Death In The Family

Chapter 21

Vidar had a long and clear memory. He remembered every summer he'd spent in the US, from the excitement and fulfillment of the first long flight when he was seven until the last flight back home when he was sixteen. The stuffy suppers with their strict and rigid father had since blurred together in their monotony, but there were many moments that he could reconstruct in near perfect clarity. His first time hunting rabbit with their uncle Bjørn, that powerful and strange feeling when he looked into its glassy eye and saw what he had taken from it. The warm static of his first kiss in the cool dark under the patio, the thrill of discovery and magic of a girl's touch. There were also a myriad of small vibrant memories that seemed to have no importance or impact attached to them at all. Waking up before dawn and watching his father meticulously clean his guns in the yellow lamplight at the parlor coffee table. The slow gathering and crawl of condensation down the side of a green beer bottle while Leif talked with the grocer about the high school basketball team he played power forward on. Memories with no purpose or meaning but the mind latched onto and etched in permanence on its own.

One such meaningless memory bubbled to the surface as he looked down at Simone. She was petting the side of a nanny goat at the farm, her eyes wide with wonder and reverence for the creature, and when she reached for a temptingly long ear with her chubby little hand, he warned her to be gentle. The feather touch she used to stroke the goat's ear must have been barely even felt by the animal, but little toddler Simone turned her head to look to him – a twenty-year-old boy of a man she'd barely known- for reassurance, her eyes shining like silver mirrors and brow wrinkled in uncertainty. He recalled the awkward discomfort of so suddenly being this little person's source of guidance and protection, but beyond that, there was no meaning to this pocket of time that had been preserved in him.

Fifteen years or so later, as he tasted the strange heat of her mouth still lingering on his tongue and his heart raced with the terrible sentiments his lizard brain communicated to his irrational mind, she wore that exact same helpless expression. He hadn't been able to reconcile that this young woman, this barely human thing he'd begun training into her function as their sex slave, was the same child he remembered as his niece. Now, he couldn't stop the convergence of those two beings no matter how he railed against it.

"No," he breathed. His hands were numb as he gripped the sides of her face. The same face, the same little girl looking to him for reassurance, the same blood that pushed and pulled through their pounding hearts. "No, no, no, you're not..."

He knew, logically, that wanting something was not enough to make it true. He was intellectually aware that no matter how twisted and abnormal her life had made her, it could never justify what they'd been doing. She was technically human, technically his niece, technically innocent of the crimes her father had committed. Technically, as in the sense that it was true, but a truth so irrelevant that it was to be regarded as false.

Breathing in her scent and her taste, he could no longer base those denials on technicalities. Facts attached themselves to opinions, tearing apart the walls of denial and illogical reasoning he had carefully constructed around them and transforming them into terrible truths, and he could not change them back any more than he could erase the sins he had committed under their influence. As his hands lowered to tremble around her torn and elegant neck, the thought that poured over the riot of his mind like boiling oil was that, despite all of this, he was still going to do it.

"It's okay," she said, her voice vibrating under his hands. She gently touched his wrists. Anders had trimmed her nails down to the pink lines of their beds, leaving her unable to injure herself further through scratching, and Vidar swallowed against the urge to vomit at the gratitude he felt for him having stripped her of that defense. "You don't have to pretend anymore. You can just be what you are."