Lighter

The girl rolls a lighter in her pocket, running a fingertip across the rough letters etched on its side. "It was a pleasure to burn."

She finds the phrase haunting, though her father says it was a quote from an old book, a play on words of sorts...

No.

He said it was a quote. Before he left.

He was supposed to go on a two day "buisness trip".

It had been to two years and counting since she had last seen her father. Her traitor of a father

She felt her lip trembling tratariously, tears filling her eyes.

DAMMIT. Her father had left, and there was nothing she could have done to stop him. Hell, she couldn't even control her own tears. Pathetic.

Desperate for control, even if it is only over a flame, she fishes the lighter from her pocket. Then, an idea sparking at the back of her mind, she reaches a tentative finger under her matress. There. The tattered corner of an aging photograph.

Her father sat there, bouncing her as an infant on his knee. He looked so happy. Content, even. She used to pull this photo out and sob over it, wondering what she did that made him leave.

She chuckles sadly at her own naievity. She was a child then. Now she knows better.

With a sharp crack the lighter ignited, a fragile flame licking the night air. She watches the glossy photo paper buckle and heave, her fathers grin twisting, the center caving inwards, giving the man in the photo an expression of pure horror. What would he think if he could see her now, burning the last photo of him in the household? She found that she didn't particularly care.

The photo blazed brilliantly for a moment, but soon there was nothing left to burn but a pile of ashes. The flame died. The girl let out a breath she didn't know she had been holding, and wept. Not tears of grief this time, but those of release.

The man she once had called father? He was dead to her. And from the ashes of his corpse, she would rise again- a phonix in her own right.