Summer Reading

Despina Minasidis

Fahrenheit 451-- Guy Montag

The Hearth of the Salamander

                  The ultimate passion in my life has always been seeing those bright, burning, blazing fires just a few feet away from me. I’ve always felt for these past ten years the most adrenaline you could ever imagine when that heat from those flames brushes my personal atmospheric space. I always have since of course, i am a firefighter and it is my duty to destroy every last book into charcoal ashes. I always have until somewhat now. It’s funny how something you believed has always been right just turns on you in just one night.
                    Clarisse McClellan. That is the girls name who has made me the confused man i am right now. This seventeen year old girl full of wonder and curiosity, and opinions that make your brain hurt in the thought of analyzing them. I saw her on my way home one night and apparently she is my new neighbor. It surprised me at first how she knew I was a fireman right away but then I realized the smell of the kerosine. I told her that, “You never wash it off completely” and that it, “is nothing but perfume to me”. Everything about this young soul leaves me thinking. I am always in awe. She noticed things that I never notice on a daily basis like when there’s dew on the grass in the morning. I can’t help but to feel slightly attracted to her with fascination. She makes me think. She is curious about everything and that strangely is contagious. In one night i have come to realize i don’t understand so many things that I thought i always had the answer to. The thing that scared me the most was the one question that came out of her mouth, “Are you happy?”. I always thought i had the perfect life and it was all just great   with a job that gave me pleasure and a wife that I love. I immediately said i was, but then when i started to think about it i realized that i don’t really know if I am.
                  Things have started to startle me... [continues]

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