Some Thing Called Myself (Complete)

II: something strange

Ch. 2: Something Strange

Mara was sixteen when she saw something strange for the first time. She had entered her living room once and found her mom probing at something in her cleavage. Jessica Alakija was pressing her fingers around a pill-sized bump that sat at the left side of her chest.

"What are you doing?" Mara asked, arching an eyebrow.

"I can feel something moving inside," her mom answered, raising a pair of scared eyes at her daughter. "This thing appeared today; I have no idea what it is!"

By then, Mara's grandfather was already dead and buried, and although the accident that took him was still recent, Mara knew her mother couldn't find in her heart the will to dress in black for more than a week. Thus, when Jessica finally managed to pop the bump in her chest, the dark-red blood that trickled from the open wound lost itself in the rich crimson of her sun dress.

"Ew!" teenage Mara said, reaching for a box of tissues. "This is disgusting. What are you doing, mom?" She rushed forward and threw a handful of tissues on her mom's lap.

"It's still in here," Jessica grunted, pressing harder.

Against everything Mara thought possible, a little white something slid outside the popped bump. With a disgusted grunt, Jessica bowed forward to let it drop on the floor. When it hit it, the small seed-like something broke the porcelain tile into several pieces as if it was a ten-kilo, sesame-sized cannonball.

Mother and daughter never discovered what that little seed was nor where it had gone—it simply disappeared overnight—but the broken tile and the weird silence they shared about it were certainly proof that it once existed. Now, twelve years later, Mara found the endings of that same cracked tile.

And on top of it, there was a fucking corpse.

"Oh, shit. Oh shit, oh shit!" Mara's breath quickened. Her eyes zeroed in on her hands, then on her reflex on the turned-off television. She was covered in cold blood.

No, not only that. She was covered in cold blood, and its owner now lay before her...dead.

This couldn't be happening.

"Wake up, dammit. What do you think you're doing?" she said in a breathless voice, her tone wavering between fury and fear as she shook the stranger.

They didn't blink. They didn't move, grunt, or breathe.

"Please!" Mara tried again. She cursed under her breath and inched closer. The blood and the lack of pulse should've been an indicator that something wasn't right, but...what would she do if the stranger didn't get up?

She definitely didn't need more problems with the police, that's for sure.

Mara blinked slowly like a lizard, one eye per time, and a lone tear carved a path in the smears of blood on her face. The candle Cauê had dropped went out, and the flashlight at Mara's side turned off. Mara closed her eyes. In the absolute darkness of her living room, she mumbled a little prayer to no one in specific.

"Please, I promise I'll donate my shit to charity; I'll only paint biblical scenes, and I'll definitely get a job—any job—and pay my electrical bills; just let me be dreaming. Let me be dreaming!"

One final time, the flashlight turned on, bright and orange against Mara's closed eyelids. She opened her eyes.

"Aw, fu—" A thunderclap interrupted her. Mara roared in frustration. "Nobody likes boring biblical paintings anyway!" she shouted. Mara ran a bloody hand through her hair, leaving wet marks all over it. A knot formed in her aching throat, and she sat back.