Tag: fiction

Child. Grandmother. Nurse. Murderer?

Rough feel of the carpet against her legs. Grandma behind, hand on shoulder, gentle, ready to clench so tight at any movement too close to the red-gold flicker. Sound, color, shadows, warmth; uncomfortable heat, wishing for outside. Subtleties, nonverbal, interpersonal, flashing across and above and around her—too young. Smiling dimly at the shadowed face of Layla: beautiful, lithe, graceful, large. Will be like you, someday. A Woman. Ignoring Nurse standing just paces away—don’t like Nurse. Nurse is naptimes and lullabies and nothing grown, but here am I beside the fire, staying awake into the morning with sister, with Layla, like grown up—this night excites, Nurse should not ruin it.

Frail bones, papery skin, bleeding heart. She should not care anymore, why should she care anymore? The blood is freezing in her veins. Is this grief? Is it dying? Hips and eyes and a bladder like hers, every day feels like dying. And she had tried, she had tried to love that beautiful dark-eyed girl, to care for her, shadowed mirror-image of her mother—and what agony, now that she should not care, to learn that she always has. And the memories are rushing back, those recollections that cling to her like deadened autumn leaves, that will not fade until life itself has ceased—the screams, the sobs, the cruel male voice and hands—these memories are not her own, but perhaps she took them on, inherited this pain brighter than steel when she watched as her only daughter was lowered in the ground, threw a wedding ring into those ashes: no burning, no heat. Oh, Layla—could she blame her? Was it really so wrong?

Twitching mouth, sharp eyes darting across the room with keen, perplexing bite. This was insanity, the police should be called—oh, please, let them come and take the dark-eyed woman and wash that blood off of her hands and neck and breasts and return the world to bright sterile perfection as it had been only this morning. She took care of the little girl because the money was good, and should she just call the police herself, she was so far from sure. Is betrayal rooted in apathy, in love, or in loathing, and which of them had she started to feel? She looked at the dark-haired woman behind her and thought of what that woman had done, and as she turned towards the young one, the loved one, her own hand moved slowly, protectively, towards her.

All right, so maybe I meant it. So maybe two women dead is too much for one bloodline—maybe one pretty kitchen knife isn’t any less deliberate than that handsome fist coming down upon me again and again and fucking again, splitting my lip wide with the gleaming wedding band. Pain as bright as burnished gold. And fire burns and burns and then it’s gone—like him, like me—I thought I loved him, my god I really did—and you don’t know what it’s like with the fighting and the fucking and the burning and the dying and if you felt steel split flesh, that sensuous rush, that ecstasy as I cut away at him, at it, at everything I could no longer bear—you would understand. And that twitchy blonde bitch of a nurse, all caught up in her conscience—she wants to turn me in; I’ll turn her innards out if she tries. Two steps forward, fingers extended towards flame: Grandma can protect little Cassie from pain she shouldn’t have to feel, but I know agony, yes, and what of it? This fire will burn me clean. If not of the blood, then of bruises and of skin, and I can’t let them find me here I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—and my poor little sister alone now and what would my mother have said?

Rhapsody in Crimson

 An unfinished love song, a eulogy.

The only girl I ever loved was seventeen, with ivory skin, eyes like winter mornings, and hair to rival the autumn in which we met.

There was a certain inexplicability to the beauty and the chaos of that hair: no ordinary shade of red but a blistering conflagration of vermilion and rust, cascading past her elbows in a cacophony of curls. She had makeup like graffiti and a gaze like shattered glass, but none of it compared to her voice, which rang through the air with vivid incandescence, and lingered in the silence like a trace of falling silver.

As the phoenix ascends from an insensibility of ash, so the girl I love emerged from the dust of her broken home, seeking vitality in an apathetic age. Her dissonance held the promise of new beginnings, but its transience left the tragedy of absence in her wake; in the end, it was discordant silence that carved her memory into my skin.

I never asked what happened to her, never tried to find out. It involved a razor and her wrists, and that was all I cared to know. Sometimes I like to remember her as an angel, all flame and song and shattered possibility, teaching me to live again. But other times, without meaning to, I envision a car on a fog- shrouded highway, hurtling into oncoming traffic: her blood on the windshield, mine on the seats. We should have died together, her and I.

