by Martha Woods
* * *
She’d never forgive herself for doing it. She felt dirty in her own skin like she could tear it off just to get rid of the pain of what she’d done. It overshadowed the cramps, still writhing around in her body. It kept her staring at the wall, contorted like a pretzel. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t deserve to, and the dread kept her from doing so. It would force her to accept the reality of her own existence. She killed her mother. She wasn’t supposed to exist.
She stayed like that, hour after hour, allowing the sickening sight of her mother’s black, gaping wounds burn itself into the back of her mind. She kept that image there as a form of penance, reaffirming her self-hatred, reminding her of what she’d done. The worse it felt, the better. She deserved every single ounce of pain and a thousand times more.
She built a mental pool of scorching hellfire around herself, consisting of guilt and self-hatred. She wouldn’t allow herself to grieve. Instead, she dove into that pool and did everything she could to torture herself. She killed her mother. She deserved worse than death-no solace, no rest, just torture.
As the hours went by, the tears came and left. Her heart broke a thousand times, and memories of her and her mother crept in.
The string of events passed her by, one by one, each a milestone, marking the maddeningly slow passage of time spent waiting. Soon, the silence became another form of torture. Her mind screamed as she realized she was in a cell, barely small enough for her to pace around and the only thing that could keep her company was her own thoughts. They began to run out, and her mind grew blank as she waited for something, anything to happen.
Nothing did. Every time she heard a noise, the slamming of a door or keys clanking, she jumped up to see who it was, but nobody came. She didn’t know what time it was, whether the night had passed or not. There was no way of knowing how long she’d been there. It could’ve been hours. It could’ve been days.
After an infinite amount of time, a hatch opened up on the door, and a thick hand pushed through a tray of porridge and milk.
“Hey,” she shot up off the bed. “What is going on?” There was no answer, so she took the tray and tried to bend down so she could see through the opening. As soon she took her food, it snapped shut, and she threw the bowl across the room. There was a paper cup of filled with several pills.
She huddled on the bed and tried to close her eyes. The voices started shortly after that. She heard her mother walking in through the front door while she was bending down and pulling out a roasted chicken from the oven. When she turned around, she saw her mother’s neck gaping open, spraying blood all over the carpet.
Other visions were of her in the woods all alone, searching through the brush until she found her mother, pale with maggots eating at her corpse.
Every image cemented her guilt and reaffirmed that she had killed her mother. That certainty grew into a serpent, stronger than the cramps. It had left her eyes raw from crying and her mind dull. It got so bad that she started rocking back and forth. Every time her tailbone rubbed against the mat, a spark lit and spread throughout her body and as she rocked faster and faster, those sparks grew into a blaze of energy that engulfed her body and sent her thrashing and writhing with foam spewing out of her mouth until she blacked out and woke up on the floor.
There was a tray sitting on the door hatch. It was a sandwich wrapped in a thin plastic bag. When she opened it, there was a thick piece of bologna and a slimy piece of cheese crushed in between two slices of thick bread. It went down the drain, but the pills looked tempting. There were two little blues, those would be the tranquilizers and a pink. That was the muscle relaxer. It would ease the rest of the pain, and the drugs would help with her cramps. She grabbed a tiny water bottle sitting next to the sandwich and opened it to take the pills, shivering from whatever caused her to black out.
She put the bottle to her lips. Don’t take those.
She found herself compelled to run over and throw them in the toilet, and fell down on her knees, losing what little was left in her stomach. She was starting to hear voices. She’d been questioning her sanity this whole time. Now, she knew for certain that she was crazy.
Chapter 5
She blacked out several more times that day, each time hearing a voice inside her head. Sometimes it told her she would be okay. Other times it told her to stop. It would stop her from dwelling on her guilt and thoughts of her own insanity, but schizophrenics are always certain that they aren’t crazy. Once she screamed back at it saying, “I killed her!” She immediately fell to the ground with phantom arms, warm and loving, wrapped around her.
Not true. Not true. Love. Love. Escape.
Sara didn’t believe that she was innocent, or that she was sane, or even that such a thing as love existed, not without her mother but she did need to leave--desperately.
Over the next few hours, the voices turned into phantoms, swirling around the room, pacing around her head in an unholy procession. The masked demons, stared at her, imbuing her with anger. She was angry for losing her mother and furious at the way she was being treated, like an animal locked in a cage.
They reassured her. That seemed to be their primary purpose. Through them she found relief. It got a little bit easier, sitting there, locked up like an animal. Sara couldn’t have killed her. There was no way she could do that. Sara loved her mother more than anyone else in her entire life.
She threw her pills away and began eating her simple dinner of beans and hot dogs, taking what strength she could while they spoke to her, reassuring her, imbuing her with a divine energy that grew, moment by moment tingling against her skin, cleansing the depression. Those phantoms showed her a way.
