The flames were beautiful. Purging clouds of black smoke churned and disappeared into a starless winter night. When the propane tank in the basement finally exploded, the massive eruption of sparks and the blazing roar of the conflagration that it precipitated was so truly awesome it brought tears of pain and joy to Bvrenda’s eyes. The fire was enthralling, all consuming, glorious, rapturous, final and complete. While she stared up at the chaos pouring up into the midnight abyss, her soul was completely captivated and entranced by the shear awesome horror and wonder of it all.
No one, not even Bvrenda, ever knew for sure how the fire had started. Bvrenda remembered dropping the knife and falling onto the creature’s headless body. She could recall how the monster had chocked up black blood and convulsed in tormented seizures of pain until it expired in shocking fits. She remembered saving the kitten, running upstairs, and dragging Hortence’s comatose body out of the house before returning to pour gasoline copiously over the monster’s body to send it back to hell where it came from.
Did she light the match? Or did the candles simply explode and ignite the fire serendipitously all on their own? Did the beast’s corpse spontaneously combust in a final act of defiance from beyond the blue? Bvrenda couldn’t remember afterward. She was in a state of shock. This was the first monster she had ever slain. Perhaps the “V” in her name was for “Victory.” Even as she stood outside shivering in the cold, wondering what had happened to her clothes, feeling paradoxically as dead and alive as could be, Bvrenda couldn’t help but wonder if it all hadn’t simply been a nightmare. She wanted to wake up, but she couldn’t.
Wasn’t it ironic? Just as the house had been nearly leveled by the flames, it began to snow. Bvrenda laughed manically and philosophized feebly to herself in the moment with words of wisdom she had learned from Mr. Butthoale, “If we’re all snowflakes, then nobody’s a snowflake…” But the words were hollow, and her capacity for intellect had grown soft and fuzzy as hypothermia began to set in. She clutched the kitten close to her breast to keep it warm, her teeth chattering as her skin turned blue.
Sadly, Bvrenda had not been able to save Jewel. There hadn’t been enough time for her to figure out how to carry the kitten and the snake out of the basement at the same time without risking the kitten’s life again. The snake went down with the house and the beast in the basement, and the raging flames from the blazing inferno gyrated like souls that had been set free from hell, ascending into the heavens. They were purple, blue, orange, red and white. Their tongues licked the dark sky with unfettered revelry. They were perfect. So pure. So beautiful and horrible at the same time.
Hortence was revived soon after the fire trucks and paramedics arrived. Beholding the debacle and hearing the horrible news of Pandora’s passing, she fell to her knees and pulled her greasy hair out in massive clumps, sobbing, “My baby! My precious hideous child!” No one could console her and only morphine could relieve her from her conflicted and insurmountable grief, even though what she was really jonesing for a hit off her crack pipe.
A dashingly handsome fireman noticed Bvrenda and rushed to her side to wrap her in a warm blanket. Her body had turned nearly blue in the snow and ice. He looked straight into her wide glazed over eyes where the reflection of the inferno offered a window into the hell she had just endured, and a single tear strayed down her alabaster cheek. “Are you all right?” He asked, touching her shoulder with genuine care and concern, knowing the moment that the words left his soft supple lips that it was an extremely stupid thing to ask under the present circumstances. Then he scooped her up in his manly arms and carried her away from the raging inferno to the safety of the ambulances waiting nearby.
Bvrenda closed her eyes, wishing that she could fall into a deep sleep and find a way to dream again. She took a long deep breath through her dainty nostrils. Drawing in the scent of the smoke-filled air, she opened her eyes again and smiled faintly from someplace far away. Her eyelids became too heavy to keep open anymore, as she fell into a deep sleep and began to dream. The sky was golden and vast. Angels parted the heavenly clouds, trumpets sounded, and a chorus of ethereal voices sang in celestial harmonies that made her heart feel as light as a feather again.