In the melancholy traces of half-forgotten melodies, her voice stitches silently through the fabric of my reality, my infinity echoing with the virtuoso of her grief. She never knew I loved her, and yet some nights I dream of her still: starlight trailing from her fingertips, tangling in that fiery hair. In my dreams she is alive, and she is crying: my universe contained within the confines of each cyan iris, her mouth moving softly in mine.

It has been two years since I last heard the melody of the beautiful, broken girl who bared to me her renegade heart and a soul like tinted glass. She had a voice like the landslide of a thousand falling stars, but she never found a song to match the violence in her eyes.

The Nobility Of Man

A deafening silence surrounds me, echoing across the gritty air and settling in the dust that covers the ground. It spreads within me, or perhaps I am a part of it, for I do not feel anything at all. In the half-year that has passed since the ending first began, this town seems to have suffered at least a century of time’s slow decay. In front of me looms the skeletal frame of a formerly inhabited house, silhouetted against a sun-scorched sky. The garden is overgrown with weeds, spilling over the walls and crawling up the sides. The dark inside of what I once considered home is now open and vulnerable: ravaged by the vicious assault of time.

I remember my sister’s sightless eyes, her cold porcelain face, the dark rivulet of blood as it trickled from her mouth. She was the first to catch it, and the quickest to die. Before the unspeakable rape of civilization, my existence had been indistinguishable from that of countless other teenagers in my suburban life. Of course there was that one time, that one mistake…if you could call it that, I was hardly responsible—lace, flesh, a black cross behind dark tendrils of hair—not truly my fault—

When my eyes snap open, pulse elevated, fingers twitching from the intensity of the flashback, I notice the cold metal barrel of a gun pressed against the back of my head.

“One wrong move,” a voice growls in my ear. “That’s all it takes for you to die. Walk.”

I am forced through the front door, into the basement of my former home. Moonlight filters in dimly from the top of the staircase: I am aware of several pairs of eyes trained warily upon me.

“Where did you find him?”
“Is he contaminated?”
“Prolonged exposure….”

“Better make it quick, then,” the man holding the gun says.

Before I quite understand what is happening, I have been forced onto my knees. I open my mouth to speak, but the words catch in my throat. The blood is pounding in my ears—

“Don’t kill him.”

The voice that perforates the silence is as welcome as desert rain. Without thinking, I turn around. In the half-light allotted by the shadowed moon, I discern the dirt-streaked skin and tangled ebony hair of the first woman I have seen in over a year.

“He could be contaminated—“ the gunman begins.

“Don’t kill him,” she repeats. Turning to me, she asks, “Who are you?”

Her voice is calm, but insistent. I cannot find my voice.

“Contamination status?” she asks next.

“Nonexistent,” I manage. “I’m immune. I caught it, but… I don’t know how… look….”

I turn my palms upward, revealing the underside of my forearms: they are mottled with splotches from when I first contracted the disease. Without hesitating, she holds out her arm as well. It is ravaged by a cacophony of rancorous color identical to my own.

“We think the immunity might be more than a biological anomaly,” she says to me quietly, pulling down her sleeve as I stare.

“A husband and wife share it as well—it may be transmitted through bodily fluid.”
She stands back up, turns the full force of her gaze upon the man holding the gun against my head: the barrel drops, and relief washes over me. The girl turns quickly away, heading for the stairs. Before I can speak, she is gone.

***

I find her again that night, just outside of the garden, examining the ruined magnolias that used to grow here in abundance. They are torn and defiled now, but once they were white and beautiful. I echo the first words she had spoken to me.

“Who are you?”

She does not respond, or even look at me. I try again.

“And…thank you. For stopping them, I mean.”

Again, no response. She plucks a damaged white flower, turns it gently between her fingers. Just as I begin to turn away, I hear her say quietly— “Leda.”

She offers no surname, no elaboration. Just four simple letters in a voice like falling silver.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

She smiles faintly. Starlight drips from the night sky, tangles in her hair.