They were real. The voices were real, and she had power.
Tense your muscles.
She was sitting on her bed in the middle of a dark swirl of black fog.
Just your finger.
She did what they said now and reached out her index finger, tensing it as hard as she could, watching the spark of blue fire flit around the tip.
Use your light.
The force of the door flying open brought Sara back to reality as two gorillas, each with blond buzz cuts and meaty red faces walked in. “On your knees on the bed and face the wall.” The larger one huddled around her, waddling back and forth on his feet intimidatingly. “Hands on the wall.” He barked.
She placed them on the wall.
“Spread them apart.” He knocked her in the kidneys with a nightstick.
“Ow! Mothe--
He slammed her in the face. “Turn around and spread your fucking hands,” he barked.
The blow shot her head back, tensed her arm, sending electricity traveling down her spine. They couldn’t hit her. They had no right.
Fucking pigs.
They felt her up, grabbed her hands and chained them behind her back with a chain in between them and a leash connected to it so they could drag her along like a dog. Sara was being treated like a moving piece of meat, meant solely to comply and scream. She’d never been so humiliated in her entire life.
The last straw was a set of shackles that dug into her ankles, rubbing against the bone. They used the leash to throw her onto the ground and knock her head against the concrete, nearly splitting her skull open. Then they ripped her up to a standing position and kicked her in the butt saying, “Move bitch.”
She thought of maintaining a strict policy of noncompliance, but if she dragged her feet, they would just beat her and put her out. So she let them drag her while the shackles moved back and forth, her muscles tensing as they barked orders, telling her to turn left, then right down the hall until they reached a steel-reinforced black door and opened it up.
Inside was a long, white metal tube with a gurney placed inside and a two-way mirror. “What is that thing?”
She turned her head and got knocked right in the temple.
“Shut up, bitch and get the fuck up there.”
They invaded her sanc
tuary, threatened her with life in prison. Then they locked her up and beat her. They had violated her in every single way, and now they were forcing her to allow them to see inside her head. That’s what this thing did. It was a PET scan, and they weren’t looking for injuries. They were checking her brain for signs of abnormalities.
She was pouring out buckets of sweat, trying to go as slow as possible as they pulled the leash and dragged her backward towards the machine. She couldn’t allow it. When they pulled her up on the gurney, one of the guards spanked her hard, and nearly crashed into the mirror behind her from the blast of blue fire that erupted out of her hand.
It sent the Guard careening backward and drove a psychic wind through the air that, when she stood up, whipped her hair behind her. All she had to do was look down and her handcuffs and shackles turned to slowly fading ash. The guard still standing glanced at her, then turned around to go. He disappeared in a hate fueled blast.
The flames danced around her like the wings of angels, giving her an unholy glow. When she turned her gaze towards the guard laying under the two-way mirror, she took her time, taking in his screams while she slow roasted him. Then he went still, and she used the full force of her fire to turn him into a pile of ash.
Once the man was gone, the fire burned out and Sara collapsed.
Chapter 6
Sara smelled French toast and a pungent black cloud of coffee hanging in the air. She woke up smiling and sat up, shocked when she opened her eyes to see that she was laying in her grandmother’s guest bedroom.
Hadn’t she just blacked out after fighting those two guards in the hospital? What about her murder charges? Her Mother’s funeral? So many loose ends. How could she possibly be on the opposite side of the country when it seemed like she was still in the northwest a few seconds ago.
What was that fire?
Sara didn’t even bother to change out of the white shift she found herself wearing. Instead, she raced down the stairs, through her grandmother’s old Victorian home. “Grandma!” She hopped down the last step into the kitchen where her grandmother was setting down a plate of food for her. “What the f--
“Watch your language.” Even though the woman was ancient, she was sharp as a whip, and she looked like she was still in her fifties.
“What happened?” Sara crossed her arms across her chest.
“You don’t remember anything?” She poured herself a steaming pot of tea.
“Oh, I remember plenty.” She sat down and threw a piece of egg in her mouth, washing it down with a gulp of coffee. “I remember setting two hospital guards on fire with my mind. I remember strange voices showing me how to do it. I also remember being chained up and forced into a hospital after being accused of my mother’s murder. What I don’t remember is traveling from the west coast to the east coast.”
Sara's grandmother sighed and pulled her enormously long gray hair back to her shoulder before sitting down across from Sara. “I brought you here the night it happened. The police called me and told me you needed a place to stay so I had you flown out. They escorted you into my care. When you got here,” she laughed, “you were so delusional.”
“Oh, come on,” she shot up out of her chair. “The last thing I need is to be lied to. Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?” She leaned forward to confront the woman who was completely undaunted. “I’ve been chained up, locked in a cell, drugged and hearing voices for the past 24 hours. Now I think, after what just happened, you owe me a bit more than that heaping pile of bullshit.”
