Burning Low Novels & Stories

Looking out, I felt nothing but a quiet release. … Tucker sat in his office with his brow furrowed. Late at night, his phone buzzed, Shelby's name lighting up the screen. He let out a tired sigh before answering, "Hello? What is it?" Shelby's voice came through, laced with frustration. "Tucker, are you still at the office? It's late. Why aren't you home yet? Don't you care about me anymore? Do you even realize how humiliating it was to sit through that dinner by myself tonight?"

I threw that cell phone in the basement, poured gasoline over it, and lit a match. In the blink of an eye, the basement went up in flames. As chaos erupted, I slipped into the shadows of the estate, vanishing into the dark woods beyond. As the fire burned, my cell phone started vibrating violently.

Swinging my legs off the bed, I slip my feet into my warm slippers and put on my robe. I begin filling my bathtub. I move at my own pace. I understand how furious he would be if I were to be one minute late. However, he currently lacks any control over me. I’m no longer his wife. I continue to add the extra lavender oil that Noah really enjoys. I’ve already poured it before I realize what I’m doing. Will I ever recover?

"You're going to use the Incident Command Center's emergency override authority over something this trivial? Do you want the entire station laughing at us?" She raised her hand as if she were about to hurl my helmet—my only means of communication—against a storage rack that was glowing red from the heat. I wanted to stop her, but the lack of oxygen was making my vision go dark. I could barely stand up straight, and my body swayed before I dropped heavily to my knees. Thick smoke was everywhere, burrowing its way into my lungs. Every single breath felt like torture. My consciousness began to fade. As the flames before me blurred into a distorted wash of color, a pair of brand-new firefighting

“What… are you doing?” At the sight of my pale face, Julius curled his fingers before turning to Seth. Panic flashed in Seth’s eyes, but he still said stubbornly, “Elena, Jody just got her surgery, and she’s in a critical observation period right now. She needs this special care unit and the pacemaker.” I endured the pain as my heart spasmed. I teared up and said, “I’ve failed four matches, and my heart is already badly damaged. If I don’t have that pacemaker, I’ll die.”

Just a few lines. *I was the flame you all feared. I was the ember no one claimed. But I chose to burn anyway. *And beneath that, scrawled in a child’s messy hand: “We’re still burning. For you.”

And then the real suffering came. It started in my insides. A heat, low and slow, like water beginning to simmer at the base of my stomach. I thought it was hunger at first, and I pressed my hands on my belly to try quiet it. But it built. It climbed, hot and burning, climbing up through my ribs like a furnace getting fed, and it spread out into my chest, my arms, my legs, until it was everywhere. My bones ached with it, like fire in the marrow, and my throat burned like I'd swallowed fire.

My thoughts kept circling around Zinnia, and I kept pushing those thoughts away. Suddenly, a poem popped into my head; In my head, I am fighting fire with fire. The flames are getting bigger and brighter. I can hear it crashing. I can feel it burning. I am tossing, and I am turning. I am burning, and I am screaming. I am crying out for help. Why are they not putting the fire out? They are making it bigger. It is burning faster. I can feel it spreading through my body. Why are they making it worse?

Five cold showers and even more pain. “What the fuck..” Noah groaned as he fell next to Lola on the bed unstable. Despite Rosewood’s chilly weather at this time of the year plus the cold water shower treatment applied on his body barely twenty minutes ago, Noah started to feel his body get hotter and his lower member slowly rose once more. “Mmmm..” The girl on the bed moaned out from her sleep again and Noah’s eyebrows furrowed. Lola had been moaning out quite often and shifting on the bed too frequently in the past hour which was unusual of her.

She argues a nonsensical point. Blood rises through my brain, “What the hell? He’s the lucky one I stayed by his side despite his absence! This is bullshit!”, I try to calm myself up before answering her, “As I said, if he really wants to marry me, or even be with me, he should have started paying more attention to me than his paperwork.”