Fires of Rage Burn Hotter

Warning: Graphic material Does murder affect everyone the same? Are you a murderer if you kill? Just because someone feels remorse for their homicidal action, can you say they'll never kill again?

Fire burns hotter if the fuel is more significant than the flame. A fire lit for survival feels less powerful than the notes you took for that class, which burn cooler than the effigy of the person who betrayed your trust.

Felicity felt the heat of rage radiating off the pyre on which she incinerated the last traces of the boy's influence in her life. She knew this wouldn't undo the hurt, and she knew it wouldn't solve anything, but watching the flames dance over everything he had touched satisfied her immediate needs.

At first, Felicity thought she wanted to kill him. Truly believing you want to murder someone for the first time is terrifying. When we say or think we want to kill another human being, we aren't lying, after all. On some level, we believe that the end of the person's life will be the end of our problems. What we really want, of course, is to eliminate their existence from our own life.

Felicity, however, did not come to this conclusion. As she stood watching the lingering flames from the unceremonious cremation, she felt... nothing. The emptiness she felt made no sense! He was gone! She should feel relieved! She killed a man! She should feel guilty or horrified or worried! But instead, she just stood there, holding a cigarette and staring blankly ahead.

While the inferno raged, she saw the past 3 years of her life go up in smoke, and she felt exhilaration. But now, as the embers crowning the remains of the skull before her dwindled, her remarkable lack of emotion was all that was left.

The inside of a  police station becomes instantly more foreboding when you get to the counter. That was when Felicity felt the weight of the ashes. It had all happened so fast. Tears and a lump in her throat made it difficult to speak, but she managed to get her confession out.

Apparently, showing remorse can be enough to shorten your sentence to 7 years in prison for murder and burning the corpse. Throughout the course of her incarceration, Felicity's guilt mounted, and she knew that she would never feel at ease with herself. Her guilt was enough to keep her humble, even if her fellow inmates where terrified at the murderer they shared a cell block with.

Eventually, the other women realized the magnitude of the guilt Felicity felt, and began harassing her. Felicity thought, until then, that she submitted to passion and instinct when she killed the boy, whose name she couldn't even remember anymore. He was, after all, trying to assault her. But one August day in the prison yard, she learned that she was simply a murderer at heart.

One of the girls, an arsonist and vandal, was teasing and shoving Felicity, and Felicity had been dehydrated for the past week because another girl, a burglar, had dumped every cup of water she tried to drink.

In a moment, the arsonist stopped breathing. Or rather, stopped being able to breath. Her throat collapsed when Felicity drove her thumb into the neck of her second victim with more force than anyone imagined she was capable of delivering.

As it happens, murder is easy, physically. Managing the psychological effects afterward tends to be the determining factor for the number of murders committed in our day. But not everyone understands beforehand, and not everyone feels it afterward.

Author's Note

I don't know where this came from.