AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In the periphery of my vision the outdated, faded calendar with its yellowed, curling edges, on which my mom had stopped crossing off days long ago, mocked me with the awareness that I’d been a naïve fool.
Believing—long past the time I’d been given every conceivable sign that I was nothing to her, and no one was ever going to save me—endlessly believing I mattered. That she care
d.
Behind them the telly played a rerun of Happy Days and I lay paralyzed, synapses charred, watching them bend to grab my feet and drag me from the cage, and I wondered about the kind of people that got happy days, and I wondered why mine had been so brief.
I had no doubt their cage would be even mightier, my incarceration far more difficult to bear.
Sometimes, something inside you just breaks.
It’s not repairable.
I died on the floor that night.
My heart stopped beating and my soul fled my body.
I hated.
I hated.
I hated.
I hated.
I hated with so much hate that things went dark and I was gone for a few seconds, then I was back but every single thing inside me had snapped, changed, rewired.
Me, the happy curly-haired kid with such grand dreams, swaggering about, little chest puffed out, waiting, always waiting for someone to love me.
When Danielle Megan O’Malley died someone else was born. Someone far colder and more composed even than the Other I’d slipped into so often of late. Jada.
I welcomed her. She was necessary to survive this world.
She was strong and ruthless and a stone-cold killer. She was human, all too human, yet not human at all.
Jada stared up at them, as they talked and laughed and removed the length of chain and collar from my neck.
Oh, the feel of air on my skin beneath that bloody band!
They had handcuffs and chains. A hood.
Jada coolly analyzed my brain, my body, deciding how the current had altered things, and then Jada undid it all, remaining deceptively passive, helpless, defeated.
I remember thinking, God, can’t they see her in my eyes? She’s Judgment. She’s Death. I’ve seen her in the mirror since.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have multiple personalities. I learned dissociation to deal with the hunger and pain. The Other was a cooler, numb version of me. But Jada is the Other on steroids. Dani is my foundation, Jada is my fortress. Danielle was my mom’s daughter. Jada, the daughter of Morrigan, goddess of war, a mother worth having.
Danielle is the one who died.
I kept the pure heart. I kept the savage.
It was the little girl who loved Emma O’Malley that quit breathing.
The moment I was clear of the cage I kicked up, flashed into freeze-frame and ripped out their hearts, one after the next, squeezing each between my fingers until they exploded, dripping blood all over myself, all over the floor.
Then, quietly, in my threadbare, bloodstained nightgown, I walked to the kitchen, washed my hands, and ate an entire loaf of stale bread.
She hadn’t been home in three days.
