About the Author; Meta-fiction.

There once was a girl, with the gift of Sight.

The lives of many were open, to her, like a book free to be perused.

The beginning, middle, end, and the epilogue.

When the world is full of stories, it is natural and human to want to read the one unavailable to you. That one elusive tome, filled with secrets and wonders that you already know the gist of, deep down, but you have never read in full.

There once was a girl, with the gift of Sight, who was incapable of Seeing into herself. Her own beginning, middle, and end. Her epilogue.

When the option was presented…

When the novel, placed before her…

How was she to resist opening it?

The Story of Yi, Epilogue.

On the day of her trial, she walked away as a free woman.

The law may not have been on her side, but right and reason had been. That was why she had been able to struggle free, to run. She’d slipped down, hidden underneath a grate, slashed at the ankles of her guards with a sharp, jagged piece of metal she’d found among the refuse.

She dragged them into the sewers with her, and cut one of their judgemental eyes from their faces.

She wanted them to still see, so that when she cut her own flesh and pressed the fragile orb into her skin, they could see the product of her work. They would see their own, condemnatory eye staring back at them from within her stomach, or thigh.

Those eyes, half-healed into her body, were the last thing so many people ever saw.

And that is how Yi’s story began.

The Story of Yi, Part 2.

When she was old enough, Yi was shown a different way to make money. She had to earn her keep, the adults insisted, and she had little more than her looks.

Luckily, people would pay a good amount of money for her looks, even if they were marred by a ruined eye and a permanent bruise.

Less luckily…no one had told Yi that was she was doing wasn’t legal. She didn’t know to ask the well-to-do gentleman whether or not they were officers, or to let them lead – to leave herself loopholes.

She was taken to prison, charged with prostitution, and no one came to bail her.

Yi couldn’t understand that. The police were wrong, to have arrested her; she was only doing as she was told, and trying to bring in enough money to make ends meet. Her arguments fell on deaf ears, and her pleas ignored entirely.

Her family was wrong, too; family didn’t let their own be locked behind bars, though when it came to living in a cell, there was no real difference to her home life that she could pinpoint. There was no privacy, always someone watching… Just like home.

In both places, she was powerless.

But here, there was one difference that it took some time for Yi to latch to. Before her was a world of ‘right’. There was no family, no love. Right and wrong, fair and unfair… Love was the divisive line between those concepts, and her perception of love had always been skewed.

Using the plastic cutlery from the dining hall, her cell mate’s ankles and wrists were cut through, tied by the hair to her bedpost. She was wrong, Yi had decided, to be looking at her with so much judgement and hate, when she had committed crimes not even for survival’s sake! She knew what her cellmate’s conviction was. Assault, against a former lover – low and disgusting.

Yi’s court date was set, and she was moved to solitary confinement…but even alone, she could feel herself being judged by those who were so much more wrong than she.

She could feel their eyes, permeating concrete walls.

The Story of Yi, Part 1.

This story was ignored by the people whose jobs it was to notice.

Yi was three years old when she took a blow to the face – the belt buckle was sharp, hard, and brought down with such viciousness that the resulting bruise would never fade. The blood vessels had been burst, damaged beyond repair, and her vision through her right eye was never quite the same.

Had she not been living in a one-bedroom apartment with a brother and sister – which one was her biological parent, she would never find out – perhaps someone would have taken her into custody. Her aunt, or mother, was primarily charged with her care, and the resentment was prominent in her treatment of the child.

It was tense, and Yi learned to take in the atmosphere before she even learned to read or right. A drug deal that had gone south meant that a flogging was unavoidable; her father, or uncle, favoured fists and open-handed smacks, while the woman liked to have something in hand that could cut Yi’s child-soft flesh.

She had to sleep on the living room couch, and her clothes were heaped in a corner. She had to be quick, when dressing herself; there was no privacy, and the doors were very rarely locked, for business reasons. People sometimes walked right in when she was half-undressed, hardly announcing their presence, and Yi would inadvertently alert every apartment down the hall that they had visitors with a surprised shriek.

The two adults didn’t bring in much income, and had they cared, they would have found out that Yi could have been enrolled in school for free. As it was, they took it upon themselves to teach her the skills they decided were most valuable.

She knew her math well. Monetary values were important; milligrams to grams, and the delicate chemical balance of those measurements, were important too. Yi’s reading came along more slowly; she only really needed to recognize the basic characters that formed client names.

Once she was old enough – the adults decided that age was ten years old – they included other aspects to her home-schooling. Where the tendons on a human body are, and where they can be slashed to incapacitate. How deeply to cut, to keep someone from bleeding out. A dead man couldn’t pay, the man cautioned. A living one could go to the police, the woman warned.

That would incite screaming matches between the two, but on a few things, they agreed. The police were not there to serve and protect. They would not protect Yi; the law was a selfish construct, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ fell firmly within shades of grey that the selfish brutes of the police force refused to understand. They were small-minded, sometimes cruel.

Right meant protecting family from jail. Family meant love, no matter how they screamed, how they hit her…

And love was always right. Survival was always right.

The Meaning of an Epilogue.

Epilogues are an odd thing.

The story sometimes doesn’t seem complete without the addition of one, yet the author made a decision to have the tale ‘end’. Aside from the passage of time, what makes an epilogue different from any other chapter of the story?

Is an epilogue meant to give the reader closure? The mere presence of one implies that the story’s ‘end’ wasn’t truly a full-stop. Now the reader knows that there are more consequences, more points to the plot and to the character development, more words lined up into sentences they will never see.

The epilogue is a paradox. A conclusion, to pointedly display that there is no conclusion.

There is no end, and thus no peace of mind. Thus, no peace at all.

The Story of Alexander, Epilogue.

The computer was dismantled. The Internet router – which had been discarded – found, and similarly taken apart.

It took some time, and more brainpower than he had ever exerted, to figure out how not to bleed out when slitting open his veins and tethering them to wires. How to fuse metal to his fingertips without damaging the circuitry – he sacrificed the nerve endings to do it.

To live in the world he wanted, he had to become a physical part of it. Have it be a part of him.

The thin skin of his eyelid was cut, his corneas peeled away…and when he could see again, it was through the screen of an LED monitor.

And that is how Alexander’s story began.

The Story of Alexander, Part 2.

The only people ‘like him’, he found online.

His grandparents were reluctant to get him a computer, but the insistence of his teachers that his assignments be submitted in tidy, computer-typed printed pages meant that they had no other choice. His grandfather attempted to drive him back and forth between the library and home, but his eyesight had begun to worsen and the risk of losing his driver’s license was becoming more and more real.

First, the computer; a printer, an Internet connection. Alexander was allotted only a few hours a day, of computer time – his grandmother had heard dreadful things, about today’s youth spending all their time in front of a screen, becoming mindless. Their boy wouldn’t get caught up in those video games – nothing but time-wasters. They had a driven young man, one who was going places.

Alexander didn’t spend his time on his assignments. His grades began to suffer, as he instead found other things to do. Little pockets of comfortable socialization; there was no face-to-face, no one being loud or grabby. People who typed out their thoughts in long paragraphs, composed their arguments – no matter how inane the contents of those arguments were – and called him a friend.

He could be honest. He could be blunt. He could plainly state how he was feeling and ask for the same information back, because there were no facial cues to incorrectly read. Everyone was on an even playing field.

What was more, he found that the talents he had were better applied, in his online world. Games that could be played to test the limits of his imagination, coordination, reflexes. He could create those games, himself, with only a few hundred lines of code.

His grandparents noticed, in time. His punishment was to be cut off from his world.

They physically monitored his computer usage, disconnected their Internet connection. He was cut off from his friends. Separated from the world in which he’d built a place for himself.

Had they not raised a driven young man, perhaps he would have buckled and broken. He may have bowed his head, and gone back to his lessons and his schooling. He might have tried to cope.

But a driven young man could not let matters lie.

The Story of Alexander, Part 1.

This story couldn’t have been predicted.

Progression has created such a large gap between the generations; almost everything is unfathomable, to a grandfather charged with raising his only daughter’s child. There had been circumstances, behind the birth – a single young woman who’d borne a child out of wedlock, who had remained tight-lipped about the father, and who’d had no other choice after the falling-out with her parents but to make her own way.

The boy, Alexander, was bright. He had a sharp mind, and if he hadn’t, the amount of floundering he would have done would have undoubtedly been considerable; his grandparents, having experienced the hardships of raising a child ‘too permissively’, put him in school a year early. His development was on-par with the older children in his grade…but only just.

Every spark of talent, as reported by his teachers, was pursued and pressed upon. He could be anything, when he grew up. He had an ear for music; piano lessons began. He had a sharp eye and great coordination; they had him try basketball. He had a broad imagination; they enrolled him in an art program.

Alexander was busy, being pressed in several directions…but it seemed that everything they tried, he lost passion for. There were days when he would have to be kept inside with a bowl at his bedside, his grandmother soothingly rubbing his back while he vomited, and he could not explain why the idea of being among so many people with so many expectations made his stomach churn.

Both of his grandparents tried to soothe him. Remind him, more so, that these were talents he would carry throughout his entire life. ‘Think of the future,’ they would tell him. He would be ever so glad to have developed these fine talents, when he was older.

School wasn’t proving to be much of an intellectual challenge for him, and he was placed in smaller, specialized classes. There wasn’t much of a chance for socialization, which only fuelled their ideas that his extracurricular activities were of the utmost important. Time was needed for school, homework, additional lessons.

