The scent of kerosene flooded Clarisse’s nose as she strolled down the eroded sidewalk. She gently closed her eyelids, embedding herself into the ground as she tried to fight the trauma of the smell, the smell that drained her hope for this world. It was almost as if a lit candle, so bright and clean, had been extinguished in her heart. Trailing after the rancid whiff, Clarisse herself felt as if she was an extinguisher, ready to wipe the smug face of the fireman that had murdered the intellectuality of the country. The world. The universe. However, as she approached the man, she was conflicted. His face, pale and droopy, manipulated her brain to feel the slightest empathy for the man. The expression on the man’s face emitted a sense of depression, but also a longing for more in life.

“Hello! Ah, of course. You’re our new neighbor, aren’t you?” asked the man kindly.

“And you must be–”, she sighed as her brain began to ponder, the killer, murderer, and destructor “–the fireman” said Clarisse with a confronting tone.

“How oddly you say that?” questioned the naive fireman. Clarisse paused. Staring at the fireman, she was intruded by a second pang of sympathy, almost as if it were her duty to guide him towards the truth.

“I’d–I’d have known it with my eyes shut,” muttered Clarisse softly. Her consciousness was drawn back through the mists of time to the day of her nightmares. On that horrifying night, the roaring inferno engulfed her aunt’s home and library in flames, all while poor Clarrise was slumbering, her snores silenced. The kerosene had caught her nose toward the end of the fire, but by then, all hope had been lost. No one was saving her aunt.

“Kerosene,” he stated reminiscently, “is nothing but perfume to me.” Clarisse abruptly stopped in her tracks, taking the moment to omit her hatred for the man, to remember that they brainwashed him, to understand that he was too far lost, just as her aunt had been that night. Clarisse turned around, escaping into the darkness, returning to her home in the shadows. It is then that she remembered that her uncle would say, “There is no saving them, it’s not worth it. There is no path if there is no destination”.