The Hands That Hold Ecstasy

What It Takes To Reap a Soul

Jonah's POV

Albany, New York – 1977

Blood.

All four-year-old Jianyu could see was blood.

This blood was not his own, but he did help shed most of it.

That night, three men broke into Jianyu's family home. Jianyu didn't know the reason they broke in and did what they did. All he could focus on right now was finding the source of the loud bangs and screaming from voices he recognized. He descended the stairs.

"Mama?"

"Baba?"

No response. He called out louder.

"MAMA?!"

"BABA?!"

There was a response, not from his parents, but from the three men.

To Jianyu, these men looked like the giants he heard about in storybooks and his bedtime stories. However, they looked more horrifying than the ones Jianyu remembered. They were covered in blood, had the smiles of killers, and were looking at Jianyu as their next target.

But, he didn't care.

Jianyu continued to search for his parents, despite the grown men coming after him with guns and bloodshot eyes.

He would find who he was looking for in the kitchen, splayed out on the floor, cold-to-the-touch, bleeding out, and holding hands. Of course, they were holding hands. When were his parents ever not holding hands?

In their last moments, his parents, his Mama and Baba, clung onto each other, their mouths forever shaped into calling out for God to save their only child.

Little Jianyu felt more anger than he ever had beforehand. He knew his parents always told him to calm down his anger and to not play with knives. But, when he saw a knife laying in his father's open palm, he knew what he had to do.

Jianyu ran across the house until his little lungs burned, but he had eyes on his targets. Three men of differing shapes and races came into his house solely to kill his parents, and that was something Jianyu would not stand for.

As Jianyu snuck up on the men and frantically stabbed them one-by-one in any place he could find, he would let out a blood-curdling, soul shattering, eardrum bursting scream. He screamed and cried and stabbed and screamed and cried and stabbed until his eyes were filled with the mens' blood, his skin was red and sticky with the substance, and the police arrived at the scene.

Jianyu never called the police, so he was confused as to why they were at his house. Maybe his parents called them before everything went so wrong or maybe a neighbor heard his screams and decided to call the police. Either way, the cops were at his house now putting yellow tape everywhere, putting things into evidence bags, discussing the situation, and struggling to carry Jianyu's parents' bodies away from Jianyu's death grip on them.

Jianyu could see the cops untangle his parents' intertwined hands and that's when he went fully crazy. He didn't know how to express himself in a language they would understand because he was still being taught English. So, he resorted to hitting the police officers as hard as he could to get them not to take his only family away from him.

The officers carried the screaming and kicking and bloodied Jianyu all the way to the back of the cop car. As they drove away and questioned Jianyu in a language he couldn't understand, his smile looked like one of a killer's and he was STILL covered in blood. All he could think of was how much he resembled the men who took his childhood away from him and if that resemblance would ever go away.