The Prisoner Project

THIRTY SIX

"Animals don't do this."

— Kenneth Eade

THIRTY SIX

NICHOLAS GLANCED ALL AROUND HIM, and all he could see was the colour red. His hands were stained, his shirt was a tie-dye of blood and guts, and the kitchen counters were maroon from the force of the splatter. The end of the gun remained smoking from the heat of the bullet. He couldn't hear much above the ringing in his ears, just the faded echo of the blast and the sickening thump! of a body against hard wood. His heart was beating hard against his rib cage, so hard that he knew if he lifted his shirt, he would see the outline of it against his bony chest. He could hardly breathe, not from fear, but the initial shock of ones' first kill.

He hadn't expected the scene before him to be this gruesome. He hadn't expected to see literal parts of her body rip from themselves and scatter round the room. He certainly hadn't expected to see pieces of her in the soup pot she had been stirring. He thought guns were like those in the movies, a single hole through ones chest. Not the gaping hole he had ripped through her floral sundress that took with it, a chunk of her insides.

He should've been gagging. He should've been disgusted. It really was disgusting. He hadn't even spent a lot of thought on the decision to kill her. It had happened so fast. He had stolen the shotgun from the man at the bodega, walked home with his head down, ripped open the front door and pointed the shotgun at her chest. Boom. She was dead.

For someone who had lived such a long and intense life, her death was so sudden and useless. Wasteful. Nicholas was beginning to understand what people meant when they said they lived like they had already died. Because fuck, life was so fickle.

Of course, he would miss her. Agonisingly so, because she had played an integral part in his life and had made him into the boy he was. But when he realised that he would no longer hear her voice, see her face, or have her share the world with him, he was overcome with an incomprehensible feeling. The feeling he could only describe as a tug of war between sadness and elation.

And just as the haze that had fogged his thoughts began to clear, a rush of adrenaline, dopamine and ecstasy engulfed him. Despite the fact that he had never had an orgasm before, he was certain that this was it.

Nicholas walked up to the corpse and spat in his mother's face. He smiled, then he frowned, then his lips were in a pout. It was extremely overwhelming. It felt akin to a tornado blowing through his chest cavity, destroying everything in its path, rerouting his entire thought process.

He blinked a couple of times and when he lifted a trembling hand to touch his bruised face, he couldn't tell if his tears came from the despair or the joy.

Either way, he was content.

___

MY WORDS WERE spilling out of me like a faucet that had broken off its hinges. "Mirabel, you've got it all wrong." I emphasised. "You don't understand what hap—"

"There she is. The beauty and the brains." Mirabel announced, cutting me off as though I had been speaking a language she could not comprehend. She stood up, arms open in a faux embrace.

The silence that greeted her was what made me spin around.

And there she was, the mirror image of everything I thought I had loved about myself. I gasped, in pain. I had known she played a huge part in my demise but God, it hurt to see it with my own eyes. No one could take it. Not even Lucifer felt this betrayed when he was tossed out of Paradise for asking too much. Lucifer had been greedy. I, on the other hand, had asked for nothing from Diana.