The Prisoner Project

FOURTY

if you're alive today, that's enough.
stay.

FOURTY

DELUSION AND DESPERATION. The signs were right in front of me. I could taste it, smell it and feel it in the air. When I glanced at Mirabel, her eyes were wet with tears, with the pain that she had gripped onto like a life boat. She had never ever considered the possibility of living without this. Without this pain, this desperate need for revenge, her life was achingly empty.

"Is that your truth?" I managed to croak out.

Mirabel scowled, taken aback by my question. "I shame the Devil." She replied, playing on the tedious phrase that went 'say the truth and shame the devil'. "You left them. After all the things you did, you packed up your stuff, and left. You didn't even call the police."

No matter how much I would try, Mirabel would never understand the depravity of that moment in the life of Diana and I. We were only 16. There was little that we knew about life and death. Mirabel didn't take into account that just like her, we had witnessed the death of our entire family in the most horrifying way.

By our own hands.

I muttered. "I couldn't..."

"We couldn't." I heard Diana mutter. Up until that moment, she had remained silent and brooding. Even Hank had kept all his nasty remarks to himself.

I looked up at her and noticed she was watching me.

Looking at her now, I could only see the corpses of my parents and brother in her place. As vivid as day, I could see their blood, torn skin and the odd protruding bone. It was the most painful thing that a child could see; the visage was hell incarnate, handcrafted to deliver the maximum amount of agony that any human being was capable of processing.

Traitor.

I looked away. Diana didn't love me. My reality was a lie. I looked up at Mirabel but her image was blurred by my tears. "So, what do you want from me?"

Mirabel shook her head. "I didn't know until a few days ago. At first, I just wanted to see you — have some control over your life. Knowing that I could get you to confess was my first wish. I believed everything would fall into place afterwards."

There was a hidden but in her words.

"But I didn't know how. After you had..." She stopped, gagged by the grief. "...done what you did to my family. I called the police."

I felt something surge through me. "My family."

"What?"

"They're my family."

Her features turned fierce. "Fuck you. I waited a week, a goddamned week, until I heard any updates on the case. You took away my opportunity to say goodbye. To let them know how much I loved them." She moved to her desk and gripped its edge. "They told me they found you and Diana in a run-down motel on the outskirts of town. You were both minors so your story of self-defence was easy to believe."

I knew exactly what she was talking about.

Coupled with our mother's history of mental health issues and Hugh's record of violence, Diana had grabbed me by the ears and convinced me to say it was self-defence if we were ever caught. It's the only way we'd avoid jail, she'd insisted. Hugh committed a murder-suicide — became my truth. Diana and I were child prodigy's with stellar records so there was no reason to doubt us without substantial evidence. We had bruises and broken teeth as proof of Hugh's abuse. The letters that I had sent to my father detailing our suffering had also proven useful. With no signs of being threats to society, we were left alone after a year of invasive investigation.