Yes, it was always you

Yves Klein-Fire 5-1961

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You were always on the lookout for trouble and if none came your way you created it. At school, if the teacher ever left the class you were the eye of the hurricane, calm and unmoving while all around you the other children were screaming, crying, rocking anxiously in the corner and you were the cause of this chaos. All it took was a look, a clenched fist, a snarling threat of violence that you were only too happy to follow through with at the slightest hint of non compliance. You had a way of making people do things they really, really didn’t want to do. Yes,it was always you.
You dreamed of terrorising the clever ones with all their book smarts using fancy words in their plum posh accents. So polite, always ‘Yes Sir’ this and ‘No Madam’ that. Teachers’ pets them all, how you hated them and their self assured ways. You were sturdy, slow moving and you had trouble following the inky squiggles and peculiar shapes against the too white pages when the sadistic teachers picked you, yes it was always you, to read to the class, self consciously stumbling over the syllables, your ears pricked, tuning into the inevitable sniggers, whispers and giggles that accompanied this object lesson in humiliation. As your clumsy tongue faltered over the sounds you were thinking that one day you would make them pay, big time and with dizzying rates of interest, like the interest that the heavies of the loan sharks made your Dad pay that time he lost big at the track. One day you thought.
Then one day while holding court with your bully boy friends at an abandoned barn you discovered the power of fire to install a bowel loosening fear in people. You weren’t afraid however, no not at all, with you it was the absolute opposite. Never had you felt such pleasure, a nerve tingling, tension releasing wave of intoxication came over you as you watched the tongues of fire adoringly lap the dry tinder. A wall of heat caressed your face and you smiled. You loved the way that fire consumed only, the purity and intensity of its singular nature. You were awestruck by its immense force but you were the master of this destruction.
Your craven, idiot friends had run away at the first sign of trouble, of course. You found one of them hiding behind a tree, gibbering to himself. You pulled him away and told him to get a hold of himself and then you smelt the excrement. You asked him if he had shit himself but he only babbled. You punched him hard in the mouth in disgust and that made you feel better. After the delicious aroma of the fire the stench of his panicked defecation was unbearable to you.
People around town said that you would end in jail or the madhouse or an early grave, but they were wrong. Because it was people like you who began to run the show and suddenly book smarts and the right accent didn’t mean automatic success anymore. It meant that you would prosper in your dream job of burning books, watching the print fade to grey before the pages curled into a dense mass of ashes and all the time with a never dimming smile upon your unblinking, incurious face.