She was seated on her knees, nude among tussled sheets in a dimly-lit room. Her raven-black hair ran down to her waist, hiding most of her bare back from view. Her head had turned towards a window over her right shoulder, the early January sunlight streaming in from it accentuating her supple cheeks and sharp chin as well as her soft yet solemn stare.

When Catherine first saw the painting at a gallery all those years ago, she felt compelled to crumble before it. She could never find the words to express why it affected her so strongly as it did, though it had not been for lack of trying. It was like love at first sight, like a revelation from God or something far beyond her consternation. It completed her, filling every hollow space that encumbered her character, and in that single moment, she felt renewed, reborn. A phoenix from ash.

“Throw it in the fire.”

Standing in the middle of the garden, Catherine clutched the painting closer to her chest.

“Catherine, I’m not asking again.”

“It means something to me, Kristen.”

“It meant something to me too, Catherine,” her wife asserted, reaching out a palm. “And I’m begging you, please, just throw it in. For me.”

Her uneasy stare drew towards the pyre of canvases crackling in a steel barrel at the side, her trembling fingers tensing up around the wooden frame. “I know you loved this painting as much as I do. In fact, we would never have met if it wasn’t for this painting, you know?” she pleaded her case. “If I didn’t spend my time going around to find out who the artist was, I would never have met you. We wouldn’t be here right now.”

“You don’t know that.” Kristen sighed, eyes closed and head crestfallen. “Just burn it.”

“Kristen, please—”

“[i]Just—[/i]”

In a split second, Kristen suddenly lunged over and snatched the painting out from Catherine’s grip, before dumping it into the fire with everything else. Stumbling backwards onto the ground, Catherine watched, open-mouthed in abject horror, as the painting of the girl crinkled and crumpled black, the flames devouring everything.

Her graceful figure.

Her tender skin.

Her tranquil stare.

“Why… why did you…”

Kristen didn’t answer—she had long since stormed back into the house. The fires only burned brighter, reinvigorated if only for a moment. In the end, all Catherine could do left was mourn, sitting in the grass with arms hugging her legs and eyes shimmering asynchronously with the embers as she watched the painting reduced to nothing but smoke and ash wisping away into the stars above.

The moon was setting by the time Catherine went inside. She felt something stir within her, and at first, she thought it to be hatred, though she realized she mistook it for the disquieting sense of pity. She had expected her wife to be asleep by then, yet when she snuck into the bedroom, there was Kristen only in her jeans, sitting on the bed with her head coddled between her knees, her hands clasping her ears shut. Her scarlet hair, once a silky raven-black, ran down past her shoulders. Her back was exposed in the moonlight, riddled in welts of faded grey with a sundry of smaller marks sprinkled around them like dead stars, all imprinted by the head of a burning cigarette.

Old scars from an old flame.

“Kristen?”

Her wife perked up at the sound of her voice, turning around to reveal her tear-strewn face. She pursed her quivering lips, her chest shaking as she struggled to contain her breathing. Before Kristen could speak, Catherine had sidled over, placed an arm around her shoulder and brought her into her bosom. The sudden warmth made Kristen gasp, yet in the seconds that followed, she welcomed it, and sure enough, she sank into it without hesitation.

“I thought it would go away,” she muttered, her voice a croaking mess. “The shouting, the pain. I thought if I burned them all, it would all go away.”

Catherine said nothing.

“If he… if he comes to our house, if he even dares to...”

“I’ll never let him get near you,” Catherine promised, hugging her wife tighter. “They may say he’s innocent, but we both know what he did.”

“It… it hurts. It always hurts.”

“Shush now..."

With those words, Kristen crumbled into her embrace and slept with a smile, a phoenix from ash.

Catherine only smiled back, clutching her wife closer to her chest.