmate’s shouts for help turned to panicked screams.

I did not black out that night, as I had the first time the power took me. In the end the guards had to pull me from the flames, kicking and screaming, and the prison medic shot me up with some kind of hypodermic that put me out.

* * *

The next day at the infirmary, when the doctor examined me, he was alarmed to see that my skin was completely unharmed by the fire.

“It’s a miracle you weren’t burned,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

What miracle? I survived. That wasn’t a miracle; that was a life sentence.

Maybe some higher power took pity on me: I was transferred to a different cell block where I met Kyra Michelson: drug dealer. At least, that’s how she introduced herself to me when the guard escorted me to my new cell.

Kyra was an extremely large woman with tattoos covering nearly every inch of her massive arms. I suspected there were many more under her ill-fitting prison jumpsuit. She wore black-rimmed glasses that were as thick as cola bottles, and I think she was the only woman I had ever seen under the age of fifty that was balding. The hair she did have was jet black and cropped short on the top and sides in a mullet.

Lying in the bottom bunk, she was propped up in the corner, and flipping through a fashion magazine. She looked up with a genuine smile when I stepped inside. The guard closed the door behind me without a word, leaving me to fend for myself. I felt like they had just thrown me to the wolves.

“I’d stand up,” Kyra said, “but I’m just too damned lazy. Hope you don’t mind the top bunk. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, you know. I just don’t like taking chances. Come over here and sit down. What’s your name? I’m Kyra Michelson, drug dealer. What are you in for?”

Stunned, I could barely form a thought or a sound, and stood in the center of the room like a dunce.

“What? Are you shy or something? I don’t bite. I mean, I might if you ask nice. That was a joke, honey. Can you speak?”

“Hi,” I managed to say.

“Ah! There you go. That wasn’t so hard, now was it? Come in, make yourself comfortable. This is your new home, after all. I don’t deal drugs anymore, so don’t ask. I don’t even take drugs anymore, not since they put me in here. My boyfriend keeps offering to smuggle in a care package, if you know what I mean, but I’ve been clean for three years now. Seriously, you’re making me nervous. Sit down, honey.”

I was so taken aback by her non-stop chattering, I momentarily forgot about my initial fear; and when I realized this, I smiled and stepped forward to shake her hand.

Kyra smiled back, and from that point on we became fast friends.

She was on a first name basis with nearly every other inmate on the block, and as far as I could tell, she had no enemies. Through her, I met dozens of other girls, and learned the ins and outs of prison life. What to do, what not to do; how to scam extra helpings at the lunch counter; which guards would turn a blind eye to light contraband, which ones were tough bulls.

She had a story for everyone she met, and knew intimate details about their lives: whose kid was having a birthday, who was a shoe-in for parole; which girls were sneaking around with what guard; and what hobbies they liked to pursue in their free hours.

Whenever someone was having a rough go of it, Kyra was the one they came to for emotional support.

Though I was reluctant to socialize at first, Kyra dragged me with her wherever she went. She got me out of the janitorial duties I was originally assigned, and managed to convince the social counselor to give me a job as her administrative assistant, which was a cushy position. The only downside was that I had to attend every group session and take notes.

Every night before lights out—and sometimes well past—Kyra would talk continuously about her life before prison; her boyfriend, John; the daughter she had to give up for adoption; her life on drugs; and a hundred other topics. I didn’t mind. Listening to her go on was therapeutic, and helped to take my mind off my own troubles. Usually, the sound of her voice relaxed me to the point where I would fall asleep without hearing the end of her stories.

It was during one of her life narratives that Kyra mentioned the mantra of control that a rehabilitation coach had taught her when she was first trying to break her addiction.

In the six months I had been her cellmate, I never interrupted her when she was in the middle of a story, but this time I prompted her to give me more detail. “A mantra? Did that work?”

“Well,” she said, thinking about it for a moment. “Sort of. There were a lot of other exercises he got me to do. I mean, there’s no magic cure for addiction. Like they say, you take it one day at a time. Once an addict, always an addict. You can only do as good as you can. But, yeah. There have been moments where the need grabbed me, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of a reason not to snort a line. Maybe it’s kind of like when they tell you to count from ten backward when you’re angry. It distracts you long enough for some part of your brain to take back control.”

I asked, “Can you teach it to me?”

Unusual for her, Kyra was silent for a long time. “Of course, honey. And I won’t even ask you why you would want to learn it.”

She was as good as her word, and she never asked me why. Though Kyra knew the most intimate details of practically everyone’s lives, she rarely got that information by sticking her nose in their business; people just felt comfortable enough around her to open up naturally.

Many nights I had lain awake, wondering about the blaze that took my parents’ lives and puzzling about the cause of the fire that consumed the bunks that first night in prison. Had I started it? The memories were clouded. Though I had been in both fires, I remained untouched—unscarred physically.

In a rare moment, about a month after moving in with Kyra, I had stolen a lighter from one of the other girls in the exercise yard and played the flame against the skin of my forearm. The pain was unimaginable, and the area where I applied the fire turned an ugly black color.

Tossing the lighter away from me and trying bravely to suppress