So often, they asked about his friends. Alexander could only shrug, a little bit helplessly, and explain that he didn’t care for the people he met there.

Friends were important, they told him. Particularly his classmates, clever little boys and girls who would no doubt be going places; they were future connections, they told him, and those were nearly as important as his talents on their own.

Alexander would nod, promise to make an effort, and go about his days in the exact same way as always.

Keeping his head down.

Putting the least amount of effort forward, as little as he could get away with.

Feeling quiet, growing disdain for others – opinionated, loud, messy people who touched and spoke too much, that made him flinch and retreat into himself, that made him want to put up a barrier between himself and them.

Without knowing why, he kept these things secret, and buried the fear that his future would be marred by the fact that he didn’t function the same way as everyone else seemed to.

Foregone Conclusions.

Part of the thrill, in reading, comes from suspense.

When you’re aware of the conclusion ahead of time…reading almost seems like a pointless endeavor.

The reader knows the story does not end happily.

Yet, we read it anyway.

It’s a trait ingrained into humanity. This incessant need to know is what drives an individual, despite their better judgment. The question is: what does having that knowledge accomplish?

Knowledge is a stain. Once you’re aware of something, it becomes almost impossible to scrub out.

Knowing leads to understanding. Understanding, to identification. Rationalization.

It leads to excuses, that we make to justify and dismiss behaviors. This is why humanity will always be weaker than them. Humanity’s greatest strength is fatal.

The Story of Linnie, Epilogue.

The girl she stumbled across was smaller than her. Only a teenager, with a camera in hand, and a look of unease all over her face. She told Linnie she’d been driving with a friend, and they’d pulled over once they realized they’d driven down the same street four times. They’d been traveling in a straight line. They got separated from each other.

She’d been lost for hours. She asked Linnie for her help.

Linnie blacked out, from the resulting anxiety attack.

When she awoke, she was lying with her cheek pressed to the pavement, a sense of calm, and her hands covered in blood.

She woke up next to a mural, finger-painted entirely in red. And that is how Linnie’s story began.

The Story of Linnie, Part 2.

She was a smart enough girl and a decent enough student, when she wasn’t avoiding her work. Linnie was easily driven to anxiety; it was so much easier to delve into the escapism her tiny bedroom could provide, rather than face exams and grades and…the future.

Linnie didn’t speak to people, even through the safer medium of text. People were difficult, for her. She just couldn’t wrap her head around most of the things they did. All of the things they did, really.

She couldn’t even figure herself out.

Her father was her teacher, mostly, and seemed to avoid particular subjects. She received none of the education one would receive in a public school Health class; Sex Ed was skipped over entirely. No particular subject, of the ones he was trying to teach her, really captivated her interest. Math, Science, English.

There was something she was missing, but the more she tried to put her finger on what it was, the more lost she felt. Eventually, she just stopped trying to figure it out.

Linnie was listless, preferring the most mindless of games and stories to anything that might force her to face reality. She was expected to apply for college; how? She didn’t even know what she wanted to do with her life.

Besides, the thought of going outside turned her stomach.

After a great deal of debating and pleading, her parents managed to figure out online college courses for her, as well. They gave her a year to think about her major, before enrolling her. Linnie failed every class.

She fought with her mother, that night. Her father, more passive and quick to avoid, kept out of it.

Her mother screamed at her, claiming she’d wasted their money. They’d given her time, she yelled. They’d taught her everything they could. The government-issued tests, she’d passed with flying colors; how was it she hadn’t even scraped the barest of passing grades?

Linnie couldn’t argue back. Not coherently. She just cried, and repeated again and again, ‘I don’t know’.

The next morning, Linnie woke up to find that both of her parents were gone.

Days passed.

At first, she thought they’d left just to get away from her. She understood. She was trying to get away, too. Lose herself in mind-numbing pastimes that never left her with a feeling of accomplishment.

After three weeks, she was starting to worry. After six, she was in a panic.

She’d rationed food to the best of her ability, but there was nothing left, now. Not a word from her parents, or the outside world; not that she’d checked the latter. She was too terrified to step out of the house. Linnie made excuse after excuse, as to why she shouldn’t.

Three more empty-bellied days went by, and she couldn’t put it off any longer.

Linnie stepped outside for the first time in over ten years, and found no one.

The outside world was less frightening, without people…but there was never a time she felt honestly at ease. She’d lost her way from the moment she rounded the first street corner. Her house was gone. The street signs were blank. Nothing made sense, and every time she spent too long thinking on it, the wild beating of her heart and rasping, panicky gasps deafened her.

It played tricks on her mind. Her pulse would race and pound against her eardrums, and the vibration of it left the strangest impression of mocking laughter. As though the city, itself, was taunting her.

But she adapted. She was never calm, but there was no one around to hurt her. Linnie managed. Until the day she found out she wasn’t alone.

The Story of Linnie, Part 1.

This story is unclear; a lack of clarity was the problem all along.

Linnie was eight years old, the first time she stepped onto a crowded bus, and was taken down a different route than intended. Her father couldn’t drive and her mother had to work late, that night; she’d been given the option of staying at school until she could be picked up, or being given a handful of change to take the bus, instead. Childishly impatient, she’d opted for the latter. She didn’t care much for the idea of sitting around at school with nothing to do.

She didn’t have many friends to play with, to while away the time. She was too shy, for that.

So, Linnie’s mother printed off the bus route she needed to take, gave her some change and the spare key to the house, and fretfully told her to call the moment she got home.

Linnie got onto the wrong bus, by accident.

Crushed against a metal pole, she clung to it and sniffled with her head down for an hour of the trip. There never seemed to be any less people. For every occupant that waded through the sea of bodies, two more would get on at the front and press everyone even further back.

Eventually, it was too much. The pungent reek of body odor, the jumble of noise, the all-consuming terror of not knowing where she was. Linnie got off the bus, disoriented and having trouble breathing…only to find that exiting was much, much worse.

She’d gotten off at a bus station. Wide, open space with nothing but signs and numbers that meant little to her. It didn’t occur to her to get on the same bus, going the opposite way. She didn’t see the right number for the bus that she was originally meant to get on.

All of the change had been spent on that first bus fare, and there wasn’t a payphone in sight.

Linnie walked, until she found the most cramped corner available – a dark, dank little space in the underground area, leading to a subway train – and cried.

The police found her like that six hours later. Her parents had called them at four o’clock, when she still hadn’t heard from her daughter. They drove Linnie home.

After that, Linnie couldn’t leave the house without dissolving into a panic attack. Rather than pressure her, her parents decided to take her out of school and teach her at home, instead.

Linnie didn’t leave the house for years.

'The End.'

Knowing the beginning doesn’t change the ending. The author can only hope that the reader doesn’t skip to the end. By doing so, you’re missing everything you were meant to feel, by that point.

‘The end’ is sharp, cold, indifferent. It isn’t fitting.

The characters deserve better.

They all deserve better.

I fucking deserve better.

But the reader? The reader, who jumps ahead to the end? Sharp, cold, indifferent? Cruel?

Who’s to say what they deserve?

The Story of Russell, Epilogue.

There was another man at the support group meeting. He was the one who organized it, apparently. He wanted to make sure Russell felt welcome.

He invited him back to his apartment for a drink, and told him he looked like he could use one. Russell was quick to agree, on that point.

There was something magnetic and charismatic, about him. As terrified as he was of using him, too, Russell asked if he was also HIV positive, not wanting to assume. The man smiled ruefully and said he was diseased, but he didn’t let that get in way of the sexual aspects of his life.

Russ wasn’t certain who seduced who.

All he was really certain of was how he felt afterwards. The shame had consumed him. The disease had, too.

It just wasn’t the same disease running through his blood. His disease was his blood.

And that is how Russell’s story began.

The Story of Russell, Part 2.

His first boyfriend was an intern; the age difference made Russell nervous.

Many things made him nervous about their relationship, in fact.

It was trying on them both – his upbringing had taught him that many things were considered wrong, and his affections for another man was high on the list of abominable acts. Being with him was as close to comfortable as Russell had been in a very long time, though, and he tried desperately to act as though he was fine.

There was only so much pretending that he could do, though. On occasion, it repulsed him, being intimate with another man…particularly in the beginning. He was feel sick with shame, and hear his father’s voice ringing in his ears, preaching about sin.

Russell wasn’t even a god-fearing man. He simply couldn’t shake that part of his upbringing.

After several months of trying, eventually his lover left. He told Russell that it broke his heart to do so, but he couldn’t stay with someone who hated the idea of loving him. Russell nodded and told him that he understood, but it broke his heart.

In his mourning period, he became determined to avoid that part of himself. He liked women, he knew…but there were men he found appealing, too. He wanted to shun the latter and keep to the so-called ‘fairer sex’; he could simply pretend.

He was still terrified he would take advantage, but he managed to find himself a loophole, in that regard.

He would drink, until he could hardly say his own name. Luckily, for Russell, there never seemed to be any shortage of those. There was one woman – a bit older, though he couldn’t even begin to guess at her age through the make-up – who would buy him drink after drink, if he allowed it.

It seemed an inevitability that they would end up in bed together. All he remembered of the night was her tossing the condom aside and assuring him that she trusted him.

He was tested at the STI clinic a few weeks later. The results came back positive for HIV.

Work gave him a few weeks off. He told them it was for stress leave.

The doctors repeated, like a mantra, that HIV was no longer a death sentence. He would have to take his medication exactly as prescribed, but live an otherwise normal life. He joined a support group, only because he was pressured into doing so, and didn’t get a chance to see whether or not the doctors were right.