“It’s Greek,” she replies.

I do not see Leda again for a fortnight. From the others in her small band of survivors, I learn that she has been scouting the area, searching for contaminated human inhabitance: but she returns grim and disillusioned. When I find her on the outskirts of the ruined town that night, and feel the first of the droplets of rain shower my skin, I almost smile. I cannot count the multitude of nights I have wandered through vast expanses of darkness, tethered to reality by the solace of a rainstorm. I sit down carefully beside her.

“Why are you searching for them?” I ask, as the first low roll of thunder breaks the stillness.

“The last wave of the disease wasn’t like the others,” she replies shortly. “They could still be human, somewhere beneath it all. And I do not fear them.”

A vivid flashback hits me. First I see humans driven mad with disease, sunken eye sockets, decaying flesh—then it is the faceless girl, the curve of her body, her unresisting form —

“What do you fear?” I ask before I can stop myself, desperately trying to keep the images at bay.

There is a long silence, permeated only by the high, wild singing of the windswept rain.

“I fear that in this fight for survival, we will become like animals: primitive and cruel.”

It is a moment before I can register her words. When I do, my eyes glance hesitantly down Leda’s body, taking in her slender frame. I try to envision her fighting the bloodthirsty creatures with nothing but the knife she wears at her hip. My heart is racing as I consider doing something daring, something utterly stupid. She turns to me.

“You have been out there too. What are you most afraid of?”

Instead of answering, I kiss her.

I not know what compels me to do it—only that I want to do it more than I have wanted anything in my entire life. At first she stiffens in surprise, but as our mouths meet I feel her hand slide up the back of my neck, her fingers running through my hair. In this moment of raw desire and insuppressible passion, she is the only thing that matters in the world.

For the briefest instant a bolt of lightening sunders the storm-darkened sky, casting a radiant light upon us—the only two lovers left on Earth, our bodies becoming one in the rain-washed night.

***

In the eighteen days of love-induced ecstasy that follow, my nights of solitude and days of aimless wandering are replaced by her lips, skin, and amber eyes. The night before I am planning to leave the ruined town, Leda and I lie beside one another, miles from whatever remains of my home and history, bathed in the light of the setting sun.

“What do you see?” I ask her.

“Unparalleled radiance,” she replies, smiling slightly. “The complexity of nature, blazing before our eyes. Even now, this world is beautiful.”

“We could see it all together,” I say. She turns to me, confused. “Come with me,” I whisper.

She looks at me, hesitates for a moment. A complicated range of emotions sweeps subtly across her face. Then she smiles. “Yes,” she says. “I’ll go. But I want you to tell me something.”

“Of course.”

“That night, in the rain, you asked me what I was most afraid of in the world.”

“So I did.”

“When I asked the same question, you never—well, you never really replied.”

She is staring out into the distance, her face bathed in blood-red light, and I want to tell her. I want her to understand this secret that I have never told anybody: I want her to know that the source of my nightmares began long before the source of hers. I find that I cannot stop myself. Without prelude, the words tumble from my mouth.

“It was maybe half a year before the disease spread. I was in my senior year of high school—back when there was still high school. I was at a house party. There was this… girl, and she was…”

The flashback hits abruptly. I can see her legs hanging loosely over the edges of the cushions, the black hem of her dress riding up her thighs. For the briefest instant, I am terrified that Leda somehow saw it as well.

“… Drunk,” I finally finish. “Very drunk. She had passed out on a couch in one of the guest rooms. I found her there.” “What did you do?”

“I had sex with her.”

Silence. When she finally speaks, I feel my fists clench. But her voice is soft. Gentle.

“Did you really?”

“Yes.”

“Did she want to?”

“No—I mean—I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Did you ever see her again?”

“No. Or if I did, I never recognized her. She isn’t a person to me,” I insist. “Not a name, not even a face. I don’t remember anything about her. I was too drunk.”

It is true that I cannot remember, even vaguely, a single feature of her face.

She looks directly at me: a long, searching stare. “Nothing?” she whispers. Her voice is hesitant and soft.

