Burning.
Silencing.
Seeping through the ground and melding with the dirt.
The floor is gone, so are the walls. The roof is in smoldering piles, making the night glow red.
I’m in the center of it all, as if the world is rushingawayfrom my body contorted in the dirt.
My clothes are burnt.
I can’t see my mommy anymore.
All I can see are bits of bodies everywhere, big and small, scattered all over the ground as if they were flung like rag dolls that fell apart mid-flight. Some have upside down v’s carved into their foreheads, others are the people who changed my bed sheets and cooked me yummy food.
The power did not pick and choose. It just ...did.
It killed.
The thought jerks me into consciousness.
I kick forward, my body now at a slight angle that allows me to slide further through the hole. A jagged piece of rock drags a line of fire from my hip to my knee as I wiggle out, freeing myself from the chewing jaws of stone.
Bubbles pour from my mouth, racing me to freedom.
I explode through the surface—choking, spluttering, heaving breath into my starved lungs. Breath that tries, and fails to temper the storm lashing my conscience.
Wading to the edge, I crawl out on hands and knees, drawing life into myself while grating layers of skin from my shins.
I barely feel the sting.
Barely notice the squealing bathers dashing from the pools, snatching their clothes, and running up the stairs as if they see the truth in my eyes.
See me for what I really am.
I make it almost to the wall before I vomit, the spill of water and bile having nothing to do with my almost drowning andeverythingto do with my sudden wave of vertigo from the fall.
Because I’m no longer standing on the edge of that chasm deep in the folds of my subconscious. I’m down in the guts of it, trying to claw my way out with desperate, bloody fingers.
Trying to escape the slew of ebony roots coiled in a sizzling slumber—the pile larger than life itself.
An oily blackness spilling out in vicious, torrential spears.
Burning.
Silencing.
I vomit again, my body repelling the septic revelation it’s being forced to swallow ...
It was me.
Murder guts you, leaving nothing but an animated shell. I realize that while I sit, balled on the wet ground, rocking back and forth in a puddle of my own bile.
All these years, I’ve been hiding from myself. Functioning without a pulse.
The Vruks didn’t slaughter everyone that day. They simply caught the scent of a sizzling meal and came running to gorge on the carnage Icreated.
Me.A tiny, two-year-old child.
