DEVIANT HEARTS| HEESEUNG

34-knives on my back

Heeseung

The rain had turned into a storm, beating upon my back with the same fury as the lashings I knew I deserved. I felt the rain on my back like knives- I wish the droplets were blades or bullets. I only wish. My clothes were soaked right through, clinging to the skin wet with rain and sweat, yet I hadn't even brought a coat or any fucking thing to protect myself with. I didn't care. I trudged across the graves, the gravestones rising out of the earth like jagged teeth, each one a reminder that those lying beneath them had already escaped the torment I still lived in.

I almost wished I could join them, be buried under this cold, unfeeling soil. Maybe the earth would hold me close, bear hug me in ways no one else ever had. Not my family. For those people around me who said they cared but only fed off my misery like vultures.

I found his stone-my father's grave-slick with rain and grime. I dropped down beside it, my back pressing against the cold stone as if it could offer some sort of comfort, but it was just as indifferent as the rest of the world. My bloodied hands lay limply in my lap, the crimson washing away with the rain, mixing with the mud. But it didn't matter. It wasn't enough to cleanse me.

"Father." My voice was a low rasp, barely audible against the howling storm, but the weight of what I said was churning in my chest. "You used to bring me books, remember? You brought me worlds to escape into. I lived in those pages because they were safer than the hell that house became."

I swallowed the bile rising in my throat, fists clenched at my sides. I could feel the sting of the lacerations as they ripped open wider. Rain seeped into the cuts-a burning reminder that I was still here, still breathing when I shouldn't be.

"Adrik. that fucker," I spat, the venom coating my tongue. "My fucking stepdad. Did you know what he did to me? Did you ever see the way he looked at me when you weren't around? I was barely a child, *Father*. A fucking child. And he. he ripped me apart like I was nothing. Like I was meat for him to devour."

And the words clawed their way out of me, each more brutal than the last, tugged from the darkest pit in my soul. "He didn't just take my body, he took pieces of me, swallowed them whole. He carved me up like some feast, leaving nothing behind but scraps of the boy you tried to raise. I saw hell, Father. And I wasn't even old enough to understand what it meant."

I let out a bitter, hollow laugh, staring at the ground, watching the rain beat down against the earth, turning the dirt into sludge. "But you? You didn't save me. You left. You fucking left, and you let that monster into our home, into my life. You let him feed off me until there was nothing left but a hollow shell."

I slammed my fists into the wet ground, feeling the sharp sting as more blood dripped from my knuckles. The pain was good. It was something I could hold onto. Something real in the middle of all this madness.

"And now I'm just like him, aren't I?" I whispered, the words tasting like poison. "I destroy everything I touch. I can't even love without ruining it, without consuming it whole like some starving beast. Maybe it's in my blood, maybe that's what you left me—this hunger, this emptiness that can never be filled."

The storm raged on, the wind whipping across my face, the rain slapping at my skin, and I did not care. I was numb to it all. Just another ghost wandering through a world that had already forgotten me.

I laid my forehead against the gravestone and felt the cold seep into my bones. "I should be under here with you, right? I should be fucking buried, rotting in this earth, feeding the worms. Maybe then the darkness inside me would stop eating me alive."

I sat there, allowing the rain to wash over me, wishing it could drown the screams still echoing in my head. The memories that refused to die. The blood that would never wash clean. "Tell me, Father," I whispered, and the storm swallowed my words. "Why wasn't I enough for you to stay?" But there was no answer, just the relentless pounding of the rain and the emptiness that followed me wherever I went.