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He frowned deeply and I felt those eyes piercing right through my skin, as if he could see straight into my soul. “Okay. Thank you,” he said. After a hesitant moment, he took the receipt, but left me the change, leaving the coffee shop behind. Long after he had gone, the nerve-endings in my hand still felt strange and tingly and I was sure it was not because of the coffee. I had never been touched like that. I had never seen someone look at me with so much concern, as if they actually cared. As if I mattered.
No. No, no, no. I pushed down the bizarre new emotions trying to break the surface, shoving the man with the blue eyes violently from my mind. He was just a random customer I would never see again. Besides, I was probably imagining the way he looked at me and what was meant by it. Why should he feel concern for me, particularly when he knew me as no more than a Starbucks barista?
Even if I was right about the way he looked at me and even if by some strange stroke of…what? Luck? If by luck, if that was really the correct word, I saw him again, it would never develop into anything worthwhile. He would either turn out to be yet another scumbag, or I would be too worried that he was to let him in. I had been broken one too many times.
They say that the hearts of the dead are never silent. They say that they live on, beat on, love on forever. But what of the hearts of the living? What of those ones who have been broken so many times that they would be better off dead? I knew that their hearts fell silent because mine had done just that. I was broken, empty, dead inside…a hollowed out, ravaged shell of the girl I was. There are those among the living who walk about, breathe, speak, eat, drink, sleep…all while dead. I was one of them.
I had been broken one too many times and torn in one too many pieces. My heart beat with the same passion as the common ghost. I felt nothing anymore: not pain, not passion, and certainly not love. My question was not whether the living could go on dead, because I knew they could, but rather whether the person they once were, the shadow of their shattered soul, could ever be resurrected.
I used to hope such a thing would one day be possible for me. That was before I was broken again, and again, and once more again. I also used to wonder if the pain would ever end until one morning I woke to find that it had gone, much like a nightmare disappears in the light of a new day, only to be replaced by a coldness so much worse than grief, a lack of emotion and feeling, a steel door that overrode all my potential for normalcy any time an opportunity to live arose. The number of offers to ‘hang out’, ‘check out a party’ or ‘study together’ in college that I had turned down were evidence of that. Since I was seventeen, I had not allowed a single person to walk into my life and the few almost-friends I had had quickly fell away. I tried to hold on to my foster-mother, Mrs. Aaron, because she was so sweet and had tried to help me, but I could not. I was not the same person anymore.
As Gigi, the girl who would take my shift, entered the coffeehouse, she waved a quiet hello and vanished into the back room. Watching her, I reflected on what I had lost. Not many friends. I had never been good at making friends, especially because my family had died when I was only two years old and ever since I started preschool, other kids made up cruel rumors about me. One of the worst had actually been Gigi’s older sister, who was my age and frankly sociopathic, Gigi’s foil in many ways. She’d had a large portion of the student body convinced until high school that I had somehow caused the death of my family and that was why I had been the sole survivor of the tragedy. By high school, no one believed that anymore, but the damage had already been done and befriending me was social suicide.
As a result, I had never had friends nor learned the ability to make friends. I never met anyone in college I spoke to regularly and my roommate had avoided me because I had honestly scared her. I did not blame her and did not mind. I had grown used to the silence.
Gigi tapped me on the shoulder, breaking me out of my reverie. She smiled nicely at me, her perfect white teeth, smooth blond hair and bright green eyes positively glowing in her attempt to make nice. She was a sweet girl, trying to earn her way through college despite the fact that her parents were very wealthy. It also seemed she was trying to make friends with me and fix me. “It’s noon, Poe.”
I smiled tightly back at the poor girl. She was wasting her time. “Thanks, Gigi.” Just as I was heading for the back room, I remembered my apple and returned to fetch it. As I headed to the back room for my coat and to punch out, I caught Gigi out of my peripheral vision looking at me with concern, no doubt guessing that that was all I was eating for lunch.
----
I am so cold. Always so cold. The cell is like an icebox. The walls are damp, a wet chill hangs in the air, the cell block reeks of unwashed bodies.