A profound radiance of spectral light materialized before her that was as bright and shining as the sun, but staring into it, she found that it did not burn her eyes. As she floated toward the pure spectral light beyond the ultra violet flame, a phantom shadow materialized before her, like a charcoal cloud of smoke, barring the way into the Kingdom of Heaven. She felt a heart pang of recognition, but she could not fully say where or when she had seen that menacing countenance before.
“Bvrenda, it’s me.” A metallic, thin voice whispered. “Pandora!” The all too familiar voice sounded like nails scraping across a chalkboard. But Bvrenda couldn’t believe her ears, because the girl standing before her like a flickering hologram was, indeed, her former friend, but now she was nothing more than a hungry ghost. She was neither dead nor alive, but more like a cellophane clone of her loathsome terrestrial self, or a lingering toxic stench left behind in a room without windows or open doors.
Bvrenda was shocked to see Mandy standing in front of her looking gruesomely undead. Zombie-like, rotting from the decay of her own withered spirit, Mandy hovered like a veil of mist before Bvrenda, chuckling perversely to herself, as she registered the look of revulsion and dismay on the teen super model face of her nemesis. Bvrenda had thought that most certainly Pandora’s soul was going to be trapped in a dark vortex of chaos for the better part of eternity. But there she was, floating around in limbo, barricading Bvrenda’s entrance into the heavenly gates.
“Shouldn’t you be in Hell?” The words flew out of Bvrenda’s mouth before she could stop them. Or had she even spoken a word at all? Communication in this liminal realm seemed to be telepathic and disconcertingly involuntary.
With mock concern, Pandora reached her vaporous hand out and touched Bvrenda’s cheek with sardonic tenderness. “I didn’t go to hell, precious little angel. You saved me!”
Brvenda recoiled from Pandora’s icy touch as if it were a hot flame. “Saved you? How?”
“You set me free from that monster!” Pandora aped her undying gratitude while delighting in Bvrenda’s self-evident confusion and mounting unease.
“But the monster destroyed you! How did I set you free?” Brenda sputtered through her mounting nausea.
“By saving me from myself.” Mandy Pandy drew closer and put her arms soothingly around her shuddering prey. “By slaying the monster that I had become.”
“Wait!” Bvrenda came to her senses and abruptly pulled away from her phantom former friend. “If I saved you from yourself, then why aren’t you in the light? Why are you blocking me from returning to the light now?”
Mandy Pandy’s ghost threw her head back and cackled like a witch about to toss a live baby into her cauldron. “Just fucking with you!” She chortled fiendishly. And then she dropped her voice low, and growled, “You didn’t save me. You can’t save anyone. Not even yourself!” Bvrenda bowed her head in despair and humiliation, because, for once, she feared that Mandy Pandy was right on target.
“And now…” Mandy Pandy giggled, fiendishly.
“And now what?” Bvrenda’s tried desperately to fight back another panic attack.
“And now you’re…stuck STUCK WITH ME!” Mandy guffawed.
“Stuck with you?” Bvrenda wondered how it was possible for her to feel her pulse quickening when she was out of her body, hovering between heaven and hell. Just as she spoke, a black chord, like a tendril, erupted from Pandora’s chest and penetrated deep into Bvrenda’s heart, wrapping around it, taking root and pulling on her life force like a giant blood sucking leach. It was an agonizing sensation, like a cold spear piercing her chest and poisoning her soul with the very darkness that had destroyed the demonic tormentor standing before her. Brvenda let out a blood curdling scream! “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME!”
“Revenge is best serve cold, and this will be the coldest cut of all…” Pandora hissed. “Karma is a boomerang, Bvrenda. THOU SHALT NOT KILL!”
“But it was self defense!” Brvenda cried.
