The Toxic Children

by Tessa Maurer

  Chapter [4]

  Days pass and I don’t keep track. I never do; they lost their meaning long ago. I am in the field, listening to the wind, paying attention to the way it touches my skin. It is the only thing that reminds me there is a world outside of myself. I listen to the breathing of the world, and I know that it’s real, that it’s not some figment.

  “Who do you talk to?” says a voice. I search for it, and on the hill a good thirty feet from me stands the girl with the red hair. I wonder if she wants me to kill her. What an insane thing to want.

  “No one real,” I say, tensing, getting ready to attack. Some intrigue inside of me lets her talk, lets her live for just a moment. My mind wants things my body doesn’t, words and sounds—to know things.

  “You seem so human when you talk,” she says. I can see the gun in her hand, knuckles white with tension.

  “A residual trait.”

  “I don’t get it. Where did you learn to talk?”

  My skin makes itself known in a way I do not understand. It’s like the twisting in my stomach. “Most can.”

  “Not the way you do. You talk with fire. You talk with a mind—a personality.”

  “You are hoping, aren’t you? Wishing for a friend? I won’t be that. I have heard of romance and fantasy, and I know this world is long past that,” I say, some part of my mind I don’t understand making me speak, telling me what to say.

  “Hope? Perhaps. But expect? Not at all.”

  “Why are you doing this? Do you want me to kill you?” I ask, and I don’t understand why, but it irritates me. I don’t need prey walking into my hands. It shouldn’t come that easy.

  “Rather you than the others. At least if you killed me, you might see me as human—you might care just a little. It’s the only thing left in this world for us: to die by the hands of someone who might remember us, if only for a moment. It’s not a good existence to be as small and insignificant as dust. No purpose, nothing. Survival isn’t enough. Survival is killing me,” she says, her words steady, but her eyes wavering with an emotion I have never felt.

  Before I can process her words, she turns and walks away, all defenses down. I could kill her so easily, but I don’t. There’s something about a prey that wants you to kill it that makes you second guess yourself. It feels wrong. It’s not the way of things.

  I find something to kill, some life to take out of the world, but I cannot shake her words. Survival is all that matters. Memories mean nothing—they do not last like air or sun or dirt. Why does it matter if I understand that she is human, that she thinks? She will be dead, and that’s it.

  “Perhaps she thinks, even if she’s dead, the memories will keep her alive,” says the man with the dark skin and the scar through his brow. He leans against a tree, his long dreadlocks moving in the wind. My head is detailed today.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “People seldom do.”

  “If you’re the part of me that understands, then make me understand in the front of my mind, the part I can access. Why does she want me to care? What does it do?”

  “I already gave you my best answer. I think what you want to ask me is: why do you want to know? Why does it stir you up? Why do you care, Inanis?”

  I want to kill him again. I want to cut into that scar, see what makes his head tick, and destroy it.

  “I have overstayed my welcome,” he says.

  “You’re the smartest of the bunch.”

  “Besides, my words have been planted nicely. You’ll water them for me,” he says, and it’s not a question. Before I can throw my knife at his head, he disappears, and the silence returns. In the silence, my mind is still, and I am not human.

  ***

  When I can’t hold onto the silence any longer, I feel the need to snuff someone out so badly my hands shake. Something dark and violent is in my head. The dark skinned man set something off inside me. The anger burns and burns and wells up into something I cannot contain.

  I take off through the field and enter the neighborhood. These houses, decaying and dirtied, all once housed families. They heard laughter; they saw life, and now they are shells. Just like me.

  I see a light on in one of the houses, the window flickering orange in the darkness like a signal. I approach, quietly and stealthily. I am an expert in the kill, but tonight I cannot control what’s inside me—I cannot calculate it. It’s as if I watch, not experience, what I do. My mind is not king. The kill is.

  I punch the window, shattering it, tearing up my hand. The Adaption is sitting on the floor, its features like a normal human, but its eyes sunken and skin ashen, toxic. I think it male, but I don’t have the time to process it before I rip it apart. I think it screams. Maybe that’s me. I am covered in blood. I destroy it until there is nothing left resembling a human; until there is no sign of life; until the urge stops screaming in my head.

  I walk back to my basement, covered in blood. No one in the neighborhood dares bother me. In the window of a house not far from mine, I see the red. She watches me. I want her to see the truth in the blood: that I am a monster. I don’t want to be her last hope; I want to be the thing that takes all hope away. That’s what we were built for. We are the punishment, not the saving grace.

  Chapter [5]

  I sit in my chair, unable to sleep. It comes sometimes, the madness. Not just the people—something more than that. I shake and rock and I cannot control it. I am still covered in blood, still covered in the redness turned rust. I look at my hands, blood under the nails and staining my flesh. The remnants of life are on my hands. I get flashes. I see the Adaption. I see his eyes, and I see fear. I can hear his screaming, loud and piercing and how it ceases, but I don’t stop. I keep ripping and tearing. Blood is on me, warm and wet and red—

  I get up and open the latch, running to the bathroom where the water still flows. I tear off my clothes that reek of blood. I scrub my skin until it hurts, until I feel that I am as clean as I will ever be, which is hardly clean at all. No matter how much I wash the blood off, it will always be on my hands. I was born with blood on my hands.

