Tragedy ✔️

Chapter 5

Tears are salty, right? Not in this hell hole.

The sugary taste of my tears fill my mouth as I drive back home. I wonder if the tears are meant to be sweet as a reward for completing the task you are assigned. Like a treat for the wrong you commit. Even if it is meant to be that, I do not feel giddy about what I did. Who would? The veterans, maybe.

After the accident, I teleported myself back to headquarters. I sat in the waiting room to collect my payment, as so did about fifteen other people who just killed someone. I tried to justify what I did as I waited. I didn't actually kill my sister. She was already dead. I just destroyed her, but no matter how many times I turned it over and over in this dumb head of mine, I felt myself plummeting into an abyss of regret.

"Mr. West," called one of the ladies in one of several collection windows.

She handed me a red envelope with the seal of the king. I walked out of the building, already dreading the thought of coming back tomorrow for my first real task in the world above.

Now as I near my house, I feel my heart drop to my stomach. I can't believe I didn't think of this before. Before when I got my payment. Before I was sitting in the waiting room. Before I sent my sister to a fate worse than death. Not a single second did it cross my mind of what I would tell my mother.

I enter our neighborhood, all the identical, small, red-bricked houses make it hard to breathe. They are all so close together and I can't stand stuff like that. Claustrophobia.

I enter our small driveway and kill the engine. I sit in my car for what feels like an eternity taking deep breaths before opening the car door. My palms start to get clammy and suddenly it's fifty degrees hotter. I close the door to my car and walk to the front door taking out my keys to open the front door to my house, but I can't seem to get the key in the key hole.

My hands are trembling so furiously that my keys fall to the ground. I bend down to pick them up and give another try of opening the door, but the door isn't in front of me anymore. It's my mother.

"Mom-" I choke up. All the things I had thought of saying to her while I was driving down here seem to have deserted me, leaving me just to stare at my mother's bloodshot eyes.

I remember when I was six, we went to Disney World over the summer. The summer before she found out she had cancer. Everyone was having fun except me. I wanted to go to Sea World, not go to see some dumb princesses. My mom forced me to take a picture with Snow White, but I didn't want to. So me and my sister stood with Snow White and just when they took the picture, I pulled off Snow White's dark wig. My mother was so furious, she gave me a good spanking right there in public, and an even more brutal one in the hotel. I swear I was sore for the rest of the summer.

But today, she doesn't yell at me, she doesn't break down, she doesn't try to hit me. At first I am confused, but then I feel some of the weight in my chest lift away. Maybe she understands that it was the only thing I could do to live. For us to live, if you call this living, down here. Well, I had the wrong speculations. My mother does the worst thing she could ever do. Worse than anything she ever did when we were alive. I wish I could die all over again, because the weight that lifted from my chest just came back a billion times heavier.

"Goodbye Colin," she says hoarsely, and shuts the door in my face.