Dark Blood

Two+

 © Amber Kalkes 2014

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Two+

I can imagine how I look in the moment. My face blotchy and red, my hair drying with a touch of frizz, the sleeves of my sweatshirt damp from wiping my tears, black tentacles leaking from my hands as my eyes turn black without any other color in sight. I flex my fingers as the black shadowy ribbons shoot from my fingertips and attack a low hanging naked light bulb from the ceiling. It shatters into a million pieces and falls to the ground below with a tinkling crash.

 This is my sanctuary, my place to let out my frustration. It’s an old abandoned cracker factory in the industrial district of town. I discovered this gem back in high school when my power was reaching its full potential. I would snap at the smallest thing and once used it to blow out all the windows in my English class because Becky Roth said I was a freak. She wasn’t wrong but she had spoke on a bad day for me.

Her reward was a shard of glass in her upper bicep.

According to people like her and my mom I was evil, a thing to be destroyed. Sure, Becky had never seen me in my full glory but she had seen enough to know something was right with me. She feared me and that made her hate what I was even if she wasn’t even sure what that was.

Then again that was how most normal people were with the unknown. Fear made them violent and hateful. They didn’t understand that this was beyond in control and wanted me to be punished for something I couldn’t change. I wish I could have changed it, I still do but I can’t. So instead I try to hide in plain sight.

My eyes are normally a rich violet color but it’s a rare color. Something that people find strange and curious. So I cover them up with blue eye contacts. The shadow ribbons are earlier to control when I let them out regularly and keep my temper under wraps. This is one of the reasons I don’t work in any high stress level jobs and opted out for the admittedly boring but calming job at the library.

Nothing can piss you off in a library.

My wings have proven over the years to be harder to cover up. I first tried to bind them but that did little to keep from them twitching when I got upset or excited. So I decided to do something else, something I’ve continued to this day. I cut them off. It hurts, fuck does it hurt, but for me to hide, for me to be like everyone else they have to go away. I have to do it once every two weeks. They go back pretty fast and the pain of them growing back burns as much as cutting them off. Essentially, for comparative purposes, it’s like cutting off a limb. My wings, no matter how freaky they are with their raven black feathers, sharp like a razors edge, and with an expanse of ten feet in each direction, they are a part of me.

Strangely enough once dislocated from my body though they disintegrate into ash, like they were never even solid to begin with. Ash, blood and feather are all that’s left when I finish my own mutilation. I don’t know why it is or why I am the way I am but I figure it has something to do with my father. He is ‘The Dark Man’ that my mother refers to him as. I only know his name from when she had her breakdown, the one that sent her to Stanton, because she kept screeching his name. I was ten when it happened and I found her trying to slit her own throat open with a butcher knife.

“Ornias” she kept chanting like a curse.

When we went to see her in the hospital she had a bandage around her neck and crazed wide blue eyes. She screamed when I tried to hug her and began the onslaught of name-calling. She had to be restrained and eventually they labeled her as Schizophrenic. She isn’t, not really, she had seen me the night before. My wings unbound and my shadows wrapped around me like an aura of darkness. She was scared and I was scared but she thought I was a monster.