The girl in the red dress

A long time ago and a place a long way away stands a house in a town called Desolation, Arkansas.

A big fire had ripped through the house a couple of months ago, destroying everything in it and killing a few people, amongst them the owners of the house. It burned so fast that this fast-burning material, packed with chemicals and designed to burn very quickly and cleanly, didn't have time to disintegrate the large windows, so a blaze shot through the house with ease, leaving everything on fire and the two people inside it killed.

The firemen could do nothing more than set up the hoses and wait, thinking it was the best they could do. When the house didn't collapse on itself, however, they were puzzled.

Throughout the night they powered their hoses at the house, but it was one of the worst fires they had ever fought and they soon realised that the fire was stronger than their hoses and had a lot more fight left in it than they did. It was going to burn for hours.

By the morning they had given up the fight, the fire was much too powerful and they needed a long rest. The fire brigade left, the town's firefighters went back to their families to sleep off their exhaustion.

Of course the fire didn't go out.

Despite the firemen's best attempts the house kept burning. As the hours wore on it became clearer that the fire was going to burn for a very long time, decades maybe or even centuries, and that it had a will of its own.

In the house the fire made its way through the biggest and oldest of the rooms, going through the walls and the floors and the furniture. The fire didn't make as much sound as it made air as it moved through the house, but the ends of the flames were burning so strongly that they were even burning the floors and the walls where they made contact with them.

The fire went through the house floor by floor, from top to bottom, leaving a burning building behind it. It went through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the master bedroom, the guest rooms and the little-used guest house. The fire had the run of the place, it went where it wanted to go, without fear of anyone catching it, without fear of it running out of fuel. There were a lot of closed doors and locked rooms but the fire just burned through them, it wasn't bothered by any of that and when it came to the staircase it jumped the stairs, all thirty-two of them, and landed in the main hall of the house on the second floor.

In the basement someone was watching it, some people were there, she thought that it was important for her to watch it and it was important for her to be there. She didn't know why, but she felt that it was – the fire changed the basement, but she didn't care what it did.

She didn't move, she didn't breath, she didn't look away. She hadn't moved when the fire began, she hadn't jumped when it had started and she hadn't hesitated, she had stood still and watched it. She had never been afraid of anything in her life and she wasn't afraid now.

Up in one of the bedrooms she could hear the voices of a couple upstairs, in the master bedroom. She couldn't hear what they were saying, she had never heard them since she had been down here, but she knew that they now lived in a big shiny house with big shiny windows and lots of expensive, bright, new things in it. She felt no interest in their conversation and she had no urge to find out what was said. She didn't know them, she had never met them, she knew nothing about them, she didn't know their names, she hadn't even seen them.

Down here in the basement was where she was and that was how it was.

Upstairs the man's voice spoke, the woman's voice replied and he said that he had bought a new car and he was very pleased with the way it was working. She wondered if he thought that he was happy with his decision to replace what had belonged to their daughter that he had burnt down, but she knew that they had never had a daughter and that he didn't think about what he destroyed. To him she thought that it was no different than she did.

She had never bothered to care about what he did, she had never seen him and she still didn't. He was not important.

The man's voice shared his joy with the woman, she stood very still in the middle of the chairs. She had lain there in that same one, stared right back at the same fire, and she had not moved once. Never once.

She had never cared.

She had cared even less when the fire had roared through, she had cared the least when it had travelled through the house, finding the stairs and leaping them, but she cared the least again when it reached the door at the bottom of the staircase and started to burn the door.

She thought that that was very strange.

She smiled.

She looked at him, the man standing on the steps, he stood in front of the door and he tried to burn it with a cigarette lighter.