  I feel sick with humanity. I haven’t reacted like this in a long time. I thought it was over. I turn to leave, but the Woman stands in the doorway.

  “You are not this monster,” she says.

  “When you’ve seen the blood go down the drain, any room for doubt leaves.”

  “But you have doubted. Do not forget that.”

  “Why will none of you let my mind die in peace? Monster is what I have been headed towards since the moment I was conceived. Let me go.”

  “It is not up to us,” she says, disappearing into the bloodied mess of the inside of my head.

  I want to be angry, but I am just so tired. More tired than I can understand. I sleep the day away, not in my chair, but curled up on the floor like the animal I am.

  ***

  I wake up more numb than usual. Nothing means anything to me. I find a set of clothes gathered months ago and put them on. I leave the house, not sticking to the fields. I walk down the street, in full view of the world. No one approaches me; no one tries to kill me. I find someone, human or Adaption I don’t know, and I kill them. I feel nothing. No anger, no hatred, no regret. I have never been so dead.

  Days pass and nothing changes. No one visits the inside of my head. The silence is numbness. I do not feel part of anything. I exist. I survive.

  I walk down the street again, not caring if I am a target. I see the red when I pass its house, and it calls down to me.

  “Say something to me so I don’t go mad,” it says, voice shaking.

  I look up. Some part of me wants to respond, but I don’t remember how. I don’t remember what interaction means. I continue down the street. The boy, his eye now missing, appears beside me.

  “You have one chance, Inanis. Don’t die on me,” is all he says. He stays with me, silent, watching. His eye burns too bright.

  Like sickness, I feel something.
In contrast to the numbness, I could almost call it vivid. I turn around.

  “Red,” is all I can manage to say. It feels strange on my tongue. I blink a few times, as if waking up. The world looks brighter, more alive. I am aware of motions I was not before: leaves moving in the wind and the slow shift of sunlight to sunset—things that don’t matter.

  “I thought you were dead. Not physically, but mentally. I’ve seen you walking. You weren’t there,” she says. She is silent for a moment. I have nothing to say. I feel something, but I do not feel alive.

  A thought forms in my head. It’s hard to put together, but I manage. “Why don’t you kill yourself? You are more human than me.”

  “I don’t deserve it, or maybe I’m just too afraid,” she says. “You have to understand how messed up I am. I watched my baby brother kill my family with his poison body and poison mind, and here I am, still alive for no worthy reason. Sometimes I think I made up humanity. Sometimes I think I’m dead, and this is my hell.”

  “This is hell,” I say, the words coming to the surface with ease, because I think I mean them.

  “Why do you deserve to be here?”

  “I killed my mother and trapped her in my head. I am just like your baby brother. We all are. We are your demons, and our own.”

  Her eyes fill up with emotion. She stares at me. The eye contact is painful. In the space of a second, her eyes change like a mask, covering up what she doesn’t want me to see. “Do you have a name?”

  “Inanis.”

  She looks at me for a moment, but then the mask is back. “Do you know how to read, Inanis?”

  “Yes,” I say, and my head slips back to memories—real memories. I hear something like wind chimes. I smell roses. I hear the warm rumble of voices. I feel something.

  “Do you like to read?”

  “I did. That’s how I know things—things I shouldn’t,” I admit. “I burned the books years ago.”

  The boy with the missing eye, Azure, he claims, looks at me. I feel his eye like I feel hers.

  “Why do you talk to me? Why don’t you kill me?” she asks suddenly.

  I think for a moment. “I don’t know,” I say and walk away. I can’t say any more. I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s a lie.

  I turn to Azure, still walking with me. “I am setting myself up for the end of me. You understand that, don’t you? I wind myself up, I become as human as I can, and then I ruin it so thoroughly the essence in me dies.”

  “I choose to ignore it,” he says, his blue eye looking back at me. “I know what you think you’re doing, but I hope for other things.”

  “How can you hope when I can’t anymore?”

  “I’ve been asking myself that same question,” he says, looking downward, watching his feet, forever the easy prey he was when I killed him. He looks up at me, his eye bright with something I can’t understand, and then he disappears into the folds inside my head. I am left alone in the silence. Even wrapped up in it, something in me feels, and I am not certain if that’s good, or the worst possible thing.

  Chapter [6]

  I sit on a rooftop near the house of the red. I watch her be human; I see her leave and look out at the world with fear and fire. I smell cooking food, something I haven’t had in a long time. I see her through the window, painting. I do not understand art anymore, but I do not dislike the sight of it. Art will die with the humans, just another casualty of mankind.

  I feel a sick knot inside me the whole time, something anxious. I try to be what I think of human as. It feels like I have a knife inside me, moving whenever I try to stay calm and quell the kill in me. It wears me to the bone.

  Hours pass and I leave my spot. I walk to the field, listening to the silence. In the manmade world, I feel like the monster, mutated and wrong. In nature, I feel like any animal.

