by Ameriie
Expectation:
You get the girl.
Reality:
Your heart swells the first time you see her. Darkness has reigned for so long that this new sensation overwhelming your chest feels like an unsolicited invasion, yet you feel compelled to talk to her. You do. Your heart quivers, then cracks, seeping into the once-hollow chasm of your chest. You are bleeding with emotion, fingertips tingling and vision dancing. But then she looks away. She can’t be yours. She distances herself from you, and the once-quaking center of your chest crushes to an insatiable emptiness only ever slightly mollified by the urge for revenge.
Expectation:
You are accomplished at every skill you try.
Reality:
You spend meticulous hours perfecting your craft, honing your sense of purpose, and extinguishing any thoughts of imperfection. If only the girl could see how much better you are than her lover. A blade sheathed at your side feels like a loving hand there to grasp when you’re feeling unsure. The wicked gleam grows in your eyes each time your knife finds the perfect mark, each time you add another tick to your body count. You notice how the townsmen cheer at the young man who has proven himself as the city’s most revered and experienced hunter as you laugh, an isolated sound in a desolate wood, crouched in the puddle of blood surrounding your most recent kill. The irony is an iron fist in your gut.
Expectation:
You are loved by everyone.
Reality:
Eccentricity drives you to madness. Nights are spent, sleeves rolled up, elbow-deep in ink of nights toiling beneath shrouds of darkness, plotting. Darkness has become the only embrace you ever feel warmly enveloped in. All of your friendships have tapered to the single fact that when you are standing in a room full of other people, the atmosphere grows so thick it is almost as if you can feel those around you compartmentalizing in their minds all of the other places that they would rather be.
Expectation:
Every issue has a smooth, clear, and triumphant solution.
Reality:
Every failed attempt, every scornful gaze, every rejection, every shortcoming collects and settles in the gape that occupies your chest. You become heavy with hatred, lethargic, and dripping with disgust. Your blood and sweat stains the soles of your boots and leaves a trail of toiling everywhere you go, but you are still resented and alienated. Your status creates an impermeable shell around your existence, driving you further into exile, but this time, via a prison of your own making. Your brain has degenerated so completely that if any shred of the old, enthusiastic you remains, it must be smothered.
So if that’s what’s inside the mind of a villain, what do heroes deal with? Interestingly, the answer is, the same struggles. Except they overcome; they conquer.
Villains and heroes are chillingly more similar in that respect than a lot of people realize. The difference is that villains get stuck sometime during the battle. They succumb to the challenges they face, regardless of whether it is their own fault or due to the circumstances they are trapped in. There is something painfully relatable in the failure to overcome hardship, and to have that disappointment fester within you. In this way, heroes represent success, the acquisition of true love, and a prosperous future, whereas villains embrace the more realistic and less glamorized version of our reality—a world in which not every problem can be solved with a sweep of a magic wand or true love’s kiss.
SERA
BY NICOLA YOON
I.
PRESENT DAY
The detective pulls his eyes away from Kareena Thomas, the woman he’s questioning. The lurid graphics and logos of CNN Breaking News demand his attention. Usually they don’t have the television on in the interrogation room, but it’s been an unusual day. He turns up the volume.
The news anchor’s voice strives to be calm and dignified, but doesn’t quite achieve it. He sounds somewhere between panicked and excited.
Panic is winning out.
In the upper right quadrant of the screen, a girl is marching slowly down the middle of Interstate 10, a major Los Angeles highway that runs east to west. All around the girl is fire. Every car in her vicinity is either in flames or a smoldering, burned-out husk. The quadrant expands to full screen and pushes the anchor’s frightened face out of view.
The girl has become a familiar sight over the last twelve hours. The media has dubbed her Soldier Girl, because she’s covered head to toe in camouflage. And because she doesn’t simply walk—she marches like a general leading an army to war. Though she’s being followed by a gang of men, they are not soldiers.
And they are killing one another.
The news helicopter above doesn’t dare get too close. CNN has already lost two helicopters to inexplicable crashes. The other reason the helicopter doesn’t get too close is the bodies. Decency says you can’t show that kind of carnage on American television.
The drivers—the commuters, the beachgoers, the unlucky travelers who happen to be on the 10 that day—are not dying by fire. They are dying by fist. They are bludgeoning one another to death. They hit until their knuckles bleed, until white bone gleams, until teeth are loosened and spit out, until external injuries become internal ones. They beat one another until the world hemorrhages blood.
One more thing about the bodies: they are all men. Every single one.
The detective forces his eyes back to the woman in front of him. He’d met her once before, when she was a young mother. She and her daughters had narrowly escaped the clutches of a serial killer. It wasn’t his case, but it was a strange one. Strange enough that he’d never forgotten it or her or her daughters, the younger one in particular.
Tonight when they brought Kareena Thomas in, she reminded him of their previous meeting. The mother said, “Then you already know. You already know about my daughter.”
At the time, he didn’t know what to think or believe. Her older daughter, Calliope, had just died. She had set herself on fire. Or she was set on fire. It was his job to figure out which.
But Kareena Thomas was sure. She said, “It was Sera. Sera killed her.”