“MURDERER!” Pandora shrilled. The chord wrapped around Brenda’s heart and tightened, growing cold as ice. The knee buckling pain was so intense she could barely hold onto any sense of reason, as she felt whatever life was left in her being sucked out of her astral body. But this didn’t make any sense. How could Pandora torture her like this from beyond the grave, even though she had been spontaneously cremated and would never be buried? As Brvenda fell to her knees and struggled with the black chord choking her heart, Pandora floated above her, taunting her insidiously, causing the chord to grow tighter and mind bendingly frigid until Brvenda thought she could bear it no more.
“I will be your Ballrog.” Pandora chided.
“My what?” Bvrenda had never been a big fan of The Lord of the Rings, but she had seen the movies, so the metaphor was not completely lost upon her.
“I will haunt you, and drag you down to hell with me. I will be the demon by your side, filling your mind with hatred, drawing you deeper and deeper into the pit of my soulless eternal existence. You cannot escape me now. I will always be in your heart, like a cancer, eating away at your Messiah complex as the witch that got away!”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Wailed Brvenda.
“YES!” Pandora ejaculated madly. “And just think of the glory that awaits me in Hell, bringing down such a good little angel, like you. Satan will be so pleased!” Upon this epiphany, Pandora performed a lewd victory dance, which was made extra glorious by the zero gravity effects of the threshold between life and death.
“I hate you now more than ever!” Bvrenda confessed under her breath. Mandy Pandy floated even higher above her, laughing uproariously, while the malignant chord between them grew and stretched out even longer, like a festering rubber band, pulling tighter at Bvrenda’s heart strings, causing her to writhe as if her fingernails were being pried off her phallanges unceremoniously one by one.
“And that is why I have won, don’t you see?” Mandy’s eyes lit up and glowed like sparkling rubies. “I have turned all of your undying love for me into something even more profound that will last forever: pure, unadulterated hatred!”
Bvrenda had never hated anyone before. Most especially, she had never hated anybody she had previously loved. Yes, she had gotten angry here and there. But she never held onto grudges. She believed in forgiveness. Feeling the burning passion of hatred for Mandy Pandy in her breast only made the chord between them grow stronger, icier, and more deeply penetrating. It was if a slice of hell had landed inside of her heart, and it was all she could do to try and find a way to resist the temptation to boil over with rage. Which was exactly what Mandy Pandy wanted.
Realizing that her anger was tethering her even more tightly to her immortal enemy and tying her soul into knots, Bvrenda calmed herself and surrendered her attachment to any form of self-righteous fury that might further enslave her soul to the demonic entity that Mandy Pandy had become. As she surrendered her rage, a lightness of being returned to her weary soul, and the grip of the tendril strangling her heart began to loosen its hold. Letting go of hatred made way for the golden light of grace, and as that light spread throughout her soul, the ghastly image of Mandy began to dissipate and fade away. Lugubriously dematerializing like a cloud being pushed apart by a wayward wind, Mandy Pandy refused to go gently into that good night, and shouted with a voice that sounded like it was disappearing into a tunnel, “MURDERER!”
As Mandy’s apparition evaporated into the clouds, Brvenda’s attention was drawn to a scene far below her, where the fireman who had picked her up and carried her away was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Gravity seemed to be pulling her back down into her body, but how could she return to the world now that she had seen the ugliness and horror it contained? Her heart was too heavy to enter into the light, and she refused to be pulled into hell along with Mandy Pandy. She was stuck between a rock and a hard place, so she finally decided to breathe.
Suddenly, Bvrenda felt herself falling back into her body, as if she were Alice falling down a rabbit hole back into the world of the living. She came to feeling like she was waking from a terrible dream, with the fireman’s lips locked onto hers, breathing life into her lungs and filling her soul with the will to face another day.
When she opened her eyes, a crowd of astonished faces surrounded her. Looking up, she beheld her prince. Reaching for his chiseled face, she pulled her mouth to his tender lips and kissed him long and deep until she came to her senses as the crowd began to cheer! When she realized that the bulge she felt near his pocket wasn’t his gun after all, all she could say was, “Sublime!”
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