  “I saw you,” says the red. She stands far from me, just at the edge of the field. “Why were you watching me?”

  “Trying to understand,” I say. I do not care that she saw me. It does not matter.

  “If you want to understand, why did you burn your books? Books are more honest than the world. If you want to understand people, listen to what they make up.”

  “They burned the inside of my head. They showed me worlds and things that I will never have. They hurt.”

  “They’ve always hurt. Books have always shown us what we want and cannot have. They make us feel alive when nothing else does.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it hurts, and hurting makes everything else feel real.”

  “I think your real is my fake.”

  “The fake things hurt the most sometimes. Dreams, wishes…” she says, her eyes looking into something I cannot see.

  “Tell me one thing,” I say. “Why is being human better than being an Adaption?”

  She looks at me, her eyes conveying something I do not understand. “I have only old reasons. Love and art and feeling and hope, but the truth is…those things mean nothing now. Humanity is torture,” she says and walks away before I can say anything else.

  Some part of me disagrees. Some part of me thinks that it was a gift, the pain and the pleasure of it. It seems so full, and I am so empty.

  Even though I try, I know what I said to Azure is true. I am setting myself up to die with a clean cut. I will be faced with what I want, and shown exactly how much I cannot have it. I believe second chances are a thing of man, not of the Adaptions.

  I fight because I always have, and because…I do not know what I am without the essence. I can be angry; I can ignore all that is inside of me, but when I face the truth, when I look it in the eyes—in my eyes—I see a monster staring back. When I kill, I feel alive with madness. The first time I felt it, the first time I felt the lust of killing, the blood on my hands, it terrified me. I grew sick with it.

  Some days, I still cannot stomach what I do. Without the shred of a conscience I have, I know I will do disgusting, vicious things that to this day would sicken me. Knowing that, knowing that that will become my personality, my mind, my actions…it excites me more than it would any human. It sickens me some, too. There will come a day when it only excites me—when it is all I want. I know I am just prolonging that. Maybe I would like to believe otherwise, if I knew how to hope.

  The little blonde girl appears beside me. It reminds me of the dream she last came to me in, only the reality of the world is clear in the tall, dying grass and weeds, not the lush green of the imagined past. “You felt bad when you killed me, you know. Not just sick, not just mad, but guilty.”

  I feel the twisting. “What’s your point?”

  “You call it sickness, but it’s more than that. You’re not being truthful with yourself.”

  “Why does it matter if I felt guilty? Or do you just want me to admit that I did? You were a kid—you smiled when you saw me. The fear, the hatred, those were always okay. I understood them, but smiling? It was…innocence,” I say, seeing it much too vividly. She laughed when she saw me, this little chirping sound, eyes shining. Her parents must’ve told her some lie to let her leave the world happy. It should have made me stop—it should have made me let her go. I know that from the books; I know that should’ve changed me, but it didn’t because I am a monster. I slit her throat. She never laughs in my head.

  I look at her, her throat open and bloody now. “Oh,” she says, touching the gap. She looks at me. “It matters ‘cause you need to remember the truth. If you’re going to become the monster, you needa be honest. If you were the monster when you killed me, imagine what you would’ve done? I bet I wouldn’t look human anymore, like that Adaption.”

  “You wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t care. I know and I accept that. I will do the things that would give even me nightmares. That’s the price of giving up the fight—that’s the price of never having to feel like a human. I am attached to the essence, but it kills me in a different way. It’s the difference between always dying, and just getting to be dead.”
>
  “You feel different. Why aren’t you angry at me? Why are you so calm?”

  “I am tired,” I say simply, and I am. I have been feeling too much—more than I am meant to. I have been toying with the idea of humanity. That’s the truth. Some deep, old part of me thinks that being in contact with humanity and not killing it will break the monster and let the human out. I hate that part of myself.

  There are two sides to me: the monster and the human. If I don’t let them cross over into each other, they both make sense. When they cross, that’s when I go mad. I can feel the kill in me along with the conscience. I can feel my head turning and twisting.

  “I like the monster in me,” I say. “I like the way it makes me feel. I liked killing you. I have liked killing every person I have killed. The sickness is a side effect; the killing is the medicine. I accept that just as much as I accept the guilt. I’m going insane,” I say, and I laugh a sickened laugh. “This is too much.”

  I walk out of the field, leaving the imagined girl behind. I want to kill. I can feel the sides of me fighting. The red girl has made me so loud inside, so stirred up. I was fine before. Anger I can manage, but this…

  I feel a stitch in my chest. My head pounds and aches. I feel the heaviness of tired so much that I can barely stand. The fight in me is too much. More than to kill, I want to shut off. I want to escape. I want to be human and I want to be a monster. I want to be a devil and an angel, but even in the books, those do not cross. I want to be something that doesn’t exist.

  Without thinking, I am at my house. I go inside and down into my cavern. I curl up on the floor, wanting to kill, but more than anything, wanting to stop feeling so alive in the worst possible way. I hold myself down, fighting the kill with sleep. For the night, it works, and I rest.

  Chapter [7]