WARNING: Language, Murder, Suicide
Guilt drags its tar nails through my chest, painting my alveoli charcoal black. The emotion bleeds into my lungs, filling my chest with a liquid summer as I stand in the garage, socks caked in Rosalie's blood. Death, once again, rose to water the drought of life.
I stare at the inside of my eyelids with the heavy feeling of reading my own obituary from the ashes of my bones. Utterly devoured by death, I think of the beast that now inhabits my mother's skin.
"I will take care of this,"
I sunk into an endless evermore, wishing that someone would shake me til I woke. My heart ticks on; a clock only right twice a day. Even though I know I am awake, that the blood that runs through my veins is warm with life, I feel a decay in my bones. Its weight makes my being plunge into a nothingness that is irritatingly familiar to me.
I met Peter Welton on a rare September afternoon in Marblehead. It was an afternoon in the twilight of summer and fall. The sun lies its amber cheek on the mountain peak as my mother leans against one of the porch posts, speaking softly to Peter as he eyes me secretly.
He knelt down on the porch step, reaching out an innocently malevolent hand out to me. I timidly hid behind my mother's arm and it brought a chuckle from both of them as the wind blew softly against my face. Without a second thought, my mother shakes his hand, sealing both of our fates.
Peter Welton was twenty-four when he felt death's beautiful kiss, twenty-three when he leaned across my desk and placed his lips on mine. I remember how my teacher awed at his bright smile as he stood straight and playfully flirted with the middle-aged widow. Everything in me screamed in confusion, but my lips wouldn't even quiver as he stood there innocently. I must have imagined it.
From stage-to-stage, Peter leaped around wildly like a puppet finally freed of its master. It started with a secret kiss and ended with his lukewarm blood flooding in between my gums as his exposed neck hung over me like cut strings.
As I was told, a neighbor heard me screaming frantically and broke into Peter's house after calling the police. They found me in the corner covered in blood and pointing a steak knife threateningly. My parents could not look me in my eyes as the police took sample after sample from off of my skin and from within my body.
In a town where you are looked down upon for leaving your garbage out the night before pickup, no one knew what to make of this. Peter was far too sweet to possibly be a pedophile. I was just a little girl uncapable of murder. The scale did not sway until I began to age and my unordinary behavior became weight behind my possible murderous tendencies instead of a result of what he had done to me.
An unwelcome affinity for older men grew like a cancer inside of me as my body began to change without my permission. Ezekiel seemed to come from the skies as I saw him as savior for my sickness, a cure for my cancer, but all his father had to do was look in my direction and I fell apart. A part of me truly loved the thought of loving Ezekiel as a girl my age should have loved a boy, but I couldn't fathom the thought of it with anyone; my mind would never let me be that open after what Peter simultaneously destroyed and created within me.
I drew on a smile for my father each morning, but the decay behind the windows to my soul was alive and breathing, aching to be seen by the outside world. He proposed a weekend in the Marblehead mountains, just him and I. Somehow, we both believed the madness couldn't follow us up there in the thin mountain air.
We had made it a few miles out of town, singing our hearts out when a semi-truck's horn turned both of our heads to the right. Its grill gleamed as it collided with the passenger's side and sent the vehicle spinning like the Grim Reaper during a ballet performance. We tumbled down the paved tar like a kicked can, the delicate will of a railing enough to slow our momentum. I came to, only hearing the sound of the semi-truck driving away.
My vision is blurred by blood flooding past my eyebrows and into my eyes, but I am able to make out my father hanging upside down, unconscious. His arms swung like a metronome as I struggled to gather myself.
"Dad? Dad, wake up!"
The panic that raced through my heart with such force is something I know I will never feel again. Fear was alive in me that day, swallowing the decay, devouring the nights where I had wished for death to just take me away with the stars.
I frantically wrestle with my busted seatbelt, eventually winning the rigged battle. Once my body hits the roof of the car, I feel a pool of blood warming my abdomen. I bite down on my tongue, trying not to panic at the metal now protruding from my skin.
My skin screams as I pull myself from the metal and hurry to free my father. After managing to unbuckle him, I checked his pulse. Weak. Threaded. One of my ankles is twisted purple, blue and red, but I kicked the driver side door until it opened. Each thrust of my leg, each connection that my foot made with the door broke my body further down, yet I was able to swallow all of my pain as if this trauma was another paper cut in my endless dance with blades. A trail of blood follows me as I drag my father's unconscious body as far away from the car as I possibly could.
So, we sat on the side of the road; me too weak to go for help and him not even able to open his eyes. The semi-truck driver didn't even have the decency to stop their truck to check on our condition. Their wheels just kept on rolling past the lives they destroyed. It took everything in me to keep my eyes open as that warm August sun turned into a chilly August moon.
We sat there for hours before another car saw the accident and called the ambulance. My condition was somehow stable enough for me to ride in the ambulance while a helicopter took my father to the nearest hospital. I remember one of the paramedics shining a bright light into my eyes and my body falling out of that reality only to go into the back of my mind.
A fractured femur, two broken ribs, and a punctured kidney. August 23rd, 2016. 9:43pm. My father took his last breath 369 days ago as I watched from beyond the operation room glass. I first blamed the surgeon, then the surgical tech, and eventually I blamed myself. Forgiveness rained upon all the others except who was never to blame in the first place.
My mother arrived almost an hour later, finding me in the operating room beside his covered corpse. Her excuse was work related, but I saw no excuse for being anywhere but with your own husband while he fought for his life.
"These were the best surgeons that money could pay for."
I disgraced his memory by screaming in the room, knocking over anything in my path. It was my first act of violence in front of my mother and it set a dark tone between us from that day forth. Fuck what money could pay for, she often confused fiscal responsibility and ability with compassion and love. I hated her for saying it aloud and truly meaning it.
"Who gives a fuck about how much you paid them? He's still dead and you were at work? What kind of wife are you?"
My words contained plenty of firsts; I cussed at my mother, I acknowledged my father's death, and I questioned her as a wife. The palm of her hand was sharp against my cheek as she acted out her anger physically. It was the first time she ever struck me.
Less than a week later--that fucking podium.
"Good girl,"
A muddy, bloody hand drapes over my shoulder as my mother takes herself from the heat of night into the deathly coldness that has overtaken our home. I watched her for hours, sawing off Rosalie's limbs and stacking them inside a wheelbarrow she dumped into a pit close to the gate that enters the woodland.
For her to touch me with those hands, I felt poisoned by her ease in this manner. She sat down at the kitchen table with a decanter of whiskey filled to its brim and her filthy fingers stained the glass as the liquor made its home in her stomach.
"Do we need to talk about this, Teagan?"
Without as much as a nod in her direction, I take myself from my seat and sulk up to my bedroom. She stays downstairs a few minutes longer before I hear her hauntingly loud footsteps tread past my bedroom. I swear I can smell the rotted flesh seeping into my walls as she runs the shower at its top degree. There is no doubt in my mind now; I killed Beatrice.