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DEIMOS
Six years ago:
I’ve always enjoyed Halloween.And not just when I was a child, when it meant dressing up, stuffing your face full of sugar, and watching mildly spooky movies, either. As I’ve gotten older, I think I might actually enjoy the day even more.
There’s something beautifully sinister about it that hits the shadowed places in the dark corners of my mind just right. It’s the nip in the breeze warning that winter is coming sooner rather than later.
The crunch of leaves underfoot. The crackle of excitement hanging in the air that has everyone a bit more on edge, as if everyone around you is anxiously waiting for some malevolent force to jump out at them from behind the next tree.
But tonight—thisHalloween?
I think this may be my favorite one yet.
I was never looking for her, because I sure as shit was never participating in the fucking gross, pathetic “fuck a virgin, win a prize” bullshit that people like Chase Cavendish revel in.
I also wasn’t looking for her because I’ve never been looking foranythingin the way of a real, human connection with someone. That part of me was ripped out years ago. I’m not entirely sure Ieverhad much in the way of relatability with other people, what with the darkness that’s always lurked inside me. But since my days in that basement, and the horrors that were inflicted on me there, and the vengeance I wreaked afterward?
There’s “damaged”. There’s “having baggage”.
And then there’sme. I am way,wayover the line when it comes to both of those things, and no rational woman would ever have the stomach to deal with it.
For years, blind, uncaring, unfeeling, casual sex with women that are never repeated has been enough. It’s a therapy of sorts, a way to shore up the walls around my monster. And I’ve always been fine with that.
Until one day, recently, someone broke through those walls. A sneak. A thief of privacy. A fool, who came back for more.
None of my siblings know what was done to me. They don’t know what I was put through, or what I did afterward to satiate the blood lust and need for revenge boiling in my veins. But, they’re still my siblings. They’re still closer to me than anyone else in the world. And it was Ares a year or so ago who suggested I might benefit from “seeing someone”.
Aka: therapy. Barf.
But as loath as I was to try it at first, and as much as I hate to admit it, itwasbeneficial. Not the therapist himself, of course. He’d become so terrified of me within the first ten minutes of our very first session that every appointment thereafter was a semi-amusing chess game of me pushing him, and the poor bastard trying not to be obvious about counting down the minutes until I left.
But hedidintroduce the concept of a diary to me.
The therapist, I dropped.
The diary, I’ve kept.
I don’t keep it at The Reckless mansion on campus, where I live. Not out of any sort of fear or worry that someone would find it. No one on this planet is stupid enough to invade my private space or snoop through my shit. No, I keep it in a hidden hole in the wall in that rose garden no one ever goes to because I need the black thoughts that I write in there to be kept a safe distance from where I sleep. I need it physically removed from me, separating me from my demons.
Yet, hidden as it was, someonedidfind it. Read it. And one day, I noticed the stone on top of it was out of place, and they revealed themselves.
Who are you?
I wrote it assuming they’d freak out and never come back. There was nothing in the diary to out me as the author, so I wasn’t worried about them using what they’d read against me.
But they did come back. They…spoke to me.
Shespoke to me.
The handwriting was definitely feminine. The thoughts and opinions, though obviously not as dark as my own, were certainly along the same lines as mine. The same fractured wavelength. The same hint of a sadness and a darkness in a soul not quite whole, and different from all those around us.
I should have ended it right away. I should have moved or destroyed the diary, and shut the whole thing down.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
And then one day, I found her.
It had to happen eventually. We were getting to the point of conversing via the diary on almost a daily basis. Sooner or later, we’d both arrive at the garden at the same time. And that day, she was already there, sitting on the bench with her legs curled up underneath her, her long dark hair hanging over half her face, with her sharp green eyes reading the words I’d written to her the day before.