“Well, one thing. There is only one detail I was ever able to clearly recall—she had a tattoo. On her neck, just below her ear.”

“What did it look like?

For a moment, I think I detect a something strange in her voice. But it is gone in an instant—I am sure I imagined it.

“A cross of some sort—a small, black crucifix.”

There is a heavy pause.

“So, what are you afraid of?”

I force myself to meet the perforation of Leda’s amber gaze.

“I am afraid of ever having to look into her eyes.”

It is the most cathartic sensation, admitting the true source of my guilt. The relief, as it washes slowly over me, is so potent that I feel almost giddy. It is not until I lie back and shift my gaze to the sunset again that I notice the nature of the silence that surrounds us. I open my mouth—to speak, perhaps, though I have nothing in particular to say—

It is then that I feel the excruciating rush of cold steel splitting my skin.

***

Blood was running hot and wet down the edge of the blade when Leda wrenched the knife back out of her lover’s throat. She stood slowly, throwing the blade aside, and looked down at where his body lay in the crimson-soaked dirt. She ran bloody fingers through her dark hair. Her shoulders trembled violently as she began to speak.

“It was right, wasn’t it?” she demanded of the sky. “It was right, what I did.” Tears began trickling down her face when the charred twilight offered no response. Her voice faded to a whisper. “Please, tell me I wasn’t wrong.”

She glanced down at the body again. His lips were parted slightly, as though he had not even had time to register the pain as the blade tore his life out through his throat. His green eyes, sightless and glassy now, gleamed in the last ray of sunlight. Even in grisly death, he was beautiful to her.

“…the immunity might be more than just a biological anomaly…may be transmitted through bodily fluid….”

“The nobility of man” Leda said bitterly, “did not die with civilization. It died a long time ago.”

The tears were coming hard and fast now, as her eyes scanned the desecrated earth. For the first time in her life, she felt a kinship with it, a familiarity. As she turned to depart, the wind lifted her hair off of the back of her neck, exposing a marked patch of skin just below the ear.

The small black crucifix glinted in the fading light.

Musings In The City Of Lights

The top of the bridge has always been my favorite place in the world. You might not realize it at first, but it is eternally, unspeakably beautiful.  I can be alone there, when the night is vast and infinite and the concrete is solid beneath my feet. I can sit in silence, half hidden by shadows, my forehead pressed against the cold metal railings as they shine against the moon. Twenty feet below me seems a world away as I gaze down at the lights of speeding cars. It is dazzling, enigmatic, and inexplicable. Lifetimes seem to pass before me in the blink of an eye, as headlights burn like comets’ tails and the world rushes on beneath me.

It is different underneath the bridge, though. Filthy, dank, and shadowed—the moon hardly shines where the earth is so close. Charlie loves it here, but I do not understand why. I cannot love where the brilliant lights are gone: where all of the pain and discontent of the world screams at me from graffiti-stained walls. I hate it down here, where anger is so present. But perhaps it is fitting. After all, I did not come to see the beauty of the passing world. I did not come to find solitude or peace. I came because I am afraid tonight.

I sit alone for what seems like hours. Suddenly, I see her coming towards me in the in the night. She walks in total silence, her ever movement graceful and discreet.  I have never truly understood what Charlie saw in shadows. Perhaps she is at home looking up at the faded sky, but I know that I never could be. I will never belong to this place of small dreams and broken homes and limited ambition. I am at home twenty feet above this spot, looking down upon the world. There seems to be no place for me on the Earth.

The glaring lights from passing cars briefly illuminate her face, and in that instant she turns toward me.

“Hey Leah,” she whispers, smiling slightly. “I thought I’d find you here.”

To anyone else, she would appear a ragged seventeen-year-old, strangely lovely with her wide green eyes gleaming in the darkness. But as she comes closer I can just make out the light dusting of freckles, the dirt-streaked skin, and the chestnut hair hanging past her shoulders in lank, unkempt strands. In the half-light allotted by a shadowed moon she is dangerous and engaging: an embodiment of unkempt, feral beauty. A moment passes before I find my voice.

