The blonde girl turns over the “OPEN” sign, locks the store and walks away. It is 12 a.m., and all she wants to do when she gets home is sleep. Under the moonlight, she pays no mind to dirty sidewalks, deafening screams, possible gangsters or the cold breeze. She walks up to her apartment, unlocks her door, takes off her shoes and lies down on the floor.
She wakes up to the sound of her alarm. She is absolutely frozen from both the cold of the floor and the wind that had slid from under the front door throughout the night. She gets up, walks to her bedroom, changes into new clothes, prepares something to eat and leaves the apartment. At this hour, all she can think about is how much she hates her job. She arrives at the store, but when she’s about to unlock the door, she freezes as she sees an older man approach her. He’s in his late forties, and the whites in his hair and beard are not indistinguishable anymore. Besides, he’s short and large, so he could probably take the blonde girl in a fight. The battered white shirt he wears and the old pants he’s wearing lead the girl to believe that he’s either broke or homeless. He approaches her with a sort of sad look in his eyes, as he does every morning, and it is apparent that he is going to ask for something -or beg.
She unlocks the door in a hurry, gets in the store and locks it from the inside so that he can’t get in. It’s 6.30 in the morning, and there won’t be any customers at this hour. Thus, she decides to stay in for a while and unlocks the door again when the man disappears about half an hour later.
As she walks home at night, she thinks about how lifeless her life is. How depressing it is to run a boring convenience store with boring customers, and come home to a boring apartment she can barely call home and eat boring food from boring plates with boring forks and knives. She has the sudden realisation that she has become unimportant. She doesn’t really speak to anyone throughout the day. In fact, it has been quite a while since she last made a sound. She is indifferent to her father, who tries to talk to her every morning. She has been quietly fading away.
When she reaches her apartment, she has the sudden, bizarre urge to set the whole building on fire. She goes into the kitchen and smashes all the unopened wine bottles she has on the floor. She doesn’t exactly know how to set a building on fire, so she also turns on the oven and the stove. She has nothing to save from her apartment, so she lights a match and runs out of the building.
“It was a sheer, superlative thrill,” she says later on, “for the directors, the crew and myself,” for a TV interview on her new movie, A Girl On Fire. She then goes on to explain how they managed to actually set a building on fire while executing the movie…
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