Of course he didn’t believe her. Whoever heard of a fourteen-year-old girl killing her older sister by setting her on fire? No. He’d seen bad things over the years.
But mostly men did the bad things. Not little girls.
But that was twelve hours ago, before people started killing one another on a massive scale. No, not people—only men. First a street. Then a neighborhood. If it continued, all the men of this city would die at one another’s hands.
And who was at the center of it all? Who was walking down the I-10? This woman’s daughter.
Sera.
Eyewitnesses said any man who crossed her radius went into an uncontrollable rage, like they couldn’t help themselves. Violence poured out of their souls. Not just men, but boys. Not just boys, but kids. Not just kids, but toddlers.
“I always suspected something was wrong, but I didn’t know,” she says. Her eyes are pleading for something. Forgiveness? “Do you believe some people are born evil?” she asks.
The detective looks at her with pity. “Tell me.”
II.
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO
SERA, AT BIRTH
She didn’t cry. She opened her eyes and looked and looked and looked and looked. She was beautiful.
All babies are beautiful.
SERA, AT THIRTEEN WEEKS
She didn’t cry.
Not ever.
SERA, AT EIGHTEEN MONTHS
Sera’s first word was “light.” Her sister’s had been “mama.”
SERA, AT NINETEEN MONTHS
Kareena and Patrick fought all the time now. Maybe it was the strain of having two kids instead of one. When it had been just Calliope, things had been easier. If Patrick was too tired, Kareena would take over, maybe take Callie to the playground or to a Mommy & Me movie. Or if Kareena was the tired one, Patrick took Callie to Kids Paint! at the museum, or tricycling ar
ound the neighborhood.
Now, though, there were no breaks.
And Callie was different, too. Needier. Shier. Fearful. It was like she’d disappeared into her own skin as soon as Sera was born. Like she was crouched down and afraid, hiding inside herself and watching. Watching her baby sister.
One night after both girls were asleep, Kareena dared to say the words she’d been thinking for nineteen months.
“Honey,” she said to Patrick. “Honey, Sera is so—” Here she struggled to come up with the right word. So many to choose from: “Strange.” “Unusual.” “Different.” She forgets now which word she did choose.
“Sera’s so _________, isn’t she?”
“All babies are _________,” he said, and rolled away from her in bed. Before Sera, they used to curl around each other and chat themselves to sleep. Her head on his shoulder. His hand on her thigh. Not these days, though. Most nights he was silent. Most nights he slept with his back turned to her. He was tired. He was always tired.
Kareena told herself that things would go back to normal once they adjusted to being a two-child family. Ever since Sera arrived, they felt outnumbered. No, “outnumbered” was the wrong word. Outgunned.
SERA, AT TWO YEARS, ONE MONTH
The playground was a war zone, and Kareena hated going. Toddler boys were little shits. The four- and five- and six-year-old boys played war games over and over again. They used dull grey pirate swords or sharply pointed sticks. The more invested ones had bright plastic guns.
Kareena wondered about the parents of those boys. They cared enough to make sure the guns were brightly colored and couldn’t be mistaken for real ones, but didn’t care enough not to give them guns in the first place.
Had she hated going to the playground with Callie when she was younger? Kareena didn’t think so. Maybe it was because Callie always avoided the warring boys. She chose the slide, the swings, the sandbox. Kareena was proud of her for avoiding them. Good instincts, my little girl, she thought.
But Sera was different. Sera watched and watched and watched the warring boys. She devoured them, eyes bright. Hungry. Kareena was sure Sera would hurtle herself into those boys if she could. If only Kareena would let her go, she would join them, become their general.
“Bang, bang, Mama,” Sera says after. “Bang, bang.”
SERA, AT TWO YEARS, FIVE MONTHS
Where do those blue eyes come from? Kareena wondered. She thought they’d have changed to brown by now. Both Kareena’s and Patrick’s eyes are brown. Callie had started off with blue eyes, but they were brown now, too.
In family photographs, Sera looked like a visiting relative. Distantly related.
SERA, AT TWO YEARS, TEN MONTHS
Callie said it hurt to hold her sister’s hand. Kareena told her she didn’t have to hold it if she didn’t want to.
SERA, AT THREE YEARS, TWO MONTHS
Kareena and another mom were standing at the edge of the preschool yard, watching their kids play. It was one of those moments of peaceful anonymity before the children realized their parents were back again to pick them up after another ostensibly joy-filled day at school.
This was a thing that Kareena liked to do—watch her child without her knowing she was being watched. Other parents liked to do it, too, she noted. What did they hope to learn? Maybe that their kid was generous. That she said please and thank you. That she shared and took turns. That their kid did these things even when not under parental supervision.
Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe in those anonymous minutes before they were once again known to their children, the parents hoped they could tell what kind of person their child would become. Good. Or evil.
Kareena needed this covert watching. She lingered longer on the periphery than the other parents. Just one more moment out of sight, she thought. One more moment and she’d gain some insight into the psyche of her strange—or was it unusual ?—or was it different ?—second child.
Now, standing with this other mom, Kareena tested the waters. Were other kids like Sera?