“I thought you were with him tonight.”

“I was.”

She kisses me before I can speak; sweetness mingled with cigarette smoke. Her fingers intertwine in my hair. That fierce, inexplicable joy ignites inside of me: that hunger that awakens only for her. I never want her mouth to leave mine, and yet suddenly, I break away. Charlie frowns as she steps back, her intense green eyes studying me carefully. One hand grips the neck of a whiskey bottle: a cigarette is tucked behind her ear. I want to say something, but I cannot seem to find the words.

“What is it?” she asks me softly.

When I do not reply, she leans in to kiss me again, and the bottle slips from between her fingers and shatters against the asphalt. The sound splits the silence, causing us both to flinch.

“Damn it, Charlie.” I say, breaking my silence at last as step gingerly away. My bare, dirty feet edge across the rain-washed pavement, trying to avoid the broken glass. She grins at me, that strange half smile dancing across her face as she kneels down amidst the fragments of the bottle. She picks up a shard and tosses it to me. I catch it instinctively, turning it over in my palm. It is small and jagged, and the edges are viciously sharp.

“I’d rather be with you anyways,” she tells me almost playfully. “You kiss better.”

“What are you doing, then?” the question is torn from me before I can stop myself. I know that no answer she gives can console me.

She offers no response, however, except to kiss me again. I cannot bring myself to pull away this time. She is beautiful, intoxicating, and dangerous, and I love her more deeply than she will ever know. I want to stay here with her, underneath the bridge, for the rest of eternity. But as one of my hands moves to the back of her neck, the other clenches around the fragment of glass. I feel its bite against my skin, and in that instance of pain, I find a moment of clarity. I finally realized what she had known all along.

I break away from her again. I allow my eyes to meet hers, and I know that she can see the pain and recognition within them. Now we both know the truth. The beautiful girl standing before me was never mine to keep. She would never belong to me, would never sacrifice the life she led by day to wander the night with me. I do not need to speak a word, because in my eyes Charlie has understood everything. And so the girl I love turns and walks away from me, head held high, without a backwards glance. She makes her way down the dark street, disappearing again into the shadows.

When she is gone, I finally relax my fist. The glass shard drops to the pavement again, and I feel blood running down my hands. I am alone again in the darkness, and for the briefest of instances, unspeakable rage consumes me. I slam my palm hard against the wall, leaving an image of agony and love in the imprint of my hand. It gleams slick and red upon the rough grey stone. I almost smile. Now my own pain screams at me from the walls under the bridge, which I have branded with my own, personal form of graffiti. I wonder if anyone will ever find it here. I wonder if anyone will ever know what it means.

A silver moon is just emerging from behind the clouds as I make the climb to the top of my bridge, where the silence calls to me. I do not why I am out so late tonight; do not know when I chose to live among the angry, the restless, and the utterly forsaken. I think of Charlie who, like myself, has been cast aside by society. I turned away from what this town never offered us, and chose instead to wander the night. She lingered in her ever-present reality of small towns and broken dreams. It is hard to say who has made the right choice. I think of my home, of my bedroom, where traces can be found of the life I live by day. There is a pile of textbooks. There is an old guitar. There is a razor on the nightstand beside my bed, where it has remained since the last time Charlie stayed the night.

I cannot deal with the pain of it any longer. I press my forehead against the cold metal and stare down at the road so far beneath me. The blazing lights of cars consume me in their brilliance, and elevate me far above the streetlights and desolation of my town. Suddenly, the pain of my life seems behind me. In my mind, I am not in a small town anymore. Instead, I am in a city. I am a thousand miles away, in a place of possibility and life, where passion is accessible, where life holds some higher promise, and where vitality can be drawn from somewhere other than the shadowed viridian eyes of a girl whose love was never mine to keep. These lights are my salvation, and strengthen my resolve. I will not play this game any longer. I will escape in whatever way I can.

I light a cigarette and stare out into the darkness: knowing full well what I have to do tonight, and wondering who will find me in the morning.

