Displaced
Sometimes he got caught up in remembering the past. Anger is easier than sorrow, and he went on rampages, destroying furniture, walls, windows, if they were inside - tearing up fields and small trees if they were not. He often damaged himself and craved the pain, only he healed when what he had ravaged did not. Lorena was amused.
The were in Kentucky when he stepped off a high cliff. He had been only a few weeks made and didn't know better. She sat on a nearby boulder and watched as he agonizingly twisted and popped back together.
"Is it the war that has made you unstable?"
"I survived," he said. He was shamed for doing so when so many others, all his friends, did not. He had become sick of the dirty copper smell and sight of blood, and now he couldn't live without the taste of it.
Four nights after his stupid attempt they came upon an abandoned mine which opened on a twenty-foot-deep open pit. She returned early the next evening with a small child and climbed out alone, dragging their ladder up behind. He hadn't fed the previous nights and threw himself at the rock-encrusted walls, snarling, shredding his fingers and hands trying to get out. He has no idea why she freed him before he killed the terrified boy.
"Next time you try to destroy yourself, I won't let you out. If ever you should succeed it will be me who takes children, including your own."
She taught him then how to drink without causing pain and death, and the various ways he could be weakened or killed. For months afterwards she was his mentor, his only friend, his ardent lover. When she let him, he discovered enjoyment in solitary wanderings - exploring the limits of his increased senses of taste, smell, sight and sound. His new "life" began to be bearable.
If he didn't dwell on the past - his childhood, his parents, his sister, his wife, his children . . . William Thomas Compton.