Flash fiction, Chelsey Shannon

This isn't meant to be specific.  

Any feedback is appreciated.

Nature

There were innocent bystanders. Pure, unsullied bystanders, tainted without permission by the stain of coincidence. There were always innocent bystanders: children subjected to parental arguments, chanced witnesses of accidents and mistakes. Victims of happenstance.

But there were also guilty bystanders, those who stood by, fully aware, even involved in whatever travesty they stood by wordlessly. Perhaps they’d caused it. Perhaps it was entirely their fault.

So is the case here. She has caused it all. And it is bigger—much bigger—than the silent child standing by as his classmate is bullied, the silent woman who does not tell her best friend that her husband is unfaithful. It is worse, she knows, than anything so petty, so easily resolved. It is more vital. It is more.

Irony strikes her as a childhood fable flits through her mind:

A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too.”

The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"

Replies the scorpion: "It’s my nature..."

She almost chokes on the pertinence as she laughs and the world burns around her. For she’s born under the eighth sign, the stinging, stunning set of stars and it is her nature. She is a guilty bystander. And she does not disown her guilt. So she can laugh as the world burns around her. And she can laugh as she goes down with it.