The murky water spun into the drain like ballerinas spin upon a stage. I stared at its dance, hypnotized.
I killed Elizabeth. I killed her.
And I felt absolutely nothing.
Did I think she deserved it? Yes. No. I didn't know. My thoughts were a smoldering car pileup on the interstate. I couldn't even begin to figure out how to pull them apart, how to sort them.
I watched the water until it turned clear. I felt like a puppet, like someone else was controlling my limbs as I shut off the faucet and stepped out into the open, automatically grabbing a towel like I was programmed to do so. I didn't feel the cold that you feel when you leave the warmth of the shower behind. I didn't feel remorse for the life I had ended.
I felt. Nothing.
And that, more so than anything I'd ever experienced, was terrifying.
I was sitting in front of my living room window now, though I hadn't been entirely cognizant of the transition to here. It's safe to say I was a bit preoccupied.
James had left me alone with my thoughts, eager to go clean himself up and sort through his own. To this day, I am amazed that he kept as level a head as he did. I am amazed that he did not reject me, immediately, as I had always feared everyone would. As he should have.
The raindrops raced down the windowsill before me, grounding me in this reality. They lived such tiny, insignificant lives, with little purpose other than the beck and call of gravity. They had no individuality, nothing to distinguish one from the other. They intertwined at points, intersecting and branching off and merging with each other until they were nothing but a blurry mess on the glass.
Jeff. That thing that broke into my house, whom I hadn't devoted much thought to since then. He'd corrected me when I said I didn't kill.
"You mean, you haven't yet. There's a first time for everything."
I was afraid back then, naturally distrustful of him and what he proposed. It sounded at first as if he wanted to lock me up in some kind of freak show asylum, and then later as if he wanted to recruit me into an army of superhuman sociopaths who served the will of a nefarious, faceless entity. He promised answers to questions I'd clung to my entire life, an offer which was tempting, but I declined because I believed that learning to embrace my true nature, as he proposed, would lead to bloodshed.
And here I was now.
Could I even stay here? Would the police find the remnants of Elizabeth's body in the incinerator and know it was I who was responsible? I should have been anxious about it; I could lose my place in life, in this home, and what freedom I had. But the feeling wouldn't come.
And that was disconcerting. Because throughout my life, I had noticed a pattern when it came to emotion and the lack thereof. It was like a pendulum of ice and fire; I would feel nothing when I should feel something, but then it would swing back to the other side and I would feel too much, pull out my feathers, destroy my room. Kill Elizabeth. Bottling up my feelings was dangerous, and not only to me. Not anymore.
I couldn't control myself when I was like that. I couldn't even retain memory of when it happened. How long would it be, if I stayed here, before I hurt someone I actually cared about?
I looked down at my hands. I'd always known I wasn't human, but never before had I so intently felt it. My skin was a costume, my words with others a script. I was just acting. Acting human, all this time. I was an imposter. A liar.
A murderer.
I was in bed, now, staring at the ceiling above me and listening to the rain refract off of it. Poor, pointless raindrops. They almost gave me peace. Almost.
I could have lay there for hours. It may have only been minutes. I can't be sure. After all, you never exactly realize that you fell asleep until you wake up.
And even that, for me, was no longer black and white.
...
...
I was screeching.
Screeching, and slashing, and burning.
I tore my past to shreds, my future from limb to limb. I killed Elizabeth a thousand times and blazed her body a thousand more, watching the flames lick up her horrified face until they swallowed me whole.
Listen to me, little angel. It's very, very important, yes?
With one touch, I ignited the line between reality and fiction into ash. I killed Xavier, Clarissa, my mother. They weren't my family. They knew nothing about me. They could never comprehend the lonely horror of my existence, here in the lacuna between sanity and madness.
I need you to stay here. No matter what you hear, no matter what happens, stay. Here. And be silent. Can you do that for me?
As my mother drew in her final breath, the most delicate of smiles graced her face. She said she'd always known this day would come. I did not understand.
No, no, no. You cannot-it is too-oh, how you say!?
I murdered my father. I slashed away his soft, green eyes again and again, but they always reappeared, always watching me. Filled with disappointment.
No, you can't go with me. I have...something else for you to do. Yes! A most important task for you, here, in this closet. Are you listening?
I stabbed out Kaos's eyes with the spork at Taco Bell. She was hardly as horrified as I'd imagined.
Hold on to this crystal, yes? Keep it safe for me until your mother or I come back. It's very, very important. Do you understand? You must stay here, and protect it.
I burned my way out of my dreams and back in, uncertain of what was distorted and what was typical. Disoriented, fighting my way through memories, facts and fiction, through macabre glimpses of what my rage was capable of. Through shattered fragments of a narrative that should have been linear, but was not.
Stay safe, my angel.
...
...
I slammed back into consciousness like a fist slamming into teeth, gasping like I'd been drowning only to choke on the air.
...Smoke?
The heat. It was suffocating. Squinting through the smoke-clouded haze was difficult enough without the chemicals burning my eyes or the retina-searing light that surrounded me.
Wait a minute. Smoke. Heat. Light.
Fire.
My brain kicked into high gear, a sudden burst of adrenaline dampening the agonizing pain splitting through my skull and dispelling whatever sleep fog had been muddling my thoughts. Reeling back, I found myself tangled in a mess of thorns-the rose bushes outside my house. I knew they were carving into my bare skin, but I barely felt it.
Was I still dreaming? I'd set my house ablaze in my dreams, but…
Still struggling to breathe, I scrambled out of the bushes and back from the flames. All I needed was to think clearly.
I found myself in the moonlit woods, braced against a tree and hacking my guts out. Finally, fresh air-fresh enough, anyways. As the smoke cleared from my lungs, it did the same from my mind; a sharp panic rose up to replace it, knotting itself within the brambles of my mind, screaming that my family was dead, that they were gone, dead, dead, dead, gone, dead, gone-
Curling in on myself, I lifted my trembling fingers up to my nose. Ash. Blood. Fear.
Gasoline.
No.
I choked on a sob, digging my fingers through my hair. What day is it? What day is it? Tuesday? It's Tuesday-
The day my family was to return home.
The world around me began to swim and sway as I stumbled blindly through the trees, deeper into the woods, away from the fire. Away from the reality of what I had done. Tears blurred my heightened vision, negating whatever genetic benefit I had, and my raptor hearing was useless over the sounds of my panicked breathing. Before long, I was running, sprinting away from the remnants of the closest thing to home I'd ever known. It was all gone, now. Burnt to ash, by my own hands.
And then, I was falling, sprawling forward into the mud, flailing my arms to try and catch myself. The cool, damp earth welcomed me with open arms. I found myself unwilling to get up and go on.
I'm not certain how long I lay there, sobbing into the mud alone among the trees. Despite the chill of the autumn night, my skin burned like the inferno I'd left behind. Who's to say if I'd been scorched by the flames or if it was just another product of my dark, confused labyrinth of a mind?
And then, there was someone. Pulling me out of the hell I'd settled into and holding me in some kind of awkward attempt at solace.
Jeff.
He was a psychopath who had broken into my house, an eyelid-less freak of nature, and quite possibly a serial killer. But in that moment, I needed him. I needed the relief of his stiff, rocking embrace and reassuring whispers. I needed to trust someone, because I could no longer trust myself.
And then, I did what is rapidly becoming my most characteristic action: I sank into the soothing siren call of unconsciousness once again.