The Story of Russell, Part 1.

This story was another that ought to have been prevented.

Russell’s mother had walked out years ago, and – if his father was to be believed – robbed them blind.

The truth of it was, they’d never had very much, to begin with.

He was raised in the country, surrounded by rather fanatic ideals that didn’t quite sit well with him. It was a country upbringing like any would expect; he could count their neighbours on one hand, and use the other hand if he wanted to count how many people he knew, in total. Their house was more of a cabin, which made escaping the man’s tirades almost impossible, and Russell usually coped by locking himself in one of the trucks and going for a drive.

They were big enough that he practically could have lived in the back of one, and had the same amount of room. He’d learned to drive without a license, and helped his father with his business on days he didn’t need to catch the early bus to go to school. The job was simple enough, trucking supplies back and forth, and Russell couldn’t stand it.

It was a mindless life. School was the only thing he felt passionate about, and he learned everything he could, determined to get into a school in the city. Preferably one more liberal-minded.

Russell got an acceptance letter to Queens, and departed the second his bags were packed.

All the studying in the world had not prepared him for people, however. He was told he was attractive, and his studies fell somewhat to the wayside as he was told a great many other things, as well.

He was easy to overwhelm, and just as easy to manipulate. There were several nights in which he slunk back to his residence, almost dizzy after spending the night with girls he thought were after something more than a drunken night of passion. Dizzy, and a little sick, feeling like he’d been left in the cold or abused, in some way.

His roommate, who was good-natured enough when it came to everything but women, often accused him of taking advantage. They weren’t sober, he argued; they didn’t know what they were doing. When Russell weakly defended himself by explaining that he hardly knew what he was doing, either, he was scoffed at.

Russell was the man; nothing else, apparently, mattered.

He called Russell a rapist so often that he became honestly terrified of being in a woman’s presence, convinced that he was using them, even when he was the one being pressured.

His solution was to avoid contact as much as possible, almost afraid to leave his room for anything but class. Russell kept to himself, until graduation, and didn’t intend to break his habit in ‘the real world’, either; he got a job at an architectural firm, and kept his distance from his female co-workers for the most part.

Once or twice, he tried dating. He wound up becoming so wary of using them that he would break it off before the relationship could blossom.

It wasn’t for several years that he realized it wasn’t only women he ought to have been avoiding.

Contextualization.

I know it isn’t the full story.

I’m only telling the beginnings.

Nothing can excuse the monstrous deeds done by something ‘less than human’. It’s an argument I acknowledge.

The author is not asking for anyone to be excused.

The author only begs the reader’s understanding.

It’s a darker side of sympathy, I know. I know, and it isn’t as though I do not care.

I am not making excuses for anyone.

The author is simply providing context.

That’s what beginnings are for.

The Story of Janine, Epilogue.

She only made it to her first day of classes.

On the second day, she woke up at seven o’clock, and began to get ready for school. She had no roommate, living on campus in a single dorm. She lounged until ten after eight, when she put on her shoes to get to her first class at eight thirty.

Janine opened the door, and came face-to-face with that little girl. The one who’d made her nanny, her parents, her foster parents, her next set of foster parents, every set of parents after that until she was thirteen – she’d made them all forget.

When Janine looked down at her, she forgot everything else, too. She forgot herself.

All that mattered was her precious former playmate, her would-be little sister…her darling daughter.

And that is how Janine’s story began.

The Story of Janine, Part 2.

Attempts at fostering Janine were a disaster, and she learned very quickly not to get attached to anything…or anyone. She insisted it was always the same reason; her pseudo-sister, better loved than she, simply would not leave her be. Janine told them she was being followed, by this girl that none of the social workers could see. They determined it was her imaginary friend that she was talking about, and tried to juggle being dismissive and being supportive.

She was thirteen when she was, at last, adopted for good. Eight years of being shuffled around from family to family had left her with a broken education and even less patience. She was a terrible student, wary and antisocial, perpetually afraid of abandonment. Her adoptive parents – a solid couple, two women who had been married for five years – paid for weekly visits to a child therapist and did all they could to ease the transition, but the damage of her childhood couldn’t be so easily soothed.

As a teenager, she was flighty, masking caution and fear with flirtatiousness and avoidance. It was difficult, telling her to do anything, for she was also stubbornly independent. She often went through bouts of declaring she didn’t need parents, and that she was more than capable of taking care of herself. Janine lashed out, at times, and always regretted it.

She started dating in tenth grade. It was never serious, and she gained an unsavory reputation (for which she couldn’t care less about); boys lasted about a week, before she was through with them.

Janine rarely did much of anything, with them. She was simply…wary, of letting them get too close.

In her last year of high school, it was as though something clicked. A sense of safety, perhaps. Her mothers sat down with her, and told her that no matter what she wanted to do after high school, she had their support. They showed her how much they’d saved, for her college fund – if that was what she wanted to do. She could use it however she pleased, whether it was to travel the world, invest in higher education, buy a car. Janine cried and hugged them both, and told them about her fears.

She was scared of committing to any decision. College was daunting; she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, and the idea of choosing a field of study, only to find out that it wasn’t what she’d wanted… It seemed a terrible waste.

They told her she could take as much time as she needed, and that put her fears to rest at last.

Janine spent two years living at home, getting work experience in a variety of places before applying to college, two cities away. She wanted to study business, she’d decided. She wanted to feel in control, independent, and commit herself to something she created, instead of dedicating her life to serving someone else’s dream. It was a long term goal, she knew, but for the first time…she felt secure in what she wanted. Her mothers helped her move in, made her promise she’d contact them at least once a week, and then…she was on her own.

The Story of Janine, Part 1.

This story isn’t favored, and perhaps that is appropriate.

As many young girls without a sibling might do, Janine often wished for a little sister. Someone to play with, and dress up, and talk to. All she really had were dolls, friends that she only saw for the first half of the day, and her nanny. She woke up at seven o’clock every day, and her mother helped her get ready for school. Her father worked overseas, and her mother left to get to work promptly for eight o’clock every morning. Janine was fairly independent, and would quietly eat her cereal, alone in the house until a ten after eight, when her nanny would arrive. She would pick her up, finish getting her ready, and hurriedly drive her to school to arrive before eight-thirty.

School let out at one o’clock, and the nanny would be waiting outside for her. She would take Janine back home, make her a snack, and keep an eye on her until six o’clock, which was when her mother would come back home. They would both fix dinner, the nanny would leave around six-thirty, and the dishes were done around seven.

It was a very set routine. One Janine was bored with.

Her mother tried to explain that she couldn’t give Janine a little sister – her father was still overseas, and he was an integral part of the process. Janine was a touch too young to understand, but ‘no’ can be comprehended at any age.

The routine threatened to be disrupted, when her nanny lingered one night, after helping make dinner. She claimed she could no longer work for them – it was tearing her apart, not being able to go home to her own little girl. She needed to be with her daughter.

It caused a great deal of confusion; in all the years she had been Janine’s nanny, she had never before mentioned having a daughter. Janine was thrilled, however, at the opportunity being presented.

She begged both her mother and nanny not to let the arrangement end. She could bring her daughter with her, instead, she suggested. They could play together all day. It would finally be like having a sister.

There was some financial negotiation, but in the end, an agreement was reached. The nanny would simply bring her daughter along, and watch them both.

They were introduced the very next day. As many young girls who are the ‘only child’ do, she didn’t take into account that she might not like her new playmate. She didn’t think, either, that she might miss the attention that came from being the only one.

But she did miss the attention. It seemed she fell to the wayside, as her nanny fixated all of her attention to her eerily-silent daughter. Her mother was less attentive, as well, with a new little girl around the house. She invited Janine’s new playmate to stay longer – have dinner with them. Stay a few hours longer. Spend the night.

She, and the nanny, started staying over more and more; they were becoming a merry little family of three.

Three, because Janine suddenly seemed not to count. They forgot to pick her up from school, one day, forcing her to walk all the way back. She only got lost twice.

It happened several times over the course of the next week. Every day, in fact. The adults in her life were enthralled by this little girl, and didn’t have time for Janine, anymore.

She was declared an orphan, and a ward of the state, when she got home one day to find that she’d been forgotten altogether.

The Reason We Read.

If you have no intention of feeling for the characters, what’s the point in reading a story?

Some people open a book and begin reading with a closed-mindedness I cannot fathom. Fiction is a gateway into another world, one you – the reader – have willingly opened the door to. Why would you not think about what you’ve chosen to read? Why would you not wish to understand?

Is it not even easier to feel, when you’re reading non-fiction? When you know that the torments that have been put into words actually occurred?

You are not reading to compare the protagonist’s trials to your own. You are reading to feel.

The Story of Stephen, Epilogue.

He hadn’t been living on the street for very long when it dawned on him.

Watching people go about their lives, reflecting on everything he did have – and could have had more of, one day – left him uncertain over what would have been better.

Would he have been worse off, if he’d stayed on the medication?

Or was he worse off now, at rock bottom, incapable of making a life for himself?

Either way, Stephen felt dead.

Perhaps that was what made him a beacon. When the shard took root in his mind, it all went back to feeling grey.

And that was how Stephen’s story began.

The Story of Stephen, Part 2.

The first year was a nightmare.

