The house is on fire. It is burning, collapsing so painfully slow, eating away at itself from the inside out. Scorched debris and dark ash encompass everything. The house does not want to be extinguished.
Full Description:
I first started writing ‘Incendiary’ as Module C practice in my Advanced English class. Months later, I submitted it along with another short story and a writing reflection as part of an internal assessment at school. The prompt for this assessment was to incorporate an extended metaphor using nature as a motif; I chose fire. I really enjoy pulling inspiration from my life when I write, but I also incorporate elements from things I’ve read or seen or watched or heard. When I started writing this story, I had just seen a tweet about how having a mental illness can feel like watching a building collapse and being unable to stop it. I thought about that for a long time, and when we got the nature prompt, I used the post as a baseline to create a story in which the narrator has a life-threatening mental illness (which I perceive to be an eating disorder, however it is up to interpretation) but cannot decide whether they want to overcome it. The house, in this case, represents the body of the person who is struggling with the disorder. The disorder itself is represented by the fire.
Throughout the story, the narrator goes through phases of grief and acceptance over succumbing to their illness, before realising that they want to live. I used an obscene amount of imagery to convey the pain and confusion the protagonist is feeling. The narrative itself is slightly non-linear; bouncing between where it all started and how the narrator believes it will end, however, I feel like it makes the storyline unique.
The original title for this work was simply ‘The House’. I wanted to change it into something that better conveys the tone for the story and how the protagonist feels throughout. I landed on ‘Incendiary’ because I feel as though the definition resonates with the person struggling. Incendiary means “designed to burn,” which I thought was fitting. People with mental illnesses often feel like they were born for no purpose, so having “designed to burn” as the title of my story reflecting that exact feeling felt right. The second portion of the title is a direct lyric from Taylor Swift’s ‘mirrorball’. Mirrorball was written during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 and reflects how it feels to go from being the centre of attention, to having nobody to perform for anymore because everybody is gone. When struggling with a mental illness, all you want is for somebody to notice you and your pain and ‘mirrorball’ conveys this feeling perfectly.
Writing this story was tough and confronting, and it took a long time to perfect it, but I am incredibly proud of the result. I hope anybody that reads it enjoys as much as I did writing it.
