We’re pleased to announce the winner of the May WWWC: Bethany Lines. Responding to the prompt ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire’, Bethany weaves a hazy tale of grief and teen rebellion.

Read her winning entry in full below.

Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire

I remember the first time I ever smoked in bed. Newly sixteen in the sweltering summer of 75, bored half to death, watching the blades of the ceiling fan rotate – dust collecting. Life has been unfair to me, I thought, twiddling a blue pen between my thumb and forefinger. The television was blaring evening news from the family room, and Linda Martell was singing ‘Color Him Father’ from my sister’s vinyl player, life going steadily on as always. The world would not stop for me, despite my best efforts; I was sixteen and hopeful.

I think I’ll color him father

I think I’ll color him love

I was unable to soothe my own restlessness. I knew where my brother kept his cigarettes, so after plucking one from the pack, I returned to my bed and lay down. It was all in motion, for no reason. Children can be thoughtful but what makes them inspiring to adults is their courage to perform without hesitation; it is something other than impulsion. It’s more beautiful than that. I set it alight with the flame of a candlestick. I sucked, felt cool. Cooler again. Then it was quite dull. Distracted, the ash fell, burning a great deep hole in the sheet.

‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, putting the cursed thing in my mouth as I reached out to touch the wound like a clumsy nurse. Irreparable. I gave my prognosis, then smoked the rest in the laundry room, shoved it into the garden beneath the hydrangeas. They’d know what to do with this.

When my mother found out two weeks later whilst changing my bedding, she sat down at the edge of the mattress until I was home from school. I remember how she looked, very long and hard at my lips, like she was waiting for flames to erupt, burst forth from my mouth. Ah, yes, her daughter, the fire-breathing dragon. Regret was overrun by the sensational experience of growing up, so I did not apologise to her. I had too much pride; I had enjoyed the smoke pouring out from between my lips and I found no satisfaction in lying to her directly.

‘You’re my daughter,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I replied, and kissed her cheek.

She was a good mother to me, but she did not understand about smoking or burning alive. My father had, and I suppose that is why he had done both.

She said to God she could never love again

And then, there he stood with that big wide grin

But now that he was not here to tell me what either felt like, I was a restless machine. I wanted to believe that when my father had died, he had chosen to die. Just like I had chosen to smoke that cigarette. Maybe, cornered by flames, he had walked into them, not afraid of having nothing to pray to, not afraid of looking his life in the face. To know this would have meant knowing that there was a purpose to his being here, being my father. But as my mother so absently explained it to me, it had not been an end at all. He had died in bed, the smoke filling his lungs. He died before the flames even touched him.

‘You’re not invincible. You are not your father,’ my mother said to me before I left the room.

I knew I was not invincible; I never put a cigarette to my mouth again. The truth was that there was an amazing anger in what had happened. The root of my boredom and my distress was the fire, and how it ceased to actualise my father as anything more than what he had been left as; nothing. Smoke and ashes. What about when he was something? Had the fire not seen him when he danced? Had it danced before him, too? In the end, it may have been no surprise that the room he lit up was his own, and just as suddenly and quickly as he had lived, he died. I was a child then, and had watched the fire burst up into the air above, the red men in suits with their extinguishers. Outside watching I did not cry – I could not see a damned thing coming from all the smoke in my eyes. Apparently, neither did he.