Chapter One

"Așteaptā, murgule, să paşti iarbă verde." (While the grass grows, the steed starves.)

Most days I can’t tell if that day was 10 years ago, or yesterday. Sometimes I wonder if it really happened. If it really took me days to rub the blood off my skin. If I really was in a court room for weeks on end. Those months are the blurriest, whole hours are blank and empty. But I'm used to that.

Today, it’s painted a vivid red in my mind. Days like this are the hard days. Mrs. Berkley says hard days bring good days. I hope she’s right.

The white ceiling of my room stares at me with all its emptiness and I feel a type of comradery with it. It watches and observes. It is blank and covered with colour painted by other people. There are stains on it. There are stains on me too.

Mrs. Berkley can see the stains no one ever saw. She’s a psychiatrist. My dad thought those were for ‘crazy people’, but he thought I was crazy. So I wonder who he really thought they were for. I barely leave my room, save for my appointments, but its good here. It’s good to be alone. To feel the quiet like a taste on your tongue.

I lift my arm to the ceiling, wondering if our stains match. I notice my hand is shaking, though it’s more akin to a violent jerking. This hasn’t happened in weeks, not since I was first admitted. I breathe in and out, in and out. Mrs. Berkley said this would work. Please work, please, make it stop.

My hand’s suddenly covered in blood, I close my eyes to the sight. It doesn’t work. The blood follows me everywhere. Through my subconscious and into my dreams. It covers everything, the smell is stuck in my nose.

My hand flickers in and out of existence. But the blood stays. Curling my other hand over my mouth I try to curb the nausea rising in me.

You’re pathetic. A voice rings out.

I sit up shakily in alarm and glance around the room. It’s empty.

“Hello?”

I said, you’re pathetic.

The voice is oddly familiar. Like an old relative you can’t quite place. Like a word on the tip of your tongue.

You could save her. She needs you and you’re laying here like a f*****g freak.

The voice is familiar because it’s mine. Accent-less and thick, but the same tone, from the same throat. It fits in my head like a puzzle piece.

“Coral’s dead.” My feelings lump together in my throat and can’t find their way out. My voice is flat and dead, there is no question anymore. No what ifs. Only life and death and what I live, something in-between.

You’re a f*****g liar.

The dam breaks and the emotions flood through me. Foreign and unwelcome, they eat at me like termites.

“I killed her.”

Anger. In the simplest terms that is what I feel. A confession does not bring relief, it only adds more weight to the world I carry on my shoulders. Every item in the room suddenly lights up in my head, the angers acts of its own accord and they swing around the room. The bed I sit on flies into the air. It’s all so much easier than it had ever been. Ever since I’ve been admitted, nothing has worked. No visions, no nothing. I loved the solace. But the power had been building inside me and now begs to be set free.

“Is that what you want to hear? I killed Coral. It’s my fault.” I don’t flinch at Coral’s name.

No. That’s not true.

It all goes faster. Like a tornado, individual items are impossible to see now, only the air pushing against them.

A knock sounds at my door, “Fabian? It’s time for your appointment.” The nurse’s sweet voice comes through the walls and makes my teeth clench.

“Go away!”

A startled pause, “Is everything okay? Mrs. Burkley says you’ve improved. You’re supposed to start working on a new technique today.”

Mrs.Berkley. She tried and tried and tried. But there are no techniques to help me, no breathing exercises or medication. Veins protrude from my neck, the lights flicker on and off. The tornado of clocks and pillows and shoes around my bed only gets faster.

The voice in my head is silent. But I know he is there, judging me. He is judging himself then. There is no part of me that isn’t poisoned or rotten. 

In my head, there is no escape from myself.

“GO AWAY!” I realize I spoke Romanian a second after it’s said. My lip curls.

“I’m coming in. It’s okay, you’re okay Fabian.”

I laugh. I laugh so loud the bulb of the lamp flying around me breaks and its fragments dig deep into my skin. I can’t feel it. I wonder if that’s finally physical proof of how not okay I am, and have always been. A sick smile plays on my mouth, my lips crack around it and a copper taste fills my mouth. 

When she opens the door, I let the bed fall to the ground but keep myself hovering there. The nurse freezes, her pale face quivering with fear. She must regret opening the door. I told her to go away. Her fear frightens me; I’ve never seen such fear directed at me before.

The few accommodations I’ve been given here crash to the floor. The book Mrs. Berkley gave me. The photo of my father my step-mom sent me. The only thing she sent me.

I thought you said you were a murderer? The voice scoffs, you just can’t admit that you’re here when you should be out there, trying to find her.

CORAL’S DEAD. SHE’S DEAD. SHE’S DEAD. SHE’S DEAD. SHE’S- My throat thickens and I realize I was saying that out loud. The feeling climbs out my throat and becomes a sob.

The nurse startled at my yelling and is scrambling down the hallway for the phone. Nervous sweat makes it fall from her hand. My breathing is coming too fast and my vision tunnels. Black dots swim in the corner of my eyes and tears fall freely down to land on the ground which sits far below me. Each one that drops echoes back like an avalanche.

The terror in Coral’s eyes is reflected back at me through the nurse’s dark brown ones.

I feel the whirl of a blade, too close for comfort. Readying myself to leave, because, maybe fate doesn’t have to be certain. I hear the scream of Coral on my skin, raising every hair on my body. The fear that coursed through me in that moment never left. It lives under my skin.

The walls shake, the nurse shrieks but presses the buttons with her thumb forcefully. I can see the sweat on her brow in perfect detail.

“A patient is out of control, I need help immediately-”

I see the fallen that took Coral. I shudder at its human features even now. I picture, sometimes, what I could have done if I was brave. If I wasn’t a coward. Maybe I could’ve snapped its body in half, or its neck-

A crack echoes through the building. It’s sickening. Immediately, I fall to the ground and the cold white tile scrapes my knees. My eyes clench close. The woman has stopped talking. Why did she stop?

The voice in my head has gone silent too.