Beheading Beatrice

Chapter eight

Finnley was starving. His body was begging for food, his stomach rumbling like a herd of Wildebeest's sprinting on an African plane. His muscles were loosening, becoming flabby and soft, instead of hard as a rock. His palms were clammy, his forehead dribbling with sweat as he groaned. His body was collapsing in on itself, deteriorating every day that he just sat in that chair. He had not eaten in forty-two hours, that horrid bitch loved to watch him suffer, almost as though it was some kind of game to her. Finnley was growing sickly thin, shedding pounds like a dog shed hair. He was no longer the exemplary soldier of his fleet, he was now just a weak sad sack, chained to a chair, being starved by a woman. Damn Vedalia, damn her to hell. She was evil, vile, deserved no mercy. Finn hoped that her sister had finally built up enough rage, enough strength to be able to combat her and most likely kill her. Clementine was strong enough, Finnley knew that Clementine could and would be able to kill her sister, even if it took some convincing. 

Nobody would ever believe Clementine if she told them what she had just felt in that dungeon. Rage, anger, the intriguing desire to kill. She had never felt like this before, ever. Her rage was blinding her, causing her to not be able to see anything but her increasing agenda. Her temper was creeping up on her like a sneaky animal, ready to rip her to shreds as soon as she was distracted. She was being hunted by herself, a separate, evil version of herself. She was plotting the death of her own flesh and blood, bubbling up from the very tips of her toes, rising up to her head, poisoning her mind, corrupting her brain. She was becoming just like Vedalia, and she hated it. But inside, secretly of course, deep within her core, she liked it. The blood, the violence. The idea of killing someone who deserved it. So truly, she was nothing like Vedalia. She killed for a reason, not spite, not sport. She killed the people that deserved her wrath, that deserved to be killed. Vedalia deserved to die, whether she knew it or not. 

The idea of death had always intrigued Clementine since she had not died yet, she always questioned if one's soul went further, or if heaven truly existed and the good, pure people of this Earth lived eternally, where the people like her sister, burned in hell, forever suffering for the pain they had caused within others, for the grief they struck within broken families, for their enjoyment as they murdered innocent people. It was sick, horrible really, they deserved to feel every second of their skin melting to wax. Clementine knew it was cruel, and most certainly unlike her to feel this way, but she did. She mulled over the possibilities of a heaven and a hell and wondered where she would go for killing Vedalia. Would she be rewarded and sent to heaven after her death, or would she burn in hell for destroying one of the evilest people she had ever known? That question, of course, could not be answered now, maybe even never. Maybe she'll die and never see heaven. Maybe she'll just float in an endless vast universe of souls. Though the idea of death felt so foreign, so strange to Clementine, she embraced it. Of course, she did not know what the universe had planned for her, especially when she inevitably died, though she was not afraid of what she did not know. Clementine had always been a curious child, and never feared what she had not learned to be the truth, the real thing she had feared was what she already knew. She feared the cold hard truth. The truth was always better than the blissful lie that shielded what was painfully true, like a concrete wall that was easily able to scale. Some do not scale the concrete wall, too afraid to see and understand what lies behind it, some brave the climb, jumping over the concrete wall and into the blissful arms of truth. Some truth is bad, bitter, a truth that one would pass up for the cotton soft lie, and some truth is warm, sweet, a truth that someone would enjoy knowing instead of the lie that was used to cover it up. Clementine was the latter. Sometimes she was afraid of the truth and ran away from it. Other times, she was like a soldier walking into battle, completely confident that she would be able to brace the truth. Truths and lies were a gamble. Flip a coin, and you can get either result. The truth can hurt, but so can the lie. It is impossible to blindly go through life, never facing the truth, and never facing the pain. It sounds easy, always avoiding what you do not know, but without the bravery to face what one does not know, humans would have never developed science. Science has given humans the idea of the world they live in, how the earth rotates around the sun, how the sky was not just the sky, but a mixing pot of chemicals and atoms, how rainbows are created. Without the discovery of the truth, humans would be hiding behind their own ideas about how the world works, and they would only learn the truth they believed in themselves, not the truth that had been developed over decades of research. Without truth, Clementine knew, that humans would be absolute cowards. Educated by none other than themselves. Nobody would listen to the truth because they would always believe that they were correct, and no one else who had come up with a different twist, maybe even the right logic, was credible. Just like now, wars would break out because of the intolerance of others beliefs, even if they could be correct. What a redundant world Clementine lived in. An ironic one at the least. Humans were cowards, trembling little children in big girl or big boy boots, intolerant stuck up jerks with sticks up their asses. 

And Clementine knew, that this world, was a world she did not want to live in.