Museum Artifacts at the Forensic Academy: A Character Study of Beyond Birthday
[Don't do that] she would scold gently, firmly, pulling his hand from his wrist where a knife was embedded blade-deep into the tendons, cool air splitting open the bloody cuts more, as the doors opened with a nod and the flash of a ticket.
[Don't touch that] she'd frown angrily, as he was captivated by the crime-scene body photos.
[Come on, B, hurry up] was the complaint coming from the hall tunnel as B's gait slowed to a crawl; the blood and guts exhibit was quite lovely and he could spend all day staring, scratching his messy hair and making his nonchalant smileyface, checking behind him for the pale white faceless things but spending too much time altogether in front of the glass, murmuring how this man and that girl were killed and generally making the museum visitors stare and hush their weak-looking children.
[Help with this] her lips would curl sweetly around the words as if she needed the help, but the words were sweet so he'd lean over and help her pore over the faux murder case designed to test the tourists' skills.
(Lethal injection electrocuted poisoned drink dismembered stabbed beheaded train wreck car crash stroke heart attack fall torn up shot) B would explain, gazing intently at the pictures, iris-cameras taking individual shots of everything, even police names and background faces and fleeting words.
[Take your own fingerprint station?] the children squeal in joy and B darts nervously, a black white butterfly flitting away quick because they couldn't have those- not from him- even if it was just for fun.
Just like the [FBI] is the acronym floating around the echoey place as B curls into a tiny paranoid ball underneath a harsh wood and metal surface, hands in hair fingers stuffed into ears stabbing his banged-up knees with desklegs as he tries to burrow away BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE FACELESS PALE WHITE THINGS LOOKING FOR HIM. They want to lock him in a cold white room forever until he dies and more after that. B doesn't like that so he tries to escape.
A little girl is walking around, sees him: [Lollipop, mister?] Yes, strawberry. B smiles for once as he takes the small thin thing with the delicious drop of color and pops it into his already-red-colored mouth where it is no longer visible against all the scarlet.
[Murder, murder,] murmur the monotonous mothers. They hold a whiny and impatient toddler in each hand and examine newspapers from then-awhile-ago, then-a-year-ago, and then-a-short-time-ago, moving on to the small exhibit about some crime in Los Angeles and Wahabara Neeju dolls or however they mispronounce it. B reads it too on his way out the door Naomi clinging to his shoulder making sure nobody sees him and inquires because she and all the other idiots think he's L.
B reads all the details of [his own murders] judging cases with a straight face, defying those with sad expressions around him. Bitter is how he feels.
[Before] they leave the museum they have to stop and look at the gore exhibits again and is she BLIND? His staring at the destroyed corpses isn't obvious and his fast hyperventilating isn't pulsing, like the telltale heart in that creepy poem book the Wammy's House kids thought was creepy?
The ones with the ravens with their feathers like his hair and the creepy eyes of the old man like the eyes painted on his murder dolls and the thump of that heart under the floorboards?
Can't she hear it? Why can't she hear it?
B screams before he dies, screams in the cell like a triumphant winner and a defeated soldier, but his heart never told anyone anything, not even Naomi who he may have loved until he realized she was a sadist and loved her more.
B never really got the concept of poetry, anyway. Ironic, because that's what his life was, a weird mix of all those terrifying stories.
La Fin