I was wearing the get-up the day I saw the body. Standing out back, smoking near the dumpsters, two guys had wandered past the end of the alleyway that leads to the main road. They were talking about a crime scene they just passed and how the body was still on the sidewalk. I don’t know why I did it. What really pushed the compulsion to manifest? It’s not like I’d spent hours upon hours obsessing over the need to see a dead body. Thinking about the dead. Or even killing. I hadn’t quite gotten to that point yet in my life. But I still found myself putting out my cigarette and walking down the alley to the street where I spotted the blue and red flashing lights of cop cars, but no ambulance. People were gathered in a restless cluster. That had to be the spot. Shuffle off the curb, I slowly made my way across the street toward a row of shops on the other side. The crowd was growing in front of Mel’s Fine Seafood and I noticed the window on the second floor of the store was broken. Slivers of glass were scattered and covered the sidewalk. Whenever the sunlight above hit them at just the right angle, they’d shimmer like diamonds. The illusion of pretty.
I approached the edge of the people and stopped toward the back. There were some people crying, some whispering about how tragic, some shaking their heads with sadness. I squeezed my way up to the front where two policemen in uniform where standing with their arms out to the side, trying to keep everyone back. But the people were drawn to it, wanting to see, yet not wanting to. Just like me. I was no different from them at the time, except that maybe I couldn’t remember a huge time of my life. My emotions were the same, though. Part of me wanted to go back to the diner and continue working as if I hadn’t seen anything at all. While the other part of me wanted to stay. I would have blamed the need to see it on Lily, but she was strangely silent. So it was just Maddie, myself, no one and nothing else that made me step forward. I did it on my own.
I couldn’t get up close and personal, because of the policemen, but I could see a girl, probably around my age, lying just behind them with her arm kinked above her head, her legs sprawled out on a sheet of blood soaked concrete, and it was in that moment, I knew this wasn’t the first time I’d seen a scene like this. I didn’t know when else I had or who it was, but I knew I’d stood and gazed down at something similar before.
The blood looked like spilled paint, the patterns of splatter and droplets creating a symmetrical abstract painting that told a story of how a girl fell through a window. But that’s it. There was no story of what caused her to get to this moment in time, what had happened right before. If she was hurt to begin with or if the glass cut up her skin. If she did this to herself or if someone else did it. I wondered what the story was.
Inching closer, I noticed the girl was missing a shoe. It wasn’t anywhere around, either, and part of me wondered if maybe someone had killed her and the killer took it. I had no idea why I’d think such a thing. I didn’t watch crime shows. But for the briefest second, I swear I could feel… almost see myself doing something similar once before. Holding someone’s shoe after they died and feeling powerful over it. Then I suddenly thought of the box of buttons in my closet that feel like my treasure in a way, and I had to wonder if that’s what they’re from? But as quickly as the image surfaced, it was like ..
Chapter 10
Maddie
I can’t escape. The fear. It’s scorching within me. Fire and smoke. Suffocating like the rain crashing down from the clouds. It drowns me. My soul. I can’t outrun it… Can’t escape… Can’t escape the flames… The fear. Everything I’ve seen… done… To myself. To him. To her. But I need to… but she tells me I can’t. That I have to feel it. There’s no other way.
Someone is screaming from inside the house, something about someone being a whore. I hate when I hear the screaming, because it means something bad is going on. I don’t want to move, so I lie there on my side, staring at the wall. The concrete is cold on my skin. I’m sick of how cold it is. I don’t want to be in this room anymore. I want to see the sun. Smell the rain. Breathe fresh air. But I’m a prisoner.
I don’t want to be a prisoner anymore… Someone help me… please… Let me out… make all this go away…
“Look at me,” he whispers and suddenly I’m somewhere else. Not with the man or the screams. I’m safe. “Stop listening to the screams, stop feeling it, and look at me.”
I tilt my head and see a figure sitting beside me. I can’t see their face, but I have this feeling they’re smiling at me and it almost makes me smile. They seem so content, even with the screaming, as if it gives them some strange sense of peace instead of pain, like it is to me.
“Do you want to play our game?” he asks. “It’ll help you not think about him.”
“I’m not sure it’ll help,” I whisper, squeezing my eyes shut as I start to fade away back to the man. I wish I could disappear from this place. I miss the outside world so badly. It’s been too long since I’ve seen the grass and trees, the flowers just outside, breathed the fresh air, looked at something other than these same four walls.
“We can try and see if it works,” the voice pulls me back to the room and the person in the corner gets to their feet and walks over to the boy, gently stroking their fingers through the boy’s hair. The boy cringes, but remains focused on me. “You at least have to try and focus on something else besides what he’s doing.. focus on something else but the pain.”
“Do you think she’ll be okay,” I say softly, reaching my hand toward the boy, almost able to grab him, but not quite.
“Of course,” he says, trying to disregard the person standing next to him, patting his head as if he were a pet. “She’s stronger than that—you know that.”
It makes me smile because he’s probably right—she is stronger and deals with it better. I’m sure she’s alright—she has to be. That’s why she’s here, isn’t it? To protect me from the bad. To allow me to stay good, unlike the person in the corner who seems pleased by all this.
“Don’t listen to him,” they whisper, strolling around the boy. “You’re not stronger. Not yet.”
“But I am.” I sit up, ignoring the person and the screams as I reach for my box of buttons, trying not to think about what they really represent, where they came from, who they belong to. The figure in the corner laughs at me, but I block the laughing out as I count them all one by one, over and over again until the screaming stops.