The girl peered through the thin, tall grasses before her. She was crouched shin-to-thigh and flat-footed, her heels grounded in the dry dirt below. In the twenty minutes she'd waited, they'd begun to burn against the leather of her shoes and her soles, weighed by her heavy feet, had sunken deep into the mud.
In the moment, everything seemed to incrementally loosen at the seams. The only thing evident to the girl was simply that she wasn't in control of the situation. And the only thing she could very well expect was the unexpected, a fearful notion only compounded by the ruthlessness of the machines she'd spent more than half her youth fighting against. She couldn't trust in reason. Killing was the high they craved, and they stopped at nothing short of the direct threat of death to get their daily fix.
The girl shut her eyes, opening her mind to the images of their banging, slashing, and pulverizing.
She thought of how they murdered as if addicted to the blood, the fear in the eyes of the exterminated, and the emptiness of the scream at the end. For years, she had watched and still nothing had changed. In the way they stepped and sliced existed a mindless mindfulness. On one hand, they jumped from one target to another, killing whoever crossed their path, but on the other, it was as if they were timed, bound to the clock, each movement on a tick—the flying punch at 5 sharp and the swinging elbow 5 seconds after.
As much as the girl hated them, she was intrigued. Their primal need to kill like a junkie doped on heroin was so completely contradictory to the way she was raised—a system of thinking that believed everyone should resist the temptation seen as ungodly, and even if it weren't, at the very least, it was said to be unnatural. Yet all the girl saw in the killers was natural instinct. They were selfish and greedy. They used the world as they pleased.
Though the act of killing was, by design, life-denying, in the killers she saw life-affirming beings. They created the world as they wanted. They did as they saw fit. They lived without pretenses.
The contradiction confused Hermione. Somewhere along the way she'd started killing. And, she felt the high too. She loved how the blood rushed during every kill, churning and pumping. The feeling excited her. Her eyes would widen. Her back would relax. She'd pummel forward and flail her arms in perfect misdirection. She craved a thick neck in her grasp, even more addicted to the way it'd gasp for the air she wouldn't allow.
At first, she killed just the one until another was added to his solitary coffin, and then a few more, the death count rising everyday. There'd been a point when she knew how many she'd taken. Now, she couldn't ballpark the number.
Sometimes, the girl wondered if she'd transformed into the enemy. But she always shook her head "no" in reply. She at least had a moral grounding they lacked. She was working toward something. Even if she wasn't certain what that something was, she had a something and ultimately that was all that mattered.
When she saw the red eyes of the enemy, drunk off the blood it spilled, they morphed into the emotion-filled eyes of the victims. Their faces flashed in front of her. Their smiles. The crinkles in their eyes. And then, the fear and the horror that contorted the bliss of their laughter.
She killed for the victims.
Always she was purposeful despite the squirm of her stomach, the clench of her teeth, and the stench of her vomit.
So as the pain in her heels crept to her calves, stinging at her bum, the girl ruminated on reason, her reason. If she forgot or worse, began to find it senseless, she knew she'd already lost to the pain.
The girl focused on her breathing as her eyes scanned the darkness around her, lit only by the streetlamp about three hundred feet away. A bunch of gnats accumulated near her, settling in the halo of hair that had escaped her tightly bound ponytail. She wanted to swat them from her cheeks, but resisted, her eyes darting in the darkness, searching.
Her trained ears perked at the sound of restless noises. She held her breath, her ears straining to stay tuned to the new development. Ninety seconds had passed when she finally exhaled a softly and carefully breath at the sound of more distinct ruffling, closer than the noises she'd heard prior.
Simultaneous to her breath, her heartbeat quickened, eyes widened, and calf muscles flexed. She couldn't see the informant of the ruffling. The anxiety that had built in the minutes before threatened to show on her body until at last she got clues.
Whispers.
With her upper-body stock-still, she pried her foot from the mud, dismissing the shot of pain that traveled down the length of her back. Slowly, she dragged one foot ahead of the other toward the voices, her left ear on the metaphorical look out.
