Other stories for this prompt

Mira had been blind for several years, but in a way, she never quite lost her sight. The smell of jalapeños sliced on the kitchen slabs made her taste green and itch with stinging eyes. The jasmine by the porch wrapped her in the white cream of Sunday clouds. The library books were still breathing dust and oil from the days they were salvaged from the great fire.

It was the fire that made Mira blind. It was the fire that Mira started. It was the fire that Mira conjured when she read from the black tome.

The planet of Book was under constant threat of an enormous finger coming down upon it and crushing countless citizens of the terrorized planet. For years, everybody had been safe--they sat on a shelf, undisturbed for nearly three years--but because of a recent movie adaptation of the story contained within, a new-found popularity forced them to face the fact that they would no longer be safe.

The leader of Book, an em-dashing senior who often punctuated his sentences by pounding his fist on the podium from where he spoke, called an emergency meeting of the greatest minds to come up...

She looked at the words on the page. 'It was a pleasure to burn.' She read them upside down, glancing sneakily across the dark wooden table at the book open in front of her fellow library user. Kelly needed to get to work, she'd had a number of extensions already granted on her final essay, she had to get finished this week. But she couldn't take her eyes off the person in front of her. She was acting oddly, not turning the page, staring at that one sentence. Then, a giggle escaped the girl's lips and she flung her head...

The dystopia is a genre of fiction designed to teach a lesson about society by imaging a future society warped in some terrible way. The interesting thing about dystopian novels is their reliance on a single, antagonistic character to provide a terrible monologue of exposition to the horrified protagonist, explaining just how and why society went bad, and why the system must persist.

George Orwell's 1984 has O'brien, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has Mustafa Mond, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has Captain Beatty, the remarkably well-read "fireman" who has turned his back on all that literature had to offer...

It was a pleasure to burn, in the end. Sarah had known it was coming without being told. Knowing things without being told was all part of being a witch, she supposed.

She hadn't ever chosen, as such - but rather she preferred to let the currents and grooves of the world guide her path through it. And the world had chosen for her to be a witch.

To anybody else, this might have seemed like a state of affairs that could be analysed and considered - weighing up the pros (foresight; cackling) and the cons (burning) - but for...

It was a pleasure to burn.
All things, it was.
Paper. Incense. Even skin.
Yes, especially skin.
They all had particular smells- those things which he burned. Paper smelled of ash and dried, hot trees, as in the desert, the heat so thick and juicy you could drink it, pour it inside of you, fill yourself with warmth in a way which standing in front of a fire, rubbing your hands together did not even thouch.
Incense- he supposed it ought to be different, depending on the smell. He only ever bought sandalwood, nothing else and so he didn't...