I am sweating. Sweating icicles that drip down the center of my back, over my face, along my chest and arms. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill them all. I’ll kill her and I’ll kill that bastard and I’ll kill the weak stupid bitch he chose over me and I’ll kill them all.
When I get out. Only a few days now, the writing was on the wall, their numbers were up. I’ll pick them off one by one, just as it should’ve been years ago. I know exactly how to do it. I planned it perfectly. There are no flaws, no chinks in the armor, nothing. No possibility for failure. If I play my cards right, no one will ever even know I was the dealer. No one knew the last time, or the time before. So much misery, all my beautiful work. And I’ll do it again. But this time, it will be final.
They will die. They will die. They will die….
----
I had a few hours to kill before my shift at the restaurant where I waitressed, so I walked several blocks to the Enoch Pratt Library. I spent hours every day in that library because it was old, it was architecturally beautiful, there was a great collection of books, and, best of all, it was free and I was poor. Usually, I spent my time there at one of the computer terminals, writing. I did not have the money for a computer of my own.
When I passed through the main doors of the library, the head librarian, Carol, smiled brightly and waved to me. “Nice to see you, Poe.”
I smiled slightly. “Nice to see you too, Carol. How was your vacation?”
Carol grinned and her eyes turned reminiscing. “Oh, George and I had a wonderful time. You know, Barbados is wonderful this time of year. The beaches were the perfect escape from this dreadful cold weather. I don’t think we’ve had a winter this cold and this early in years.”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind the cold too much. But with how clumsy I am, that ice is terrible.”
“Winter in general is terrible!” Carol insisted, her voice growing humorously impassioned about the issue. “All that ice and slush and whatnot….although,” she added after a thought, “My kids will be home from college soon for the holidays, so that will be lovely. It’s always so nice to have the family together.”
My smile turned tight and it felt as though a stone had settled in my stomach, but I nodded. “Yes. I’m sure that will be wonderful.”
With nothing more, I slipped through the library to one of the computer terminals Carol couldn’t see from the front desk. I rested my elbows on the desk and placed my head in my hands. I did not cry, the wounds were too old for that, but there was the sick aching in my chest that was always there to remind me of how hard it is to escape from such a massive loss. One parent or sibling would be painful enough to lose, but both parents and both siblings? I did not even have other relatives. My entire family had been wiped out, leaving me with nothing at the age of two. Somehow I could still recall glimpses of them, but I was not sure if that made the loss any less difficult. In fact, it might have made it worse.
I pushed away the painful memories, logging into the computer with my library card and taking a flashdrive from my pocket. I plugged it into one of the USB ports and scrolled through the files, selecting one after some deliberation, and began to work on it. I was not even a page in when someone took a seat in the chair next to me. I stopped typing, my jaw tightening. I knew that every other terminal was open. There was no one at the computers around me when I had sat down and I would have noticed if someone had appeared since then. Why then was this person sittingrightnext to me?
I was just starting to calm myself, telling myself for the thousandth time that I was being paranoid, when a familiar voice asked, “What are you writing?”
As I tried to slow my racing heart, I gradually twisted in my chair to look at the individual seated next to me and froze, my gaze locked by eyes that could only be described as molten ice, if such a thing existed. After a brief moment, I recovered and my own eyes narrowed. “How did you find me here? Are you stalking me?” I accused. “Who are you?”
The blue-eyed man I had met earlier at Starbucks smiled, seeming to take note of my defensiveness and mentally file it, then skirt around it. “Coincidence. I happen to like the library too and saw you sitting here. I recognized you,” he said.
“Right,” I snapped, shifting my legs around the chair to face him head-on. “I’m not interested, I do not like to be followed and I am not attractive enough to be worth stalking. You are wasting your time and I am not someone you can mess with. Leave me alone.”
He smiled patiently, his eyes smoldering, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly in an attempt to hide a smile. “I just wanted to talk to you again, maybe over a drink? It’s not every day you meet someone who’s genuinely interesting and you’ve only reinforced that view since I sat down.”