“Second children are so different from the first, aren’t they?” she finally said out loud.
“Yes!” The other mom nodded, hand punctuating the air. “Yes, they really are.”
Kareena felt a moment of hope. Maybe she wasn’t all alone. Maybe all second children were—what word to use, what word?
But no. She would ask this question again and again over the next few months to different moms. She asked at preschool drop-off in the mornings, the other mom rocking back and forth, second child perched on her hips. She asked on the playground, the other mom diligently pushing the second child in the baby swing—the one that looked more like a harness. The differences were always harmless—about eating or sleeping. “Well, little Maximilian was always such a good sleeper, but this little one? She never sleeps!” Or: “Sophia is a very picky eater, but Madeline eats absolutely everything.”
The differences were superficial, nothing to worry about, not really. Not like with Callie and Sera.
Once, someone came close to expressing what Kareena herself was feeling. This was one of the poorer moms, one who could no longer afford their preschool—the rates had gone up again.
“Compared to my first, my second kid has a nasty temperament,” she’d said. Had that mom used the word “nasty”? That might be Kareena’s word. Probably the other mom had said something more innocuous and forgiving. Something more loving. Probably she’d laughed affectionately as she said it.
No one ever said what Kareena suspected. Not only was her second child different. She was somehow wrong.
SERA, AT FOUR YEARS
For her birthday, Sera wanted guns and soldiers and swords. She preferred the ones that looked real. Patrick wanted to indulge her, but Kareena did not. Instead, she bought her bright plush dolls with too-big eyes. Sera built forts with pillows, used her Barbie car as a tank, called in air strikes with her walkie-talkie, sent those dolls to war.
SERA, AT FOUR YEARS, TWO MONTHS
Her eyes never did turn brown. She never had any baby fat. She was always all angles and sharp places. So many differences. Hard where Callie had been soft. Fair—pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin—where Callie had been darker, richer, warmer.
Sera was fearless, but not in a good way.
There were things in this world to be afraid of, and Sera was afraid of none of them.
And then came the day that changed everything. The three of them—Kareena, Callie, and Sera—were walking home from the park. Winter was on the horizon. The days got dark earlier, and the mile-walk home longer and lonelier than in the summer.
Patrick was at work. He was always at work. To get to the park, they had to leave a very nice neighborhood and cross through a less nice one. Not that it was bad, but it had dead zones. Dead zones like the one they were approaching now.
The street ended in an abandoned parking lot on one side and a narrow, dark alley on the other. A few blocks beyond this dead space, the neighborhood once again became safe, inviolable. But for now there was the parking lot and the alley and two little girls who were too slow and a man who Kareena could swear she’d seen watching them at the park. Now he was half a block behind them and there was something about him, and that something was not good.
Kareena picked Sera up and told Callie to pedal faster on her bicycle. Callie frowned her little worry frown and, instead of pedaling, got off the bike. She held tight to Kareena with one small hand and pulled the bike along with the other.
“Get back on the bike, honey,” Kareena urged, trying not to look back at the man, but looking back all the same. He was closer.
Callie refused, but not because she was being bad, but because she was worried. Her little Callie understood danger, but not what to do about it, and Sera—well, who knew exactly what Sera understood?
Should they run? Was she just being paranoid? Kareena looked back again, and the man met her eyes and he was closer, and they both knew that he would ca
tch her and her girls and do to them what he would.
Kareena adjusted Sera’s position on her hip so she only needed one hand to hold her. With her other hand, she grabbed Callie and pulled her away from the bike. They could always buy another one.
“Run with Mommy,” she said, and Callie obeyed.
They ran. They just had to make it to the other side. Had it always been this dark on this street at this time of year?
Sera wiggled in her arms. “Put me down,” she cried. “Put me down.”
Kareena was the kind of mother who tried not to yell. She was careful to explain her reasoning when denying something or the other. She never told her girls that they were bad, just that they had bad behavior. She almost never yelled. But she wanted to yell now. She wanted to slap their faces so they understood that she was serious.
What she wanted most of all was to put Sera down and pick Callie up and run.
Sera would be fine.
The thought flew away as quickly as it came, but the shame of it almost killed Kareena as she ran. Sera stilled in her arms, as if she’d heard her mother’s thought.
“Put me down, Mama,” Sera demanded. And Kareena did, but before she could capture her hand again, Sera twisted away and ran in the wrong direction.
Kareena screamed because now she could see that the man was definitely a bad man. Not just bad behavior. No. He, himself, at his core was a bad man. She screamed as Sera ran toward him and Callie screamed, and Kareena could not think what to do.
“Bang, bang,” Sera said loudly as her little legs brought her closer to the man.
He stopped moving.
“Bang, bang,” she said again as she stopped a foot away from him.
He pulled out a knife.
Sera lifted her small hands into the air and raised her little voice so that it strained around the edges. The knife was still in the man’s hands, and Sera was so close to him. Too close and her skin was pink, pinker than it had ever been, and even her hair seemed less pale. And the man held the knife and Kareena screamed and Callie screamed and Sera said “Bang, bang,” and the bad man plunged the knife right into his own heart, and then he twisted the blade.