As the eternity of darkness overwhelms me, I swear I can see her shadow against the moon. But as my eyes widen, drawn to cold ethereality of the scene, she is gone again, and I realize that I am alone in this vast expanse of night. There is no love, no passion, and no beautiful green-eyed girl. There are only the cars below me, and the moonlit sky above. All illusions have shattered and all desire has ceased, as the beauty and agony of the world surrounds me. For a moment, I almost smile, and at long last I am overcome by the inevitability of my destiny, the reality of my nightmares, and the musings I contemplate in my city of lights.

musings in the city of lights

Drunk with a cigarette,
Smoking alone
While she’s off with him
As if I hadn’t known.
Four hours north
Feels like lifetimes away
Fuck it, one more drink
A lover’s cliché.
This time I’ll go bold
Won’t cop out with mint
It may kill me faster
No rose colored tint.
I’ll live just like smoke
That’s not asking for much
A vital illusion
That’s empty to touch.
I’ll keep myself empty
And light in the head
Every calorie skipped
Is one closer to dead.

The Ninth House Of Shruikana

A narrative I wrote for my English class. 

The night was ominous and cold. Black clouds gathered across the flat expanse of sky, smothering the moonlight and extinguishing the stars. But despite the vast and crushing darkness that surrounded her, the girl’s eyes could be seen gleaming in the shadows, as grey and disturbed as an overcast sky.

Her name was Melinda Alistair, and she was the youngest Mind-Dancer of the past one thousand years. Her art was a rare and subtle one, and she practiced it in the shadowed world behind the glass of mirror in her bedroom. Before her entrance into this Mirrorworld, this cold and beautiful realm of nighttime and intrigue, she had been nothing more than a prisoner in suburbia: an over-bright world of biting sunlight and rebellious teens. Every day of her life, until the Dark Nobility tracked her down and saw that she was properly trained, random snippets of other people’s thoughts had echoed in her head. For twelve years she had been forced to share the jealousy, grief, fear, confusion, celebration, joy, anxiety, bitterness, and pain of every single human being within a mile’s radius of wherever she stood. It was almost enough to drive her mad: the ignorance of the human race was near unbearable for her.

Melinda had dealt with the agony of it alone until the evening of her thirteenth birthday. On that tempestuous night, as rain lashed against Melinda’s windows and lightning sundered the sky, an agent of the Dark Nobility came to her in a dream, and Melinda finally learned the truth. She stilled remembered with a thrill of pleasure the feeling of elation she had experienced as the cold glass of the mirror had melted like ice beneath her fingertips: forming a darkly illuminated doorway. The Dark Nobility offered her the security, protection, and sense of belonging that she had lacked in her former life, and so in the years following that fateful night, Melinda became a formal member of the Mirrorworld’s shadowed hierarchy. In truth, she was nothing more than a useful, but disposable pawn. And yet they accepted her at least in part, and it was more than she could ever have hoped for. If her talents could have gained her full access into their ranks, she would gladly have done anything they asked.

And now, it was as a result of this blind faith that Melinda Alistair found herself bare-shouldered and shivering, standing at the gates of the Mirrorworld’s most horrific torture chambers at the age of fifteen. She did know why the Dark Nobility had appointed the scouting of Shruikana to her, but for their acceptance, she was willing to do anything. Despite her youth and relative inexperience, Melinda knew that she was more than capable of entering the torture chamber that they called the Ninth House.

She took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The cold washed over her like filthy water: the unholy smells of iron and death mingling in the dark air. Her mind was instantly almost overcome by an onslaught of sickening terror and sadistic delight. Gasping for breath, she wound both hands into her hair, twisting it tightly with her fingers and fighting to stay upright. Broken glass sliced the bottoms of her bare feet. Suppressing a whimper, she threw up barriers around her mind, and concentrated on the warm trickling of blood.

Her feet seemed to move of their own accord as she drifted invisibly through the corridors. She paused once as she slipped unseen through the halls, in a room where a young man, hardly more than a boy, had been chained to a chair. A Guardian had him by his jet-black hair, baring his throat for the long, curved knife that was pressed against it. Dark blood tricked from his nose and stained his porcelain skin, which gleamed like a bone in the darkness, and his eyes were the piercing blue of ice. Melinda moved her gaze impassively away, and left him with the knife against his throat. His tortured screams followed her, but she walked on, unperturbed by such displays of human suffering.

