BLOOD FOR BLOOD ─ paul lahote

prologue ── Monster, May I?

TRIGGER WARNING: mentions self harm and suicide

FOUR YEARS AGO   ||   2002

          "How do you feel?"

          Tired, I say. For two reasons. I'd had to wake up early, just to make punctual for this morning's appointment. In my head, I trace the route I'd taken, envision the imprint of a subway map behind my eyelids; how I'd fought, a feeble force, against the unrelenting current of passengers boarding the train, elbows clipping unforgivingly against my ribs, bruises blossoming where my wrist had hit someone else's watch; how I'd had to do the same dance over again on the second train I'd had to catch with the bustling crowd. A million bodies squeezing into a compact space, pushing this way and that, tugging and tossing me along like a cork bobbing directionlessly in the sweeping tide, let the world do its worst. All this after school, skateboard in hand, backpack still loaded with textbooks, my starchy St. Xavier's Academy uniform scratching against my sweat-sticky skin.

          Just thinking about it was exhausting.

          I don't talk about the second reason.

          I'm painfully aware of my condition, so does the doctor, needless to say; nobody has to ask because they know it too. It's public knowledge where I used to live back in Forks, Washington—before my father sent me away to California, where I now attend some prestigious boarding school and subscribe to weekly therapy sessions with Dr Morozova after school—this small piece of overcast suburbia, utopic until there's a dirty rumour passed around the locals like a virus. I suppose it was me, this time, to have a go at being infectious.

          Or in this case, the infectious news of my brother's murder, and my subsequent hospitalisation, white walls and sterile disinfectant. Being wheeled out in a hurricane of shouting EMTs, the pressure of hands everywhere, strapped to a gurney in the pulsing wash of red and blue lights of an ambulance was nothing short of a particularly effective method of being the talk of the neighbourhood. All of that's on paper; on the document my father had to sign some weeks ago.

          You are alive, I've been told to recite to my pitiful reflection in the mirror, a phantom apparation of a girl, all scratched-up alabaster skin and hauntingly gaunt features sitting amidst the little fissures spiderwebbing over the lichen-infested glass. Then they always press further with the detested, but are you living?

           There is a spider on the window sill. Sitting perfectly motionless in the sunlight slanting into Dr Morzova's musky, disgustingly tasteless office and soaking into the carpet like rum staining the mahogany floorboards, and I have every reason to believe it's either dead or in predatory mode. That is, until one of its fuzz-covered legs twitches involuntarily as a breeze siphons through the stagnant air cloying in the oppressive heat of July and my insides recoil on primal instinct.

           The funny thing with death, fundamentally, is that everybody sees you in a different light all of a sudden. It doesn't matter how mercilessly you've aspersed someone or their home, or if they'd resented you before for some reason. When you're six feet under, your name is a talisman hanging off their lips and your picture is crucified on your mother's wall. They pay their respects, wish it had been someone else — always someone else, always cursing someone else for another's downfall — and then they wax poetic in eulogies and reduce you to the appellation of 'loved one'. People seemed to hold this entirely dubious conjecture that a person's premature demise was a tragedy.