They were experimenting with drug cocktails, trying to determine what would balance out Stephen’s erratic moods. He was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which was a term he quickly came to loathe. Mood stabilizers and anti-depressants, a small dosage of an anti-psychotic, ‘just to try’, ‘see if it helps’, ‘how does it make you feel’.

Stephen was told to monitor his moods. No one ever told him how.

He didn’t know what feeling ‘normal’ was like; his idea of normal was, apparently, ‘wrong’. Often, he would give vague answers, or ones he didn’t even know whether or not they were true. He would tell his doctor that one medication made him feel worse, or better, without knowing for sure if he was telling the truth.

What was better supposed to feel like? What did worse mean?

Most often, he simply quoted his girlfriend – now roommate – and told the doctor what her impression seemed to be. She seemed to know better than he did, what ‘better’ was. Following her opinions and basing everything off her observations, they finally settled on medication, and he began to take it steadily. They increased the dose, as the doctor seemed to think best, and he took the pills without question.

Then…he took them a bit less.

It was starting to frighten him. The equilibrium he’d reached made everything feel muffled and grey. Or, perhaps more aptly, it made him feel not much of anything.

Stephen felt as though he was losing his sense of self. As much as he dreaded the low points…there was something he missedabout the highs. The good emotions, the bad emotions. At least he had been feeling something.

His girlfriend was less his lover, and more his roommate. He didn’t feel as connected to her, as he once was, and she wasn’t oblivious to it. They both knew they were drifting from each other.

It wasn’t killing him, that their relationship was falling apart. He wanted it to be killing him…but he couldn’t muster it. Stephen was hardly alive, anymore, and that was what he was mourning, above all else.

He started skipping his medication. The withdrawal made him worse – they would fight, and scream, and he would revel in his own despair simply because it wassomething other than dullness. He drank, sometimes, and spent the nights blacked out in an alleyway next to the bar. He turned down offers of drugs, if only because his experiences with the medication made him wary.

He didn’t want to be reckless. He just didn’t want to feel like a zombie, anymore.

His girlfriend gave him two months to find somewhere else to live.

The Story of Stephen, Part 1.

Initially, I misunderstood this story. Now, I am determined to tell it properly.

Stephen was late into his adolescence, when he finally realized his idea of ‘normalcy’ had always been skewed. His mother’s mood swings weren’t influenced by her brain – not the way his were. Hers were instead directly correlated to the alcohol content in her blood.

She was a chipper sort of woman who slurred her words, draped herself on the couch and giggled her hours away, pungent fluid sloshing in her glass and spilling down her shirt. The house was always in disarray, a jungle of clutter and grime. Every available surface was covered in bottles and cans, soiled tissues that were soaked and sticky against the countertops or coffee table after being left for so long, dirty dishes stacked in any available corner, rotting peels of fruit that had been eaten a week ago, bags, plastic wrappers, half-chewed toothpicks.

And that was to say nothing of the floors.

His mother either didn’t notice the state in which she lived, or didn’t care. She hadn’t worked in years, living off the disability cheques that came to her every month – she had fought the government for it, and used every penny within the first week of its arrival. The house was paid for; given to her, following the divorce. Their food was mostly charity from their local food bank.

The booze…that was where their funds seemed to go. She was the greatest abuser of the liquor store’s delivery service, and didn’t tend to leave the house unless that was her destination.

Stephen didn’t mind. It was better than the times she was sober.

When her drunken high wore off, her footsteps would get heavy, and it was hard to say whether she was more angry, or depressed. She would sleep through entire days, sob into her pillow when she woke, and sometimes need his help just to dress herself due to her lacking energy.

No matter which extreme she was experiencing, she didn’t tend to take much notice of Stephen. Not where he was, not what he was doing. She didn’t monitor whether or not he was in the house, and on several occasions she would respond with puzzlement when his school called and ask why he hadn’t been in attendance for the past few days.

There was no one to tell him that the manic moods weren’t typical. Stephen didn’t swing between his highs and lows due to any sort of substance abuse. It just…was.

Those days he didn’t go to school was not a sense of laziness, or rebellion. He felt the same lack of energy, the kind where an ache would drag his head back to the pillow and the rest of his body would seize with anxiety, knowing that he would have to face people. A new day meant more judgmental staring, meant the weight of expectation from everyone in his life; what was the point?

The mountainous highs were almost just as bad. It wasn’t ‘a good feeling’. His energy levels prickled under his skin, making him snappish, putting every reaction on the surface and pushing them until he was all but screaming how he felt at any given time. He would fixate and frenzy, staying up to the wee hours of the morning, cleaning the house.

After graduating high school – which he only managed to do thanks to summer classes – he applied at their local grocery store and obtained three things; his own money, his own food, and the attention of a girl.

She worked at the next cash, close enough for them to exchange flirty banter throughout less rushed business hours. When they started dating, she told him from the beginning: their relationship could never be anything but casual.

For the first while, he accepted that. When they both realized they’d fallen in love with each other, she set forth a condition. They could start thinking about a long-term relationship, if Stephen would look into counseling.

She wasn’t strong enough to deal with his mood swings alone, she told him. He needed to work on his problem, too.

It was the first time he’d ever been told he had a problem, of any kind.

He reacted poorly.

In the aftermath of the argument, he didn’t leave his bedroom for days, and called in sick to work.

She visited him at his home, when it had been a week since they’d seen each other. He could see in her face, that she was trying not to be appalled by the state of the house, the drunken antics of his mother. She implored him to reconsider, said that maybe they could live together. He could have more independence, a healthier place to live – but he needed to get help, first.

She said Stephen would be so much happier.

He made the call and set up an appointment with a psychiatrist, with her in the room, and moved out by the end of the month.

Biographical Works.

I beg anyone who reads this not to feel on behalf of the author. That is not the author’s job, excluding autobiographical works.

This is not to presume that I have inspired any sense of pity.

This is written under the assumption that the reader has pieced together the heavy-handed implications in all I’ve said. Being forthright, at this point in the story, would be overkill. You know what I am. You probably want to kill me, just as you would want to kill any proxy.

Any proxy, like the ones in the stories I read. Stories I have relayed to you.

The Story of Heather, Epilogue.

Heather was too afraid to leave her house, and delivered her own baby in her bathtub.

She slept on the floor, by the crib, and fought to stay awake. Still, she would inevitably fall asleep and wake to the sound of her daughter’s wails, and her heart would seize and sink into her stomach when she would look into the crib and stare down at the phlox bouquet nestled next to her baby.

Berriroses, jonquil, pink and yellow carnations, mallow, and oxeye daisies. In each bundle, like a taunt, a single sprig of lavender.

Lavender; like her infant daughter’s name.

If she were kinder…if she were stronger…her hand wouldn’t tremble, when she held a blade against her tiny neck, and the knife wouldn’t fall out of her hands. She wouldn’t hug Lavender to her chest and sob, instead of burying her in the garden, next to her father.

Heather’s cowardice condemned her to live, always under His fathomless stare.

And that is how Lavender’s story began.

The Story of Heather, Part 2.

What happened was warped by rumor, news reports, and Heather’s hazy memory. It quickly spread to legendary proportions, until she couldn’t so much as leave the house without someone spouting half-facts at her and questioning. Crueler people made jokes.

That wasn’t the worst part of it, though. Since seeing what had happened, she was seeing ‘Him’ everywhere.

It was as though he had been around all along…and now, was making no attempt to hide himself. She watched him raid her gardens. She watched him lurk outside her window. At her front door. In the hallway of her home. In the corner of her room.

It was beginning to take a toll, and – with considerable persuasion that turned to half-mad begging – her parents allowed and helped her move into her own little house, out of town. It was very modest living, but she hardly minded. It was somewhere that wasaway. It was perfect.

Heather labored under the delusion that she had gotten away, at last. The delusion only lasted as long as it took for a dried-out, dead bouquet to be delivered to her doorstep. The very same flowers from her garden.

Knowing that she was being stalked, that she was never alone, that there wasn’t a single moment that she wasn’t being watched…it made all the difference. There were no moments of reprieve, nothing to make her feel safe – even if that safety was an illusion. She all but boarded herself up in her home, half-numb to the paranoia and panic that came from constant scrutiny, trapped by the constant threat of danger.

She found ways to work, from home, sewing and hemming, making works of art or clothing. She made very little money, but just enough to avoid starvation, while her parents were made poorer and poorer as they paid off her little house. Heather was locally infamous, and the only person she tended to see at all was her mail man. As a favor, he brought her the mail, then took any parcels back to the post office.

He was kind…and human contact was scarce.

It made her physically ill, knowing she was being watched as she took him to bed. She managed to hold back her tears and her nausea until he left, but the door had just barely closed before she broke down and sobbed, screamed, asked if that was what He wanted to see.

Of course, He said nothing, and only grinned. That terrible grin, that stretched wider than his face.

The following day, the mail man came to her door with a bouquet of flowers.

She pulled him inside, and ripped out his throat with a kitchen knife, in her fearful craze.

Heather came to her senses too late, and spent the afternoon in her small backyard, digging up a new garden. By dim light, not late enough to be suspicious, she packed him deep under the earth.

The next day, she ventured outside at last, and bought flowers to plant in her garden. Her paranoia worsened, but no one seemed to suspect her. Still, the sickness was brutal, every morning, for months.

An entire trimester.

The Story of Heather, Part 1.

This story takes place in what most think of as a more innocent era, roughly sixty years ago, and – in part – became a legend.

