I wrote this entire one-shot in, perhaps, an hour. I have so many half-written pieces, it's not even funny, but this came all in one whoosh. I took a different approach from my norm; it's a piece shaped around a metaphor.
It's shorter than most of my stuff, but – like I said – the nature of this work isn't made for details.
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Her father was a man with perpetual rage dimming in his eyes. It never seemed to catch flame, not since she can remember, but never did the spark burn away – not completely. His irises were gray – not the dull shade but the husky one – like the smoldering of ashes.
Her father had eyes like the remainder of a blaze.
Her mother was different. When Bianca looked her mother in the eyes, she saw not the end, but the beginning – the rise of a force perhaps stronger than fire. Her mother had a blue gaze, not like the sky, Bianca decided, but more in tune with the ocean. Darker than the clouds but lighter than a storm. Her mother had softer eyes than her father, peaceful and gentle – but strong and righteous, nonetheless.
How she hated the innocence of her mother's eyes. The promise of a quiet victory over the shrieks of an unruly enemy. You see, it was her mother's last blink of truth that forced Bianca DeSousa to create her own table of elements.
In her version, fire destroys everything.
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Growing up, she is elementless, an undiscovered module to science. Break her down, and there is nothing left of her parents.
Her father has left when she was only eleven. From their apartment's fire escape, she watched him lug suitcases in and out of the building to a taxi stationed beside the curb. He didn't have time to say goodbye; the meter was running.
She remembers that day in vivid detail, recalls that sense of waiting. She read somewhere that when something this life-shattering happened, the world was supposed to stop. But the tiny people below on the sidewalk didn't stop; they didn't know that the man boarding the cab beside them was leaving forever. They didn't know that the little girl perched on the metal stairs ten stories up would never find an element now. The world moved like any other day.
And even when her mother starts to act strange, starts to stumble when she gets home late at night and cry more than she used to – even when the waves in her eyes finally meet their crash – Little Honey Bee, Bzz-Bzz-Bumble Bee, B, Bee finds a way to move with it.
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The day her two older cousins push her off a trampoline is the day Bianca finally chooses her element. She wants to be unbreakable, unbendable – she wants the power to destroy. And so, from that moment on, she is fire.
She listens to her aunt's hateful remarks concerning her mother, and Bianca snaps back at them with venom. Her mother – with her weed and her debt and her depression – doesn't possess too many defendable qualities nowadays (in fact, Bianca hates the darkness pooling in her eyes almost as much as the memory of the innocence), but more than anything, she despises her aunt's attempts to discard all traces of her mother.
Bianca doesn't tell her that she is nothing like her aunt's sister. She doesn't tell her that Mom was weak in the end, that Bianca wants to be hard, strong, unmovable – like her father was.
Instead, she buys drugs in back alleyways and breaks curfew every night and steals bottles from the downstairs fridge – her aunt will pay for trying to guide her in a different path.
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Drew Torres is wind. It's an element she's heard of – scoffed at mostly – but never has she actually encountered it. He's the breeze in the air, free and soft and careless, and when she first meets him, despite it all, she is intrigued to say the least. She works hard to stop herself from wishing that she had chosen his element.
And she's right to do so. The thing about wind is that it is easily carried away.
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Katie Matlin's element, for the longest of times, is unidentifiable. She certainly is no wind like Drew; her feet are planted firmly on the ground, ready to win, ready to strike in a subtle manner. There are times when Bianca sees the spark in her.
She decides that, perhaps, Katie Matlin – as different as she may seem from Bianca – stills boils down to the same element. Perhaps, she has found another flame.
The friendship is guarded and unexpected and hard. Companionship is one thing that can only go so far when you are fire. There can be no trust.
But Katie betrays her. The night her true intentions shine through, Bianca realizes that Katie has eyes like her mother did. Katie Matlin is no flame, after all – she is a wave.
Bianca leaves her former friend's apartment with clenched hands. She doesn't tell Katie what she knows – the girl will figure it out sooner or later.
The thing about waves is that – like her mother before her did – they will always crash.
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It's when the tears come late that night that she realizes she may have been wrong about something for a very long time. Katie's abandonment is weak in her knees; Drew's memory is wistful in the breeze from her window.
Bianca shouldn't feel this. She is a flame, a blaze, a wildfire – like her father. Don't look back, don't wait, don't feel. The meter is running.
Katie Matlin pushes her aside without a glance, betrays her without a thought, and Little Honey Bee, Bzz-Bzz-Bumble Bee, B, Bee cries that night.
Suddenly, it is so painfully clear who the fire is in this equation.
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She's elementless again. She's not peaceful or righteous like a wave, not careless or free like the wind – and she certainly is not hard enough to be a fire.
Her feelings belong to no element. Bianca is nothing.
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"I was like you once." At first sight, Mrs. Torres is a wave.
Leave, she thinks bitterly, I don't want to be around to see you crash. Her eyes are gentle like Bianca's mother's once were, but there is something more to them – something strong that wasn't always that way, Bianca decides.
Mrs. Torres has a son that is the wind, another son that is the water – and something sparks around her like a flame. But she is not fire.
Mrs. Torres, she realizes, is where they all meet. She is earth.
And when Bianca thinks of her mother's water washing over the shore, of Drew's breath sweeping through the trees, of her father and Katie's hiss licking at her edges, she realizes that she, too, stands in the middle of all the elements.
She bonds them together.
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Years later, when she doesn't long for spark anymore or scorn the waves or miss the wind, she allows herself to think that, perhaps, she is the most important element of them all.
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Thanks to anyone who is reading, and reviews/favorites are greatly appreciated.