Page 97 of Circus From Hell

Again.

And again.

I can hear Arlo crying and screaming.

I keep stabbing.

My father’s gurgled noises fall on deaf ears.

All I can hear is Arlo’s sweet screams.

My father drops to the floor.

I step back, panting, my knife following in suit to clatter against the wooden panels beneath my feet.

Sound and vision, previously muffled and blurred, ram into me with the force of a truck. I stagger back into the recliner my father had been sitting in moments before.

Before the massacre.

Arlo has stopped screaming.

I turn to look at him, huddled in the corner of the room.

He has blood on his face, on his hands, in his bright, white hair.

Why? I didn’t hurt him?

“Pipsqueak,” I whisper, dropping to my knees. My bloodied hands stick and squelch against the floor as I slowly crawl forward, and Arlo’s pretty face becomes more and more terrified as I approach. He’s leaking tears, unable to choose between looking at me and looking at his mum’s corpse behind me. “Eyes on me.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t reply.

“Hey.” I sit on my heels when I’m a foot away. “You’re safe now.”

“Get away from me,” he weeps, feet pushing against the floor like he can back up further into the wall, but he can’t go anywhere. I reach for him, and he starts screaming and kicking. “Get away from me! You monster! Get away!”

I let him kick my approaching hands, and I let him curl into the wall like it’ll save him. He’s right; I’m a monster.

But someone could have heard the screaming.

Someone could have called the police.

We can’t stay here, surrounded by dead bodies.

“We need to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he spits, and I see the fear morphing into betrayed rage.

“You don’t have a choice.”

“You killed my mother, you… you… you sick freak!”

My stomach twists, and it feels like he’s taken that very knife I used to slit his mother’s throat and stabbed it into my chest.

“They were selling you, Arlo. It needed to happen. Now come on. Quickly.”

Why am I so calm?

I stabbed my own fucking father. I shouldn’t be this calm.