Heather loved to feel as though she was creating something. She took well to hobbies that produced something beautiful; painting, gardening, sewing. She had a talent for those things, and – while not unsociable – was a solitary girl, for the most part. Her friends, she mostly saw during classes or at school events. Her parents were aware of how blessed they were, to have a daughter who didn’t see the appeal of ‘wild teenage years’.

She had always been a sweet girl, if inclined towards naïveté. Full of trust and disinclined to see the ‘bad’ in people, it came as a shock to both mother and father when her behavior began to…change.

It began when people began clipping Heather’s flowers, right from her garden. Neighborhood children, if she had to guess; she was guilty of the same, in her childhood, plucking pretty flowers from gardens without realizing they were the property of the people who lived there.

What struck her as strange was that the flowers would inevitably be delivered to her. A cluster of purple lilacs were left on her doorstep, first, from the tree in her backyard. She’d noted two days beforehand that a number of them had been clipped off the branches. She didn’t think very much of it, though, even putting them by her bedside in a vase of water.

The trend continued, however, with everything she planted. Morning glories, white and yellow tulips, lavender. First, they’d be taken in patches. Then, every single flower would be plucked from the soil, and left in clumped bouquets on her doorstep.

Her parents assumed the trend stopped; Heather had started ignoring the bouquets, leaving them to dry up and wither on the patio, but she still seemed…vigilant.

The flower-thief was still taking them from her gardens, leaving her with a sense that she was being targeted, somehow. Why only her flowers?

She felt silly – it was such a minor gesture, a small thing, yet it was making her feel almost victimized. Heather forced laughter over the issue, and gradually pulled away from her hobby, spending more time with friends.

One friend, in particular.

He had the reputation of being a ladies’ man, according to her friends, but he’d been nothing but sweet, with her. She was enthusiastic over the idea of dating him, but less so, over what he thought their first date should entail.

She felt a little uncertain when he parked the car, the radio blaring a report about an unknown individual being seen lurking one of the neighborhoods – he turned it off, and began to touch her.

The report, her reluctance, and the nerves that always close to the surface made her too jittery; she wasn’t sure whether she was imagining noises outside the car, or if they were truly there. Hanging her consent over him as a reward, she persuaded her date to check outside the car, just in case.

All she could think to do, while watching his chest be split open and heart torn out, was lock the doors.

The Importance Of Writing.

It’s an important job, to know. To feel, and empathize, so I can write down accurate accounts of their lives, before these things got the better of them.

There is only one story I have never written down, and that is my own. There is no account of what happened to me.

That is likely how it was always supposed to be.

I know an outline. I know the barest notes that were taken down, before this became all I am.

He took all else from me.

Until I was nothing but a gift, and that gift is a curse.

A curse I use, so that He may know. How much would He know without me, I wonder?

The Story of Alice, Epilogue.

Perhaps her idea of beauty was warped, but she thought the woman in the mirror was stunning.

But then, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at, really. All she knew for certain was that when she looked into the mirror, she could hear little whispers, soft promises.

All Alice needed to do was prove herself, and she could be beautiful, too.

If she proved herself, no one could make her feel stupid, or small, or worthless, ever again.

With each small step to showing that she could leave that useless person behind, Alice gave up a little humanity…but didn’t feel as though she’d lost a thing.

And that is how Alice’s story began.

The Story of Alice, Part 2.

High school was an even more unfeeling place than middle school; there were more students, but less attention from her teachers. The only thing that hadn’t changed was her reputation, which had carried over intact and seemed to seal her fate as an outcast.

She still had no friends, and with each year, her grades dropped lower and lower. She was just barely making the cut to pass her classes.

When she came home with the news that she would need to be put in summer school if she had any hope of graduating, her mother looked at her with disappointment. That was when Alice decided she didn’t want to cope, any longer.

After dinner, she went up to her room with her laptop, and typed out a note. She didn’t have much to say, but tried to prolong the amount of time it took to write. A farewell, and an apology, to her mother. Not much of anything, to her classmates; she didn’t want to outright blame anyone, in particular. A paragraph, explaining why she was certain everyone in her life would be better off, without her in it. Another paragraph, wondering if anyone would even really care.

Not even a full page, and she’d exhausted all she had to say. Alice took a pair of scissors and cut up her sheets, and tied them into a noose, which she snuck into the bathroom and locked the door. She pushed aside the shower curtain, tied her makeshift rope to the bar, and let herself slip into the tub.

She’d hoped to break her neck. Instead, it cut at her windpipe, and she struggled until she blacked out. Her full weight was more than the bar could support – it broke away from the wall, and the crash got her mother’s attention.

The fire department had to cut the door down, and Alice missed two weeks of school while she was in the hospital, under suicide watch.

She returned reluctantly, and found the rumour mill had remained just as active, during her forced vacation. Some of the teasing was gone, and replaced by hushed and poorly muffled whispers.

But for some…news of her suicide attempt had only given them more ammunition to work with.

They called her uninventive names, mocked the fact that she hadn’t succeeded, and wished her better luck, next time.

It pushed her past her haze of depression…into anger.

They had picked at her, insulted her, spent years making her feel small…and now they were laughing at her for trying to escape them?

The resentment and the loathing she had been denying for years was starting to creep up her throat, like sick bile, and Alice spent the rest of the day hiding in the girl’s washroom, bitterly staring her reflection down and insulting it.

She called herself ugly. She called herself naïve. Mostly, though, she called herself stupid, for ever thinking she should hate herself more than she hated them. She vomited and spat into the sink, and when her eyes lifted to the mirror again to sneer at her reflection, someone else was looking back at her.

The Story of Alice, Part 1.

This story is about what someone can be pushed into becoming.

A girl’s self-image does not come from what she sees in the mirror; it comes from how she’s treated. In the mirror was a girl who was pretty, when she smiled, and her mother told her as such all the time. Alice was constantly showered with praise, told repeatedly since infancy how well she did everything.

If one were to listen to Alice’s mother, she was sweet, clever, with a quicker wit than any little girl. She was well-mannered, she was mature, she was pretty enough to be a model, one day. Alice was gifted, her mother would say, and the world was her oyster.

For the first eleven years of her life, Alice was taught at home, by her mother. Public schools didn’t know what they were doing, and wouldn’t know what to do with a child so bright, her mother said. She had a degree in education, and decided to put it to use up until Alice was about the age to attend middle school.

She needed other people, and she wanted to go. So, after much debate, she was enrolled into seventh grade to begin in the fall. Alice entered school with an inflated ego, which was popped within her first year.

She took to knowledge well enough…but she wasn’t accustomed to having to work hard to understand things, or prove that she knew them. The other students didn’t like her very much, and she had an incredibly difficult time making friends. She was oversensitive; cried too much, yelled too much, too-much of everything.

The more vulnerable she displayed herself to be, the more vicious other girls her age were. One in particular took absolute delight in stalking her around the school grounds with her friends, laughing and teasing her, taking apart the over-inflated praise Alice’s mother had nearly pounded into her, through the years.

Alice was too afraid to tell her mother outright what was happening. The bullying was escalating into outright harassment – there was nowhere she could escape to. Home was her only haven, but she had argued in favour of leaving it. She would feel idiotic, asking to stay home.

When she did mention things the girls at school had said, her mother simply dismissed them entirely. She would tell her that it was nonsense; what did they have to tease her about? She was pretty, she was smart, she was everything they probably wished they were. They were jealous, she assured Alice. They likely just wanted to join her group of friends. The group that, surely, she had. Obviously, she was popular. Why wouldn’t she be?

Alice would simply nod silently, and pick at herself all the while. She found her own faults, where her mother was dismissive, and blew them vastly out of proportion. She felt she needed to be perfect.

She knew she was anything but perfect.

Every night, Alice would go up to her room, stare at herself in the mirror and pick. Mentally pick at her faults, tearing them wide open. Physically pick at imperfections in her skin, absentmindedly, until her skin was bumpy, bloody, and scratched so dry it looked as though she was shedding it.

Documentation.

My job is to tell stories.

I write them down. I feel them.

Except, they aren’t stories.

I feel them as they happen.

My job is to document them.

Everything needs to be documented, to keep our archives complete.

So, I document every single story.

That is how they chose to punish the author, who must beg of the reader to indulge her. The author must beg of the reader to believe. I beg of you to feel what I feel, and feel what they felt.

The Story of Justin, Epilogue.

He feigned sleep, that one night, lying with his back to her. She was stroking her fingers through his hair, lightly drawing them down, over the shell of his ear.

She whispered, asking if he was awake. He kept silent, not wanting to ruin the moment.

He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, initially. The odd, tickling pressure from inside her fingertips. Something wet was touching his ear, and the tickling went further down. Running along the inside of the shell, into his ear.

As the grub dug into his ear canal, he realized what was happening.

The wetness was blood.

They were ripping their way out of her fingertips, and worming their way past his skull.

She covered his mouth with her own, when he tried to scream. He wasn’t sure what was crawling over his tongue, but by the time she was through kissing him, they had stung and swollen his throat so badly, no more sound could escape.

He lay there, painfully conscious of the grubs nestling into his head. And that is how Justin’s story began.

The Story of Justin, Part 2.

He told her everything.

It was strange, for him, to have someone to just…talk to. Over text, online, in person; every time he spoke to her, more and more would spill out of him. It was almost embarrassing, and he often wondered (aloud, to her) if he was just being stupid and humiliating himself. She’d reassure him, prompt him into saying more, and he was keep going.

