I've been like this since I was born. I've been a monster. Doctors refer to it as being a "psychopath," but I know what I am, and that word doesn't even begin to describe it.
It's a fact that psychopaths are incapable of love.
And I thought that that was true for me. But it wasn't.
I fell in love. With the worst person possible.
I know it sounds cheesy, me falling in love, but this story has no happy ending. Monsters do not get happy endings. This isn't a Disney movie.
It was a hot summer night in the midst of August. The humidity was thick enough you could see it, and it made ill-fitting shirts stick to your back with sweat.
A bonfire was flaring up in the hot, dry grass that hadn't tasted rain in a month. One damn long month. Some schoolmates of mine that I didn't even know the name of were chattily discussing their lives while tipping back beer after beer. Sixteen is a rough age, they said. I hate my life, they said. A buzzing in my ear, a relentless drone.
I ached to burn them, to throw them all in the fire and listen to the screams, amusing myself with the thought, Sixteen is a rough age. You do hate your lives.
I calmly asked one of them for a beer, and they tossed me a nondescript bottle through the flames; the heated glass burning my fingers until I could smell burnt flesh. But I didn't feel it, or maybe I didn't care.
I cracked it open, throwing the bottle cap over my shoulder into the grass somewhere. I pulled a joint out of my pants pocket and pursed my sweaty, tight lips around it. I lit it with my engraved lighter. Monsters Exist, it said, staring me in the face.
I huffed on it for a minute or two before opening my mouth and letting the smoke drift out of it, surrounding my head in a thick opaque cloud.
"Hey, bitch, gimme that fucking joint. Need me some pot," said a gangly teenage boy who sat across from me on the other side of the fire. He smirked at me.
"What did you call me?" I asked gently, my anger bubbling up into a simmer.
"I said, bitch, give me that joint," he replied, showing too many teeth when he smiled. The drunken girls hanging off of his elbows giggled and oohed.
I rose from my seat on the ground, the sweet smell of crushed grass coming from where I had been sitting. I walked around the fire slowly, my lips still tightly pursed around the paper, wet with my warm saliva.
"That's a good slut," he said, reaching out his hand to pluck the joint from my mouth.
That was the last straw. I wrapped the fingers of my right hand around the back of his head and yanked him foreword, plunging him into the flames. The girls fell with him.
God I loved the screams. I held them in the fire, held their poor faces in it until their skin burned and melted like wax from a candle. I shoved them deeper into the embers, the scent of their burnt flesh seeping into my nostrils and whirling around in my mind.
Eventually, they were too weak to struggle, and stopped moving, and died. I left them in the fire, stoking the flames and adding more wood. I sat back down in the grass, watching the flames lick at the flesh of my classmates. One charred hand reached out of the flames slowly, asking for life.
I answered with a firm but soft no, and pushed the hand back into the flames with my foot.
I waited until the bodies turned to ash and bone before letting the fire die. I always kept a pair of thin leather gloves in my pocket, which I put on with a soft snap. I emptied the nondescript blue and white cooler of its ice and packed the bones and ash into it neatly.
I packed up all of the empty beer bottles and wiped them clean before throwing them into the woods, breaking them all against the trunks of trees.
I carried the cooler off into the woods where I knew a swift stream flowed. I gave the three a proper send-off by letting their ashes be swept away. I buried their fire-cracked homes under a plain grey rock, the only marker to their graves.
