The Arsonist’s Daughter by Raymond Brunell
Icicles clung to the eaves, glinting and mournful, as if the house itself wept. The air stung her cheeks, each breath a cold, unfinished chord. Frost shattered beneath her boots as she stepped inside—her father’s house now, and hers to inherit.
Ashes arrived with the deed, sealed in a tin rattling against her palm. The house breathed with the memory of gasoline and spent matches, the scent sharp and familiar. She crouched by the hearth, built a nest of sticks, and struck a match. Flame leapt, hungry and uncertain, heat blooming upward as firelight painted restless shapes over peeling walls.
The house replied in its own language—beams creaked, pipes gave a slow sigh. Ice outside, fire within: a call and answer. She found his journals in a battered trunk. Pages browned with age and smoke, the script restless and looping. He wrote of buildings pleading to burn, wooden ribs aching for flame.
She turned a page, and her father’s voice seemed to slip through the paper, clear as if he stood just behind her: “Some houses want to be saved. Others want to be set free.” The words caught in her throat. She read on, landing again on the line that had haunted her: “The voices said fire and ice, but I heard fire as ice, ice as fire. Same song, different notes.” She whispered it aloud, and in the fire’s crackle, something inside her shifted—a chord struck, a resonance she’d always carried, unnamed and heavy.
It wasn’t madness that claimed her father, she realized, but a terrible inheritance: a gift for hearing the hidden music in destruction and cold, for feeling ruin not as loss, but as harmony. The frequencies of burning, the harmonics of shattering ice—they’d driven him, and she’d felt their tremor all her life.
She fed the fire, log by log, but her hand lingered over each piece of wood—a memory flickering in the light: her father’s hands, rough and gentle, guiding hers as a child to strike the first match. She could almost smell the old wool of his sweaters and hear his low hum as he watched the flames climb.
The flames writhed in the hearth, each pop an answer to the icicles melting outside. She pressed her palm to the warm stone, letting the vibration rise through her bones. Grief and understanding braided together—a strange inheritance, destruction as song and solace.
Outside, an icicle broke loose and shattered on the stones. She watched until the last ember fell and the house was quiet. In that hush, she heard her father’s voice and the music only she could hear—the fire’s promise, the silence that follows.
The song would carry her, as it carried him, until the house was ash and the night was clean.
Raymond Brunell (he/him) is a writer and engineer whose work blends speculative fiction, surreal imagery, and social commentary. His stories often explore archives hidden in bodies, landscapes, and myths, circling the fragility of truth and memory. He is the author of several books and shorter works.
www.linkedin.com/in/ray-brunell/
www.instagram.com/risekit_founder/
Photo by Onur İrtem on Unsplash
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Raymond, a masterwork of imagery. Emotionally evocative. Nicely done.