The more he knew about her, the more he felt utterly inferior. She was too good, almost, and it was frightening. Almost universally liked by his classmates, despite her quirks. Patient, beautiful, commanding. She had a presence about her that managed to both dominate and accept, and Justin was growing entirely reliant on her.

Hearing from her would get him through the day. He continued to open up his every thought and feeling…even when she began to change, and a cycle started to form.

It was subtle, at first. Little things she said that held a note of condescension. Sometimes, she would offhandedly compare something Justin had done to someone else – not saying either was better, or worse, but it would send him into a self-conscious panic for days afterwards, wondering what she’d meant by it. She dropped frequent, niggling implications that she might lose interest in him, which prompted him to scurry about like an ant serving his queen, trying to appease her.

All the subtle gestures were like grubs, chewing through his brain and growing there, escalating the anxiety and depression.

Then, it started getting a little more…malicious. It was as though certain things she said were just designed to crawl under his skin. Tiny barbs that he might have been misinterpreting; had she really just implied that he was weak? That he was being unreasonable, for feeling depressed?

Every thought he’d ever had against himself had been put under a magnifying glass. She stopped being quite so subtle, but he didn’t even notice, anymore. She never needed to attack himself, outright…soon, all it took were a few choice words, using the things she’d told him in confidence against him, and Justin would crumble.

That was when things would loop around, neatly completing the cycle. She would help put Justin back together with her sweetness and her acceptance. He would apologize for being so weak, pathetic, and needy.

On those nights – the make-up nights – he would sleep over at her house, and he would fall asleep to her stroking his hair until he fell asleep.

The cycle continued. Again, and again, until he caught her. But by that time…it was too late.

The Story of Justin, Part 1.

This story could have been avoided.

Being ‘a man’ meant many things, if someone was to ask just about anyone, but the fundamentals never changed. To be a man, he had to be strong at all times. Tough, unyielding, any number of synonyms that all pounded the same message into the heads of little boys:

To be a man, one could not show weakness.

Justin’s father lived by that doctrine. He had been in the army right from the age of eighteen, having stepped out of school and into the barracks. Justin all but worshipped him, growing up; his proud, harsh father never backed down from anything. He never showed fear, or backed down from a challenge…and he expected his son to act in the exact same way.

He had always been quite busy – too busy, really, to help raise Justin and his sister. His mother was always moving at the speed of light, it seemed, doing everything she could to keep their family running smoothly. Waking up the kids, getting ready for work, getting them ready for school, dropping them off, going to work, picking them up after school, getting dinner ready, tidying the house, serving dinner in time for her husband to be home, cleaning up the kitchen afterwards, getting everyone’s lunches ready for the next day, cleaning herself up, and dropping herself in bed.

He got along well enough with his sister. They got on each other’s nerves, as any siblings were inclined to do, but life was pleasant enough.

There was always food. He had both parents still alive, and they were still married. They had a nice house, his grades were decent enough, and – to be frank, even with himself – Justin wasn’t a bad-looking teenager.

He was just…lonely.

Real men didn’t show weakness, or feel depressed, or spend their nights feeling too exhausted to cry. If he’d grown up in unfortunate circumstances…he could see it, then. Feeling the way he did. At all times, it felt like there was a weight sitting on the back of his brain, and he didn’t feel strong.

He couldn’t speak to his father about anything, and his mother was far too busy. Besides, he couldn’t burden his mother with emotional problems; as far as he knew, for it was what he was taught, he wasn’t supposed to have emotional problems.

Justin envied his sister, a little. She could burst into tears and tell everyone what was wrong, whenever she liked. He couldn’t do that.

There were a few times that he had done those things. Try to talk about how he was feeling, or just break down and cry. Those times, his mother had gotten flustered and hadn’t known what to do with him, or what to say. Then his father had sat him down, given him a light smack against the back of the head, and told him firmly that whining and crying about his problems wouldn’t get him anywhere. It wouldn’t fix things, and real men fix things. He had to pull himself together and ‘get shit done’.

So Justin tried to do that.

He just had no idea how, and the idea of just charging ahead and fixing his problems – it was daunting. He was only a teenager, he argued with himself. How was any teenager supposed to just know how to make things better?

In secret, he tried to visit the only person he could think of who might have answers. His high school guidance counsellor, as it turned out, was woefully unhelpful. She advised him to ‘express himself’, and talk to his father about his feelings, ‘confront him’ – maybe speak to a psychologist?

All useless suggestions.

The visit wasn’t without a silver lining, though.

Outside the guidance office, he’d spent about a half hour talking with her. She wasn’t in any of his classes, so he hadn’t seen her around very much, before. But, she was pretty, she was sympathetic, and she listened even better than the person paid to do so.

They started dating, over that weekend…and Justin fell fast.

There was just something about her that made him feel…not so alone, even if he was still weak. Something he couldn’t help but trust.

Non-Fiction.

All of my stories are real.

The ones I read. The ones I tell.

The author must beg of the reader, again, to understand what that means for me. It likely does not sound so terrible, to anyone. A curse of non-fiction; there are so many more harmful things.

It must sound like a terrible joke.

The author begs the reader. I beg you to understand.

I fled humanity into the arms of a horror, and this was the most painful torture It thought of, for me.

Do you understand the punchline?

The Story of Isaac, Epilogue.

The police investigation was thorough, and brutal. Eventually, Isaac and his mother were only dismissed as suspects because neither of them could possibly possess the physical strength to do what had been done to a full-grown man’s body…whether he had already been dead, or not.

It took months – nearly a year – for them to wearily declare that the case was destined to go cold. No one could figure out where to begin looking, for a murderer capable of bending a man in half at the spine and stealing away into the night.

Isaac got ready for bed, and allowed his mother to shut off every light in the house. He followed her down to the basement, and tried to fall asleep in her embrace.

Becoming the fear, she told him, was the key to overcoming it.

And that is how Isaac’s story began.

The Story of Isaac, Part 2.

As he got older and more self-conscious over his fear, Isaac started abandoning childhood comforts. First, he agreed to have the hallway light switched off. He didn’t dare leave his bedroom in the night, no matter how badly he needed to – for the first short while, it led to the most humiliating of circumstances, in which his refusal meant he would soil his sheets. In time, he got used to it, and prepared accordingly. No drinks after dinner, which he insisted had to be at six o’clock at the latest, and he’d visit the bathroom three times before officially turning in for the night whether he felt he needed to or not.

Then, it was the nightlight. His curtains had to be thrown wide open, and it had to be bright outside for him to even consider shutting the little light off. The moon had to be especially visible against a clear sky and stream light into his room, like a natural substitute for that blessed bulb he was weaning himself off of.

After many nights with this practice…Isaac was finally starting to feel ready. His phobia was in his head; he could control it. That was what his psychologist told him, what his parents reassured him was true. Isaac was beginning to believe, at last, that his dependence on light had only made things worse. He was getting more sleep, bettersleep, with the lights out.

It was a new moon. There would be nothing to see by. After agonizing deliberation, turning over the nightlight in his twitchy, stiff hand, Isaac opened the drawer to his bedside table and put it inside.

He managed to fall asleep after tossing and turning for an hour. When he woke, it was because he had been jolted into such a state, and he couldn’t figure out why.

Something was rolling across his floor.

Familiar panic was welling up in his throat, and automatically, he reached for the drawer. He jerked it open, and felt around desperately for the nightlight.

It was gone.

The replacement bulbs were missing, too.

He could see the shadows moving, and there was a creak at the end of his bed as a weight was removed. His eyes weren’t adjusting to the darkness; someone had drawn the curtains shut…

Isaac drew the blankets around himself tightly, and spent the rest of a sleepless night listening to the thumps, bangs, and creaks of his dresser drawers being open, filled, and forced shut.

The shadows stopped moving, when the sun came up, but Isaac still didn’t leave his bed. He rocked back and forth, almost catatonic, and didn’t respond when his mother tried to shake him into alertness. He didn’t scream, when he saw that the rolling object he’d heard in the night turned out to be his father’s head.

And he wasn’t surprised when he police opened the drawers and found the body, folded and broken to cram neatly inside among Isaac’s clothes.

The Story of Isaac, Part 1.

This story took place several times over, but the cautionary tale was never heeded.

Most – if not all – children suffer from achluophobia, at some point. Isaac was no different, though it was, perhaps, odd how long his fear of the dark lasted. At least, his father expressed that concern to his coworkers, many of whom had children of their own. The need for night-lights and the belief in ‘the boogeyman’ would end soon, both parents assured him. His mother would check the closet, and look underneath his bed. His father would read him a book to take his mind off the impending darkness, and he always left Isaac’s bedroom door open a crack, as well as a light on in the hallway.

Isaac also had a nightlight, plugged in day and night, the bulb regularly changed. His father put in Christmas lights, so the light would take on a colorful tinge – it dampened the brightness, but things sometimes didn’t seem so frightening when bathed in orange or purple light, instead of the paleness of a bare bulb. They’d rearranged his entire bedroom so that his bed was right beside the outlet.

His mother and father would helplessly continue their routine, assuring him again and again that there were no monsters lurking in the dark. Isaac’s mother was almost obsessively thorough in keeping her son’s room tidy and uncluttered, trying to ensure there wasn’t much around to cast warped shadows. One might have thought they were either very poor, or that Isaac was very neglected – there was little more than furniture, in his bedroom, and it was all so sparse and immaculate that no one would have guessed it belonged to a child. It was almost…restrictively dull, but it was all his parents could think to do.