Melinda Alistair was neither a cruel nor a kind person. She took no joy in the pain of others, but she was entirely devoid of compassion, and no one had ever bothered to teach it to her. Melinda had never felt even the slightest tug of love or emotional obligation to another living creature in her life. There was no tenderness in her steely nature. Leaving innocents to die in Shruikana did not delight her, but it did not unsettle her either. She was indifferent to their agony.

The next room was long, and full of still more prisoners. Melinda tasted the air, and found nothing but the presence of broken minds. She glanced around and saw that almost all of them were still young—the smallest was a girl no older than six, her throat slashed wide open. Her dead, empty eyes stared into oblivion.

And then she saw him: a weak, trembling body on a bloodstained cot.

She never could explain how he had caught her eye in that dark, gruesome room. Melinda Alistair did not believe in fate, and yet something inexplicable drew her gaze to where he lay, flat on his back, shivering violently. As she stared, he sat slowly upright, shaking. His hands grabbed compulsively at his filthy hair, and his face was ravaged where he appeared to have clawed at it with his own fingernails.

Melinda gave a hastily stifled gasp—she had never encountered this brother of a comrade before, but she had seen his picture on the missing posters far too many times to soon forget the face.

The once-bright eyes were blank and unfocused, there were deep, raw knife-slashes across his chest and shoulders, and the torn remains of his dirty white shirt hung loosely on his emaciated frame. Even from a distance, Melinda could easily count every single one of his ribs. But the resemblance to his sister was unmistakable. Before Melinda could stop herself, his name slipped through her shocked lips.

Mark…?

He didn’t even blink at the sound of his name, but she was certain. She approached slowly, cautiously. Warnings were screaming in her ears—that this could be an ambush, a trap—but her instincts urged her onward. And as she neared the bed, it became evident that Mark Andrews posed no threat.

Without stopping to think, Melinda lowered her defenses and allowed herself to become visible once more. Mark’s breathing was panicked, and when he held up his hands in some desperate defense, Melinda saw that some sort of blade had been use to slice deep, thin cuts into the undersides of his arms. Unaware of what she was doing, she reached tentatively towards him, and he cringed away from her touch.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. But her words had no effect—his fear was beyond all reasoning.

In his terror, he was digging his fingernails compulsively into his skin again; leaving bloody gouges in his face. Without thinking, Melinda grabbed his hands before he could flinch away: hoping to prevent any further harm. As soon as she touched him, she was overcome by an excruciating sensation: a thousand knifes slashing against her consciousness and tearing at her mind. Melinda could feel herself slipping away into a roar of crimson pain: the cold, metallic taste of insanity seeping into her consciousness.  In desperation, she grappled for any solid thought or emotion to hold on to, but all she found was panic, confusion, and terror. It was pure human pain, raw and undiluted, and it was making her sick.

Just seconds before it was too late, Melinda’s body lurched involuntarily backwards, letting go of his hands. The pain evaporated from her mind instantly, leaving only wisps of misery behind. Released from her grip, Mark shrank back, breathing fast, and wrapped his arms protectively around himself. He was shivering, and tear-tracks were etched into his bloodstained face. Melinda realized that she had dropped to her knees on the stone floor. Her hands were shaking violently: in the first twelve years of her life, before she learned how to close her mind, Melinda truly believed she had experienced every degree of human suffering. But what she had just experienced left them all far, far behind.

She glanced at Mark, worried that the ordeal might have frightened him still further—but then she realized that no assault against his consciousness could possibly do more damage than what had already been done. She had never experienced such agony in all of her life, and hard though her heart was towards the human race, Melinda felt a certain degree of pity, of sympathy, stirring inside of her at the sight the broken teenager with the bloodstained face. Somehow, they had destroyed him beyond anything she had ever seen before.

Mark Andrews’ mind had been completely unhinged.

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