The reason we kill

Chapter 2

It was only days to her eighth birthday, and ugly little was almost two now. At some point, her mother had decided that ignoring Cara wasn’t enough, and had started ignoring her father too. This had resulted in her father moving downstairs and sleeping on the couch, while her mother shared her bed with the ugly Abigail. Her father got more aggressive day for day, shaking her a little too hard, smacking her with a pitiless strength that gave her pains everywhere.

Cara couldn’t sleep. She had been drifting in and out of some memory of from when she was very small, and had now been harshly ripped out of her comfortable drowsiness by the arrival of her father downstairs. Soon after ugly Abigail’s birth, he had taken a new, better paid job to be able to provide enough money to afford all Cara’s mother’s extravagant wishes. This new job meant that he had already driven off in his car before Cara got up in the morning, and only came back when she was already supposed to be sleeping. She got up and tapped over the stone floor to the banister over which one could view the bottom story. Her father was gray-faced and looked exhausted. He looked this way every time he came home from work now. It wasn’t only his work that exhausted him though. He also spent every spare second he had training his body in the gym. This resulted in a change in his body. The little round belly he had once had evaporated and was replaced by stone hard muscle. And there were changes in his character to. The happy charming man he had once been had disappeared, and was replaced by a quiet, strict and aggressive person she didn’t know. Now her father threw a bundle to the floor next to the couch and took off his jacket. A dark red stain spread from his shoulder to his hip. He winced and carefully took the shirt off. When Cara saw the blood trenched bandage on his shoulder she gasped. She clapped her hand over her mouth, but it was too late, he had seen her. Slowly he got up, and walked towards the stairs, treading carefully as not to make a sound. Cara backed back towards her room, then she turned and ran towards the window. She couldn’t explain the sudden panic that flooded her. She loved her father. He had never hurt her. At least not badly. Well, at least not outright. Her frantic fingers fiddled with the window’s latch. She could hear her father approaching, coming closer. Finally she snapped the latch. Just as she had pulled herself up onto the window pain, her father reached her. She struggled against the strong arms that were pulling her, not all too softly down from the ledge. She stared into her father’s face, and felt herself star to cry from fear.

“Never tell anybody what you saw today, Cara. Do you understand?”

She couldn’t answer. Instead she sobbed, all the while trying to make her mouth form an answer. Her heart raced with a fear that she didn’t understand.

Her father shook her hard. “Did you understand I said!?” he yelled.

“Mommy…” Cara called, half choked through her sobs. She banged against the side of her bed with her shoulder, splinters going deep into the flesh. She wailed when she saw the glint of the knife.

“I don’t want to hurt you, honey.” Her father whispered. “But if it’s the only way you learn…” He pulled her shirt up and pressed a hand onto Cara’s mouth. “None of this ever happened, Cara.” He whispered, as he slowly dragged the knife through the soft skin on Cara’s hip, smothering her scream with his big hand.

She didn’t really care for school. She had always spent her afternoons at the old lady’s house and never done her homework. Soon she had decided she could also live without being screamed at by the teachers every day, and she could surely find a job that didn’t require the tiring lessons she slept through every day. School hadn’t helped her anyway, she hadn’t understood half the things the teacher was saying, so at some point she had just stopped caring. It was already half past eight. Her mother and ugly little Abigail had gone to baby-swimming or something like that and her father was at work. She was all alone in the house, and she was hungry. The early morning sun was pouring into the window along with a cool sea breeze. Cara kicked her legs out of bed and went to her closet to get dressed. She picked out a pair of dark jeans and a black t-shirt. She traced her fingers over the X shaped scar on her hip, and remembered the painful months in which she hadn’t been able to wear pants over the fresh cuts. When she was dressed she went downstairs and out of the door. The sun was shining outside and a cool breeze was coming from the near sea. A beautiful day really. She reached the old lady’s house and went inside. The cosy kitchen smelled of freshly baked choc-chip cookies and lemon soap. The sun was shining in through the kitchen window and the air inside the small house was warm and heavy. Mozart was playing in an ancient cassette player on the counter and a fresh vase of roses stood on the living room table.