Isaac’s sleeping patterns didn’t improve. He was listless all the time, falling asleep in his classes, with circles under his eyes that were so dark that he looked bruised. His teachers called home often, and there were two investigations looking into whether or not Isaac was being abused.

His father was losing sleep, as well, and Isaac hated himself for putting his parents through this. The stress, the suspicion, the helpless exasperation. Still…he was certain he saw movement, in the shadows.

They plagued him every night, rustling around and creeping against his walls. Isaac would pull his blankets up to his chin, huddled into as compact of a corner as he could manage, eyes flitting around wildly to every little movement. There was something there, he insisted. He was sure of it.

He was thirteen years old when he first felt them.

The light beside his bed that he was so vigilant in monitoring flickered, and died. It must have been a faulty bulb, and as jolted as he was, there was still the hallway light to see by. That was just barely enough to fix it. He had some spares, in the drawer of his nightstand – just in case.

Shaking a little, Isaac eyed the shadows moving against the wall, and opened the drawer.

His bedroom door shut.

It could have been a breeze, from his open window.

Isaac thought otherwise.

It was pitch-dark in his bedroom, and Isaac was nearly biting through his lip, trying not to cry. He wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t wake his parents…not over a silly fear. He could go to turn on his light, or open his door…but leaving the imagined-safety of his bed was just as terrifying as remaining in the dark all night. His fingers fumbled for one of the little light bulbs and grabbed one almost too-tight.

He knew where the outlet was. He was working blind, but fast. They were there. They were in the room, with him. He could feel them. He could hear them.

He reached for the night-light.

The pain that shook his hand and lurched up his arm made him scream.

In a flash, the light switch was flicked, and the door was open – his mother rocked him back and forth as he cried, and reassured him that he must have dreamed that something had broken his hand. She held him until morning.

The Gateway That Is Fiction.

It should be understood that the only thing worse than Feeling on the behalf of everyone else is to be numb.

That’s where books became a solace.

Feeling for fictional people…it was a greater reprieve than can even be described. Their emotions were not forced onto my back. They simply experienced things, and words were a window into those experiences. But every story has roots in something real.

The Story of Farah, Epilogue.

Dressed entirely in her burqa, it was almost embarrassing how easy it was for Farah to leave the hospital, that night. She walked the several miles back to her husband’s home, barefoot, drums beating a steady rhythm in her head.

It was past midnight when she arrived. She had two sets of keys; one to her husband’s house, and one to her in-laws’. She opened both doors, and barricaded the doors to the bedrooms.

She set the rooms ablaze from the outside, and waited for the screams.

She was not disappointed. And that is how Farah’s story began.

The Story of Farah, Part 2.

Farah had never felt oppressed, before. Having grown up in a society that the Americans constantly called sexist and wrong, she had always shaken her head and wished she could show them their side of things. She had friends who were married, with children, who were happy. She had expected her situation to be much the same.

She’d had all the freedom she’d ever needed, back at home. Freedom to praise her God, freedom to play and laugh with her siblings, freedom to feel like more than someone’s object.

She had been robbed.

Her father didn’t know – couldn’t have known. Of that much, she was sure. It was easier to feel anger on his behalf than her own, at first. A quiet, festering rage over the fact that her father had been tricked. That man, her now father-in-law, had fooled him into believing he was an honest, respectable person. He had lied, and claimed his son – her now-husband – would make a decent spouse.

They had made a slave, out of her, and she felt too worthless to feel truly angry. She could feel a lack of justice, though. She bit down and gritted her teeth, on behalf of her family.

Some time later, when she discovered she was with child…that was when she found herself capable of more.

There were complications. Stress, her doctor had said, was making the baby weaker. She could not leave the house without an escort, and so her husband went with her to the mosque, and they prayed for their child’s health. Or rather, he did.

Farah found herself otherwise distracted. It was a curious thing, the beating of drums ringing in her ears, blocking out her own thoughts…but it gave her a sense of clarity. She pretended to pray, and focused on the sound. Focused on the heat, stemming from her core.

Rage. Quietly burning away, like embers that refused to die.

The baby’s growth wasn’t any better. She wasn’t stressed, anymore. Not exactly. All she felt was the quiet churning, like her stomach was filled with lava, her thoughts turning violent, and constantly, beating and ringing in her ears –

The beat of drums. Incessant. Soothing. Maddening. Giving her clarity.

The way she was being treated wasn’t an offense to her father, her family, her unborn child. It was against her.

The realisation had her throw herself down the stairs, repeatedly, until she was bruised and bloody.

Her husband rushed her to the hospital that night, hours after he returned home from work, but not before ensuring she had a few more bruises to show for it.

Several tests were run, but Farah was reassured – she had not lost the baby.

Her husband’s child (her rapist’s child) was still growing inside her, safely, but they wanted to keep her overnight for careful observation and to tend to her wounds, just in case. Farah agreed, and pretended the lava in her stomach wasn’t about to erupt.

The Story of Farah, Part 1.

This story came to be due to injustice, and the cascading events that followed changed the world as so many knew it.

In her country, some girls were wed far too early, and marriage was the only opportunity ever presented to them. It wasn’t that way for all, but it was the dismal way of life for others. Farah had never been given an opportunity to be educated – she had too many brothers and sisters, at home, and found herself too busy with their care to even think about trying to make an independent life for herself.

She learned to read, to write, and some English…but only because she was lucky enough to come from a family who had fought for the chance to learn. She rarely left the house, even to escort her siblings out to play or to do the shopping for her mother, unless she was covered from head to toe in a burqa.

Farah didn’t feel oppressed, or unfortunate; these things were simply part of her way of life, and of her Muslim heritage, she was deeply proud. She believed in what the Quran taught her, practiced her religion daily, and counted her blessings. She loved her brothers and her sisters, her parents, and Allah – she couldn’t imagine a more fulfilling life, even though she was hearing with increasing frequency how looked down upon she was, for her choice of dress and way of life.

She was content. Who would pity or judge her for that?

When the time came for her to be married, she was a little more wary in her happiness, but she had great trust in her family. Her father had been the one to arrange the match, with a man he’d known for a great deal of time. His son was older than her, but she hardly thought it mattered; from all she heard of him, he was well-educated, had a stable source of income, and would provide well for any children she bore.

There were many tears shed from her siblings, who told her repeatedly how they’d miss her, and she had her wedding day at the age of fifteen. She stayed with her family for a week, afterwards, while they sorted her things and helped her move in with her new husband; they were only next door, to her in-laws, but much further away from her own family.

She missed them terribly, at first…and then, she didn’t have much time to miss them.

Her days were spent with her mother-in-law. Cooking, cleaning, taking care of her in-laws’ home. She didn’t mind that, so much. She was accustomed to housekeeping. It was the screaming that she couldn’t stand. The things sometimes thrown at her. The slurs, the cruel names, being told – repeatedly – that she was the property of their son. She was to be obedient. She was to do as she was told.

Then she would go to her husband’s home (it was never hers) and wait for him to return from work.

When he’d come home, she would be all those things. Property of her husband. Obedient. She did as she was told.

She slept poorly every night, and cleaned blood out of her bed sheets every morning. Then, she would spend the rest of her day the exact same way as the last, doing as she was told.

Irony.

The gift of Empathy can often blind the one who bears it.

I say this with a trace of irony.

The gift of Empathy makes it difficult to look at a monster, and still see a monster.

Sometimes, the gift of Empathy makes you think you may have done the same. The gift of Empathy is a curse.

The Story of Madeleine, Epilogue.

Madeleine, as she predicted, didn’t feel any more in control as she went through rehab. Juvenile hall was vicious, and she very nearly found herself convicted of further charges as circumstances demanded her to fight, to defend.

‘Nearly’, for she didn’t wind up remaining behind bars.

They found her hanging on the end of a noose, and assumed that the lack of a pulse made her harmless. They thought she was dead.

When they went to cut her down, she used that makeshift rope to strangle them to death, one by one, and didn’t apologize for what the strings under her skin were having her do. She was under control; she no longer cared.

And that is how Madeleine’s story began.

The Story of Madeleine, Part 2.

There was no gateway, with the drugs. She took what was offered, whenever she was offered.

Her boyfriend was desperate to present themselves as wild, carefree, rebellious. ‘Live fast and die young’ – the slogan of so many who didn’t know better, he literally had tattooed on his chest. Maddie wore wigs, or pretended she’d shaved her head to prove some sort of wicked point. She found a sort of pseudo-acceptance among people she didn’t care for, and pretended it didn’t bother her when she’d come home after days of drinking to find her mother exhausted and her father strung out on panic.

She felt as though she hardly knew her once-beloved, anymore – she could only tolerate him if she was on something, or if he was high, or some combination of the two. He was moody and sometimes violent, without the drugs.

And she…she was worse.

Maddie was starting to feel manic, hitting highs and lows she didn’t know could be reached. From day to day, everything would change; she would feel bold, aggressive, owning her ‘freakishness’ and brazenly feeling beautiful, regardless of what anyone said. The following day, or hour, or minute…that euphoria would crash, and she’d tear at her bald scalp with her nails, sobbing in a heap, never wanting to be looked upon for the rest of her life.

When things finally escalated, she was so out of her mind that she couldn’t give the same story twice. First, she told the police it had been his fault. He was crazy, coked up, angry. He’d lashed out at her first. The next time she told the story, she was choking on regret, claiming she’d been the one to hit him, first. She’d grabbed a bottle, broken it against the counter, and slashed him right across his ridiculous tattoo.

