Threnody

He woke to the smell of burning; and perhaps he might not have bothered to move were it not for the smoke. His breaths deep through his nostrils, drying his throat, filling his lungs, enveloping him entirely, without and within. He choked, tumbling from the couch, retching involuntarily, forcing razorblades forth from his heart, tearing at him from the inside out. His body taken over, base instinct stretched out his hands, feelers searching desperately for escape, his legs moved of their own accord, pushing him across the floor. The carpet singed him though it was not yet aflame, his shirtless chest rubbed raw with each thrust towards the door; that reminded him that the now was real, his body sobered, his suffering made flesh, that in a stupor he mused for a moment that he might have found Hell, or rather it found him. His guilt manifest that had lurked in wait, a shadow behind every action, stalking silently since his brother.
But no, he didn’t want to think of his brother.
His hand pressed against the wallpaper, it bubbled and peeled back from the heat, from the flames or from him, he cannot tell, and he hears a scream, almost inhuman. And as darkness imposes itself across his sight, he doesn’t realize the voice is his own.

He found himself gasping desperately for air, had he passed out for a moment there? He was outside, his fallen figure silhouetted against the roaring beast. Sirens sound somewhere, neither close nor far as yet, and the motel room glares at his body, its windows burst in abject rage, its mouth agape, frozen wide in hunger. A tongue of flame licks out across the ground towards him, and he thinks how it would be so easy to let it take him, to let himself roll back into its embrace, launched into that demon that had driven him across the world for a foolish purpose, a whim of no regard.
But he had dragged himself out, as surely as the room devoured his belongings. His world was witness to a string of same-such rooms, each one over time blending into another, an endless repetition of the same clothes, the same objects, the same stock characters in his Punch and Judy play. And before him they charred and melted in the face of his past. A life spent in escrow now quivers in fear, the inevitable reach of a foolish act unmarred by time drawing him ever back, come finally to claim him, that it had stolen all else he’d loved. And here he hopes, as the paramedics wrestle him across the road from the mouth of the demon and faceless shadows dart back and forth with hose and bucket, that she had not suffered. That she had been taken in her sleep, unconscious to the crackling of the forest aflame, and the home she had built crumbling about her form so deathly pale.
The oxygen mask is forced over his mouth, and the world explodes white, a high-pitched squeal drowns out the metronome beep of his heartbeat in the corner. He knows then that he must face her, though the ruins be the only remainder of her body.
She calls to him across the void.
“Mum?” His muffled gasp escapes in answer.
“Fucking junkies”, exclaims the paramedic, examining the track-marks, “always leave such a mess.”