South Park, Colorado- early September. Autumn leaves are strewn on the ground, fallen from now frozen trees. All of the houses are still. The wind and the occasional straggling hobo are the only things breaking the silence of the night. Walk along the street and you will think the houses are peaceful, quiet. The serenity of their appearance covers any suspicions of the persons inside. The night is replaced as the sky brightens to a dark dawn, the sun not even having yet woken from its slumber beyond the mountains.
If you walk along the frozen pavement, you will pass a house that is like all the others in the neighbourhood; A white house with a small balcony overlooking an immaculate lawn, solar powered light beams over the walkway from small lamps along the sides. The only differentiating factor is a teenage boy sitting outside. A cigarette is pursed tightly between his lips as he blows grey smoke that disappears into a foggy haze. His face is indifferent, despite having replaced his usual navy gloves with a pair of caking crimson.
This boy is Craig Tucker, and this is the night his life changed dramatically.
Craig stares at the dried blood, watching as it goes from red to crimson to a dark indigo in the light of the moon. He hears silence inside, and outside he can hear the sounds of distant sirens. He knows exactly what street they'll turn on, the house they will arrive to. He knows because he called them. Dark nonchalance had been in his voice when he had told them the news. They'll find him like that: still smoking a burning cigarette as he stares blankly at painted hands. Hands painted in the memory of a father that received karma through a long kitchen knife aimed straight for his black, black heart.
Craig's mind is empty even as the moonlight illuminating his fingers is replaced with bright red and blue flashes. The flashing lights belong to the police cars that are nearing their destination. One, then another, and then another. He does not hear the sirens nor the whispering families as nosy neighbours peek outside their doors clad in housecoats and slippers. He can only hear the nothingness that is wrapping his mind up in a blanket. The nothing that has been his best friend for years.
"Sir?"
A voice breaks the nothing, and a small twitch in his fingers tells the officer Craig has heard him. The officer's gaze is met as cold indigo eyes pierce into his. The indigo so dark, that at that moment they appear a sombre black. He acknowledges the officer with that gaze, words not wanting to crawl from his throat to his tongue. They want to join their companions hiding in the apathetic boy's silence. They want to be held within the prison of a shattering, cheating heart and a static mind.
The officer stares back, almost stumbling over the look in Craig's eyes. It is a look of cold indifference. A chilling indifference that can frost the already freezing night. Before he can remember what he is going to say, another officer joins him and steals away Craig's attention. Well, at least any attention Craig had paid.
The officer asks questions, but is met with answers so lack in their complexity that they are a bit frustrating. It's the last question that seems to make Craig do it again: that small twitch of his fingers that tells the officers he hears them clearly. "She did not mean to" is the simple sentence he says as he seems to be done with talking.
They do not know which "she" he is talking about, but when they leave him and enter the house, the crime scene is surreal. There is blood on the walls; blood from small and large hands smeared as if someone had been finger-painting in it. It leads to the kitchen where the table is turned over and a broken bottle of whiskey is shattered on the floor. Clear glass peppers the tile, threatening to cut any bare feet that decide to enter.
The officers walk on until they reach the side door of the kitchen. More blood. It is on the knob, as if someone turned it in a fumbling, running hurry. Outside, they can see a man with red hair facedown in a pile of autumn leaves. They find a girl with the same coloured hair sitting beside the body with the same cold indifference as her brother. She is sitting beside the corpse with a cigarette trembling between bloodied fingers. A mother beside her sobs, lacking the calmness her children have.
Before they open their mouths to speak, they are met with the mother's cry as she sobs and confesses. Mrs. Tucker's hands shake as she begs for them to help her as she tells them it was an accidental homicide brought on by a slow homicide in the three of them. A homicide that has killed her children's ability to express and her ability to cope. Murder of the mind and heart, pure and simple.
They take her as well as the daughter who is still sitting in the cold, wet grass. She is not looking at the body but at the peaceful horizon. Her eyes hardly move. Not even when she is forced onto her feet and taken to a car to join her mother and brother does she turn her eyes away. The town is too small to be able to afford more transportation. Their father, the mother's husband, is going to get his transport through a black body bag.
People on the street watch as the flashing lights of the car escorts the three away. None of them are looking out the window. They do not face the whisperers, the gossips, or the just-passersby. They only face the floorboard of the silent police vehicle. None of them dare to look up at each other. Craig feels like he's falling, and he is sure the others feel the same. They're all falling down, which seems impossible from the hell they have just come from; a living nightmare they have finally awoken from only to be taken to another.
A dimly lit room, and cold coffee Craig does not drink, greet him at the police station. More questions from the officers and detectives he does not answer. Craig merely just says the same things in a different way. He offers them no evidence, collaborating in only the smallest way possible. When he wishes to be there no longer, his indigo eyes look up and meet the glass. It is as if he could see through it and to the officers listening on the other side. Craig then looks back at the detective in front of him and voices his thoughts. "I want to go home."