The story changed several more times. She hadn’t attacked him at all. No, she had. Or had he hurt himself? Maybe she’d hurt herself. Maybe there was a third party. Had one of their friends been around? Had they left? Was she going insane?

She felt insane. The courts didn’t agree.

She was seventeen, and bound for juvenile hall and drug rehabilitation. Part of her felt that was just.

Another part of her…a much louder part…felt nothing at all. She had no faith in that system; she knew was became of girls like her. She was out of control…and places like that only ripped at the wound.

She wouldn’t get better, in there, and that was all she wanted. She didn’t care if her hair grew back, if she got clean. She didn’t even care if her parents forgave her, even though the thought had her crying herself to sleep every night.

She just wanted to be under control, again.

The Story of Madeleine, Part 1.

The story of a young woman spinning out of control ends exactly as the experienced reader would expect.

Madeleine had an affliction that took a long while to set it. Until the alopecia began to affect her, she was as average as one might expect any pubescent girl to be. She was giddy and sociable, with flighty dreams that not even she took seriously. She was really quite pretty, and even though she found as many faults with her appearance as any awkward teen, she didn’t loathe her body. That was better than some could say.

Before even the condition, though, her issues began with a young man.

She was very young, and he, not quite as much. It had been the idea of one of her close friends, to doll themselves up and pass for college-age; one of them had a brother, who had a friend, who knew the band. There would be too many people around for anyone to take notice a group of fifteen year olds out of place. Maddie borrowed a low-cut shirt from her friend, ‘borrowed’ a skirt from her mother’s closet, and caught the attention of a college freshman.

He told her that he was part of the band, ‘technically’. He helped move their equipment, sometimes. They flirted all night, Maddie drank two beers, and at four in the morning the pair of them slipped out of the house owner’s bathroom with hickeys and huge smiles. They started dating, and laughed off the more derogatory comments aimed their way.

Alopecia is a condition in which the body attacks the hair follicles, preventing it from growing anymore. In some cases, it leaves bald patches…in more extreme cases, the hair loss can spread to the face, arms, legs. Anywhere, really.

Madeleine lost it all. There were treatments she tried, but every single one failed.

People most often asked if she had cancer. There were some less-than-pleasant remarks about her appearance, but even if no one had said a word, the blow to her ego was devastating.

For dating a girl four years his junior and struggling with a much-changed workload, her boyfriend wasn’t a source of much support. He’d started to fit into the wilder side of his ‘experimental college years’, and had more to prove to those around him than to himself. He was the subject of taunts, and he was eager to prove them wrong. He was eager to have Maddie prove them wrong.

There was pressure from people she didn’t even know, and wouldn’t see for more than a single night. There was grief and panic, for her future – idle as the dreams of being an actress or a singer were, who wouldn’t laugh at her outright, if she said those things now? Who would ever want a freak?

She felt as though she belonged in a circus. She felt ugly, unlovable, and wild.

So, while some teenagers were susceptible to peer pressure…Maddie’s will wasn’t just easy to crack. It crumbled, and took her down with it.

The Use of Language.

Language is a finicky thing, and the use of certain terms in casual dialogue may sit differently in the mind of everyone who hears the words used – or, in this case, reads the words.

When a writer types out a narrative, one must assume that every word is chosen with purpose. Sometimes, the purpose is to weave together a figure of speech. Other times, they are being literal. It can be very difficult to tell.

In this case, the use of the word ‘beg’ is significant.

It is not a term being casually used. In this case, the author must literally beg of her audience to believe.

These things are not a fantasy.

These things are real. They are terrible, they are beyond the comprehension of someone like you or me, and they are everywhere. Watching, and waiting.

The author begs of the reader to at least indulge her, if they cannot believe.

Please. This is not a story.

The Story of Theodore, Epilogue.

Theodore wandered off school property during lunch, one day. When his teacher looked for him, she called his mother in exasperation, claiming he must be skipping class with his friends. Teddy’s mother informed the teacher that he didn’t have any friends.

The police’s search didn’t turn up anything, that time. They filed a Missing Person report on him, and presumably forgot about him, then. There were a few news reports, and Teddy’s mother was interviewed twice. The nation clicked their tongues and shook their heads, remarking upon how sad it was that a disabled boy had gone missing, and then put him out of their minds.

Unbeknownst to them all, Teddy had never gone far. He was just isolated. He was so tired of being isolated.

His patience had disappeared, and he had begun to seek out friends. He didn’t want to wait, anymore.

And that is how Theodore’s story began.

The Story of Theodore, Part 2.

The more time Teddy spent alone, the shorter his patience became. He felt as though he was always waiting – stuck at a metaphorical train station with an expectant look on his face, constantly being overlooked and forced to watch every train rush by without even slowing down.

There was only so much waiting he could take.

From early grades to middle school, Teddy’s love for his peers lessened and warped, turning into desperation. All he wanted was someone to speak to him, like they would talk to a friend. He never got that.

He didn’t get bullied, anymore, which his mother thought was a large step in the right direction. Teddy disagreed. It would have been refreshing, if anything, to be spoken to without that note of pity and condescension…and, if he was to be given those sympathetic looks from time to time, he would have preferred them to be motivated by injustice.

Better to be pitied for being bullied than pitied for being who he was.

He was starting to notice girls. Like most of the other boys in eighth grade, he developed a rather large crush on the pretty brunette girl who was the reigning ‘queen bee’, and asked to take her out one night. Her eyes took on that look, and she averted them as she stammered an excuse about having too much homework.

At that point, Teddy stopped thinking he would ever be anything but alone.

Hence, it came as a massive surprise when, in the tenth grade, that same girl asked if he’d like to go to their Winter Formal dance together.

Teddy’s mother was overjoyed, and helped him pick a suit. She drove him to the school, where he met up with his date in front of the gymnasium. He’d brought her a corsage, which he fumbled before managing to properly tie it to her wrist. His mother took a picture, and told them she’d be back to pick up Teddy at ten o’clock.

He almost told her to come pick him up sooner than that. He was nervous enough to sweat through his dress shirt, and he prayed that his dark suit jacket and the dimmed lights hid the stains.

It turned out, he had very little reason to worry.

Asking Teddy to the dance had been enough to alleviate her conscience, and she proceeded to spend the rest of the night dancing and laughing with her friends. She didn’t notice, when he left.

No one noticed.

Teddy’s mother spent all night driving around town, searching for him. When the police finally located him, they found that she hadn’t needed to go very far, in actuality. They found him in an empty classroom, sitting by an open window. Shivering, pale, isolated, and cold.

The Story of Theodore, Part 1.

This story is about a young man with a child’s mind.

Even in infancy, his mother could tell that he would not experience a ‘normal life’, and she saw her dreams for him die every time she watched him struggle. He would not be the valedictorian, and not go on to get his doctorate. He would never walk on the moon, or win a court case. She loved her son, for certain, but that did not prevent the sometimes-sadness that visited her and made her mourn the futures she’d entertained during her pregnancy.

A happier toddler could not be found, however. Theo had an infinite capacity for love, it seemed, and patience that stretched just as far. The delay to his learning didn’t prevent Theodore – often called ‘Teddy’, as a child – from being wise.

As he grew up, he managed to teach his mother a thing or two, remind her of things she thought she’d long since forgotten. Teddy was optimistic. He tried, and when he didn’t understand, his face would scrunch briefly in confusion, and then he would try again. He was only a little boy, but he knew better than most: to achieve anything beyond expectations, one simply had to keep hope alive.

He didn’t get to associate with other children until kindergarten. For the most part, his experience was no different from any other child’s. There was some mockery, sometimes – other children noted that he lookeddifferent, from them, in a way they couldn’t place. Some gentle reprimanding was enough to put a stop to it, and Teddy made friends. He would insist to his mother that he was the most popular boy in class; he loved every single one of his classmates, and thought of them all as his friends.

His body matured, through the years. His mind followed suit, a few paces slower.

The reprimands stopped working as well, for his peers were picking up on subtleties to social interaction that Teddy couldn’t grasp. The ability to be cruel, nurtured rather than imbued in nature, wasn’t taught to him. Instead, he was often the subject.

There weren’t classes set aside, for Teddy. That was both a good thing, and very bad. Teddy didn’t want to be separated from the children he still regarded as friends. On the other hand, they had so many more opportunities to make jabs at his expense. Sometimes Teddy laughed along with their insulting jokes. Sometimes, Teddy cried.

It was decided by the school board, and Teddy’s mother, that it would be for the best if he was moved to a more specific program, designed to suit his needs. There weren’t enough students to create one, but they still did their best to shield Teddy from the barbs being slung at him.

They protected his feelings from further injury, and the only time Teddy even saw the other children were during recesses.

He couldn’t play with them, much. There were too many things he might hurt himself doing. For the first little while, Teddy was still on the receiving end of cold teasing…but, as time went on, something far worse began to happen.

Being isolated from the others meant Teddy was steadily being ignored.

To Expand.

To expand upon a presumptuous statement, I mean to say that, through Empathy, the girl with the gift could guess at what a person’s past held, because she knew their pain. She could even muse about their future with some degree of accuracy, knowing what would inhibit them for the rest of their days.

It may have been a blessing, if the burdens weren’t breaking her back.

The easiest way to avoid the weight of the world was to avoid people, altogether. Thus, that was precisely what the girl tried to do.

She did not realise that it was a foolish attempt to escape.

It was not that her escape was unsuccessful, per se.

She just didn’t realise that in fleeing from humanity, she was running into the arms of something far worse.