Her grandmother reached over to a porcelain container full of creamer at the center of the table and spooned a small amount into her coffee. She stirred it around, staring at the liquid while she did. Then she tasted it and set the glass down. By the time she went to grab another spoonful, Sara had all but lost her patience.
“You’re not going to tell me a single thing are you?” She stared down at her grandmother as the woman poured the next spoonful in and swirled it around. “Well, are you?”
“Just eat your food.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Of course you are,” she laughed jovially. “You’re probably so tired you’re about to fall over, and you don’t even know it.”
Sara sat silently with her arms crossed and her chair pushed away from the table. She met her grandmother’s eyes. “This little bullshit charade will get you nowhere with me.”
“Watch your fucking mouth.” Sara's grandmother seemed to grow ten feet.
Sara grabbed a piece of dry French toast and stomped up to the guest room. The second she got inside, she tried to summon the blue fire. She tensed her whole body. Her head shook, and her lips trembled, but there was no fire, no voices.
Her grandmother's house was no better than the hospital. In some ways, it was worse. She should've died. Now she would be forced back into the real world where she would have to accept that her mother was gone.
This was her worst fear come to life. She had lost her home and her family--her support base and now she was going to have to keep on living. It was possible to move on, but she didn’t want to do it. It went against every single fibre of her being. Her mother should be there with her, plain and straightforward. She should’ve been allowed to die. Why couldn’t she die?
There was a soft knock on the door. Sara whipped around and opened the door. “I’m sorry I--I don’t know what to think.”
“I’m telling you the truth, Sara. I don’t know what you saw, or what you think happened, but I’m not going to lie to you and play into some silly delusion.” Something in the way her bright green eyes met made Sara almost want to believe her, but she knew her grandmother was lying. “Come on.” Margaret took Sara’s hand and led her down the stairs and into the kitchen where the table had been cleared, and a vase of roses had been set in the center. They both sat down across from one another, still holding hands. “How do you feel, Sara?”
“Like I lost an arm.”
Margaret nodded understandingly.
“Do you know anything about my mother’s death?”
“No, just that she was attacked.”
“I don't know.”
“You must know something.”
“I know what you have to do,” her grandmother said. “You have to heal. I’ve found that the best medicine for grief is a healthy dose of real life. You can’t just sit around here doing nothing. What do you think about going to school?”
“No.” She responded immediately.
“It starts in an hour.”
“No.”
“You’re going.”
“Grandma…” Her head fell back. “Seriously.”
“I’m not letting you wallow in pity. I’m doing what I know is best. You need a distraction to cut all of that noise out of your head. Everyone thinks the same thing, you know. They tell themselves it’s their fault, that they can’t live without the person that died. It’s all bullshit. We all die, and we all have to get over it. The sooner you do, the easier life will be.”
“It’s not your place to say a thing about how I’m coping with this.”
“Say what you want, but I know you're taking on the burden of your mother's death. You're blaming yourself, and it's only going to end up driving you crazy. Stop. Get ready. It’s your senior year. You’re nearly through it. You don’t want to mess that up.”
Sara’s fingernails still had blood stains underneath the surface, and her hair was wild. “I look terrible.”
“Then wash up and take your time. It’s not like they’re going to get on your case if you’re late.”
“Alright.” Sara got up and walked upstairs. To her surprise, her clothes were already hung up in the closet, and she had her backpack sitting on a desk next to where her grandmother set her laptop. All she had to do was find the right outfit, and she was done.
Chapter 7
To most people, the first day of school is all about fitting in but Sara was not most people. She hated everything under
18 and for a good reason. Sara saw the rest of her peers as animals led around by their carnal urges and raging hormones. She considered herself to be a higher life form and she was. She was smarter than them, led by her brain rather than her groin, and she was better than them, ruled by a higher moral code, and she didn’t care about any of the petty things they obsessed over.
She had a natural aversion to anything with a penis. She wore the blandest things she could find, a pair of plain blue jeans, the cheap kind you get at Wal-Mart and a plain black shirt with a ringed collar. She topped the outfit off with clunky black boots and met her shocked grandmother downstairs.
“No. You’re not a lesbian. Get back up there.”
“I’m not dressing nicely. I don’t want any of these people talking to me.”
“But it completely defeats the purpose of you going.”
“I thought that was to learn.”
She beamed down at the girl. “You’re smarter than most of the faculty, and we both know it. You don’t even have to study. Now,” she pointed up the stairs. “I want to see something that barely covers your crotch. Get the black and purple skirt. At least that’ll go with your shirt.”
“No. I’ll go to school, but I’m choosing my outfit.”
“Alright.” She turned around and led Sara out the door.
Cape March was a small town off the coast of northern Maine, where God decided the sun would never shine. The sky was always entirely white unless a storm was rolling in. Then a theatrical array of blacks and grays would line up to create a tempest so powerful that residents often joked that the wind would blow them away.