TMI: The Conspiracy

One day in my Creative Writing class in College, we were challenged to create a short story using an article from the newspaper as the basis and inspiration for the tale. 

I had never done this before, but was excited for the opportunity to peruse the newspaper and recreate an event from my own imagination. 

Wasting no more time, I remembered I had grabbed an old newspaper, spread it across my desk and got busy looking for an exciting story. 

I had already decided not to look into the court cases, but wanted something that would jump out to me. 

What I found was the news article about a suspicious fire.

 As I read the article, I felt myself becoming suspicious of all that was reported. 

How did the fire start? 

Why was the older brother who didn’t even live with them the one talking to the media? 

I fired up my writer’s brain like nothing before and the next thing I knew, I had created a pretty wild short story. 

Years later as I look through this work, I still feel the same suspicions, but this time I get to really bring up the emotions through my improved descriptive capacity. 

It is my hope that as you read this short story, you connect with the characters, feel the loss the community will feel and understand the dichotomy of what her sons actually experienced.

When a fire consumes the house of Mavis Walker, a stalwart in the small, close knit community of Baker’s Lane, it plunges the community into deep mourning and heralds huge life changes for Mrs. Walkers’ two sons.

  “Fire! Fire!” A man screamed, horrified by the furious flames completely engulfing the old, wooden house.

 The man, Johnson, was a tall, big boned man who lived opposite Mavis Walker’s home.

He had awoken in the middle of the night to use his toilet when he smelt the cloying, thick smoke, then he heard the licking sounds of crackling wood.

His stomach had dropped right to his toes, heart shattered into two before resurging with a fearsome jolt of extreme panic when quickly opening the window in his living room, he had been faced with a terrible nightmare. 



Mavis Walker’s home was on fire! - excerpt from The Conspiracy. 

In the book, the community knows Mavis as the woman they can go to for anything, help, sugar, or even babysitting in a time crunch, however, only her two sons really know how rough it’s been to care for the much older woman after the death of her husband, their father. 

While the elder son, Derek  moved out after getting married to start his own life away from his childhood home with his wife, the younger son, John remained to take care of his ailing mother and feels not only burdened but trapped by the responsibility and the abuse he undergoes daily. 

When the fire breaks out, neither son is home and it’s up to the neighbours to not only put out the fire, doing all they can to stop it from spreading to other homes, but in a terrible moment of realisation, try to rescue the older woman from the inferno. 

“Do you know if anyone is still in the house?”

And Johnson had almost dropped his phone. 

Was Mavis still in the house? Was she in there?!

Voice trembling he said, “ I-I don’t- I don’t know. She might be in there. Oh God, she might still be in there!” 

“ I’ve alerted and dispatched the fire truck and the ambulance. I’ll connect with the police next. You said the houses are close to each other. Wake up the community, get as many people out of the zone as possible. None of you approach the house. Do you understand? Responders are on their way!” - excerpt from The Conspiracy.

Now that the fiery thief has destroyed everything, what will John do now? 

And was the fire truly an accident by a forgetful woman or was it intentional arson? 

Start reading to find out.