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𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐍𝐄 : 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐎𝐈𝐍𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐍𝐎 𝐑𝐄𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐍
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How do you live in a place that reeks of death?
I don't know either.
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I could pretend that sunlight naturally finds its way here in soft ripples that caress your face tenderly, or that flowers bloom effervescently under a spring no winter could ever snuff out, but I would be leaving out the crepuscular, throat still gurgling blood, ghost of a father that lurks in all of the shadowed corners.
And it's hard to ignore that.
So, instead, daggers of sunlight come in harshly through aged lace-trimmed curtains, and weeds line up and down the block in this forever freeze with the most interesting of molds growing in the shadowed corner where my Father's ghost resides.
I didn't think there was anything of importance about this day. The same pale grey sky churned with white sea froth, the same howling winds pounding on the window, all atop a run-down house in the middle of a quarry with no special name.
They tell you seventeen is a threshold. The tipping point from where you trade your ferocity for civility, pride for humility, and curiosity for cynicism. It's when childish levity hardens into darkened gravitas and you finally trade in your fragility for something wiser.
But here I am stuck in the same twilight daze I have ever known. The one that followed me like a plague from every four walls that caged me in. I don't feel any wiser than I did yesterday and to tell you the truth, that doesn't mean much.
I was young when I realized my late Father was a murderer—or when I realized all of Japan called him a murderer. It was one fateful day when, instead of Father coming home, the police took my mother away for questioning, asking if she knew he would kill his secretary and then take his life afterwards. I've heard bit and pieces from Mother, most from when she's mumbling in her fitful sleep, but the incident happened when I was a baby, and I've only realized it at court, a couple of years after when a group of people in town rallied to get the family of psychotics moved somewhere else.
The psychiatrist the prosecutor brought in says that these murderous tendencies are genetic, and pass through a family like a cherished heirloom, so it's best to get the Ichigo family as far away as possible before another secretary ends up dead. An effective solution—in its own crude way.
So out we went, Mother and I, fleeing like witches from our cherished family home to run-down motels, using fake names and burner phones, until Mother used the last of Father's savings to buy this house all the way on the other side of the country. We had tried to go further, you know, to maybe another country but as you could guess, the Ichigo's don't have the best reputation now per se.
