Three Degrees Of Danger (2019)

|| TWO ||

"Wh- what are you talking about?"

My voice shouldn't be shaking this much.

But it's Sav.

Sav with her brilliant beam, kind eyes and contagious laughter. The girl who stands before me, armed with a knife and a snarl that reveals sharp teeth is someone I do not recognise.

Her lips compress into a pout and she brings the knife to her chest, allowing me to have a clear view of her fingers gently stroking the blade. I shiver and force myself to move backwards but my muscles refuse to abide. Maybe it's because I'm not used to this strange feeling- being repelled by a girl I so adore.

"Come on, Vic. I thought you hung onto my every word like it's a piece of precious jewel." The distance between us begins to close and I can feel the walls starting to cave in on me. The alarm bells in my head are shrill, beckoning my heavy feet away from Sav.

Wait, no.

Whoever's in front of me isn't Sav. It's someone else, something else.

"Put the knife down." Her name nearly slips but the syllables cause a tension to take shape in the form of the clenching of my lower jaw.

Sav watches me carefully and an icy sensation snakes down my spine. Her eyes are dark and clouded over with an unreadable emotion but I've seen this look a thousand times before. In fact, I see it everyday. It's the expression on a shark's face right before feeding time.

With my heart sinking through the soles of my shoes, I realise why Sav is staring at me like that.

She's the hunter and I'm the prey.

There's a moment of silence that hovers in the air. My body is stiff, out of fear that the next move I make might be my last.

After a while, Sav breaks the silence.

"Do you know what it is that I don't understand, Vic?"

I don't even dare to shake my head. But it doesn't matter, Sav answers the question anyway.

"What befuddles me is the concept of huamnity. We live and go about our daily routines. We let life pass us by and when we're nearly gone, we incline our heads towards the stars and we wonder."

"You're crazy." The words hang from my lips, as if partially detached. I'm too scared to say it but too nervous to control the weight of the words and the effect they have on me.

Sav shakes her head, dismissing my remark. "We wonder why when we've led life to the fullest, when we have done just about everything we had set out to achieve, there's an emptiness. It's throbbing within us, beckoning us to probe a little deeper."

Now we're inches apart. I can see that the luminiscent shine that always had a home in her eyes is gone. It's replaced with a murkiness that I can't read. And where laughter falls like petals off a flower so naturally from her lips, there's only a thin trail of cruelty.

"You don't know what you're talking about. You're not dying. You're not even close to that stage." A fish does its second lap around the tank and the jagged blue lines cut along my shadow harshly.

"Oh, but we all are, Vic. We're all dying inside, one way or another." Sav raises the knife such that it's next to her face. Her features look as if they have been sharpened by the blade she currently holds and all my instincts scream at me to run.

"You don't want to do this." But even as I say the words, I know they're a lie. There's no way a person holds a knife so menacingly and doesn't make a cut.