She approached a clearing. If she didn't cross it, she'd need to inch along the vegetation of the outskirts, a length nearly two times as long and almost as ill-concealed. As the clock kept on with its tragic tick, she used her hands to measure the distance between her front and back foot, estimating how many steps she'd need to get across the clearing. She leaned forward, putting her hands on the dirt and setting herself as if she were a sprinter. She assessed the environment again, eyes on the lookout again. Satisfied, she targeted an area of tall grasses on the other end of the clearing and swiftly ran, her chest low. On reaching the grasses, she slid into them, ignoring the way they rubbed her skin. The quick exhales of her pumping chest quieted.
As the girl settled in the grass, she saw a light looming over her. She maneuvered in a way such that she was flat on the ground and diagonal to the trees instead of head on, a position where she could see the shadows of figures.
"Malfoy, get over here," a man said loudly.
The girl jolted.
"Hermione, get over here," Mrs. Granger, the normally soft-spoken woman, screeched at her daughter, who was playing on the floor with a book she had borrowed from her primary school's library.
"One sec, Mummy," Hermione replied mechanically without looking from her book. "I'm almost finished."
Mrs. Granger rubbed her forehead to get rid of some non-existent sweat. She looked at her daughter, foot tapping. "Hermione, I said right now."
As Mrs. Granger waited for Hermione to get up, the girl continued on with her reading. Nervous now, Mrs. Granger snatched the book from her daughter, throwing it to the other end of the floor.
She then grabbed Hermione's arm and took her to the door where Mr. Granger had a couple overstuffed suitcases packed.
Immediately, Hermione began screaming for her book, annoyed at the gall of her mother. Meanwhile, Mrs. Granger placed her hand on her daughter's mouth to suppress the girl's screams.
"Hermione, you need to be very quiet. You, your mum, and I… we're taking a trip," Mr. Granger said.
"But I don't want to go on a trip. I want my book," Hermione answered, her lower lip jutted out as she turned her head in her mother's arms waving to the book carelessly left open on the far end of the living room floor with her hand.
"When we get to our destination, I'll get you all the books you want." Mr. Granger said softly, hoping to pacify his stubborn daughter.
"But I want that book," Hermione remarked, her upset veneer beginning to crack.
"Well, we can get that book too," Mr. Granger smiled. Hermione smiled back at him, a toothy grin spreading her cheeks.
Mrs. Granger took a lollipop out of her pocket, which Hermione eyed with delight. Her dentist parents never let her eat candy.
"Is that strawberry?" Hermione squealed.
Mrs. Granger sighed, "Yes, it's strawberry."
She placed Hermione on the ground, opening the wrap of the candy for her before handing the lollipop to Hermione, who shoved it in her mouth greedily, smacking her lips with enthusiasm.
"Now be a good girl for your mummy," Mr. Granger patted Hermione's head. Hermione just smiled again, leaning into his touch and curling her ear into the tough flesh of his palm.
Hermione went to sit on the stairs by the door, tuning out her parents, who talked in whispers beside her. She didn't know what was going on. Nonetheless, she was content with her candy, smacking away until she noticed a weirdness in the lighting of the curtain that covered the narrow window next to the door. The normally cream curtain had changed to a canvas of different colors: blues, greens, and purples. It looked like an Impressionist painting except that the colors kept changing as if they were colorful waves. Hermione stood from the step where she sat and looked more closely at the curtain. She pushed it aside, and gasped.
Her parents stopped their silent bickering to look at their daughter, immediately running to her. Her mother looked horrified and Hermione didn't know why. She knew her mother was a nervous person, but she hadn't seen her ever look this way. The fear in her mother's eyes scared Hermione. Before she could think more about what had happened, her father had swept her in his arms, bounding the stairs in twos.
"Hermione, listen to me. Just listen," Mr. Granger kissed the ear of his daughter with each word.
"You are going to wait right here, and you are not to get out until either Daddy or Mummy return."
Hermione wanted to protest, but her father had the look that meant there wasn't room for discussion. He set her down and went to open a door beneath the carpet in her parent's room which she hadn't known existed.
"You understand, my darling?" He looked straight into her eyes, a tear threatening to break from his waterline.
"You understand?" He repeated, the tremor apparent. He knelt before Hermione, asking with his dark eyes that she obey.
Hermione could only nod as she walked forward, clinging to her father.
Mr. Granger returned the hug, rubbing Hermione's back in soft circles as he carried her into the small room below the floorboard, the dark interior of the room swallowing Hermione.
