There are days I wish it were over. I don’t want to know who I am and I don’t want to face another night. It’s different when the sun goes down. I know and they know and the world just goes on, ignorant.
When I was a kid, I would read every fantasy novel I could get my hands on. I was the skinny kid saving his pennies for the dictionaries on Middle Earth and I was the kid alone on the playground acting out the last epic battle of good versus evil.
Teachers would pull my mother aside and tell her I made other children uncomfortable. They told her the reason other kids picked on me and ridiculed me was because she allowed me to stay in my fantasy world. I’ll give my mother this; as overworked as she was, she stood up for me.
Occasionally she would pick me up early from school, sign me out, and we would have ice cream in the full light of day. I know that she felt it was us against them, but I didn’t know how many battles fronts she was fighting.
She didn’t come home one night. They found her remains three months later, down by Navy Pier. She didn’t die there. The police still call it an open case. The cops that investigated her murder even came around to check on me in foster care. I know she didn’t die easy; it wasn’t quick.
I was thirteen when she died, and foster care was one of the worst things that could have happened. When they tapped on my window and I cried for help, my foster parents didn’t believe me. At one point they institutionalized me for schizophrenic behavior. That was worse because then the bastards could walk right in–the loons invited them in all the time. Nobody questions why a homeless schizoid dies alone–they pack them off to cold storage with a shrug and a “too bad.”
Strange, though, the loons never turned. Never.
I would have won if a weary old priest hadn’t heard my screams one night. He didn’t believe they could crawl along the ceiling and hide in shadows, but he gave me a golden crucifix that has never left me. That stops them, scoffers be damned.
You don’t know how desperate and crazy you can sound when a white clad orderly is standing in the doorway with a straight jacket for you and one of the cursed ones is smiling at you from the ceiling; they would crawl around like flies. I think many of the inmates went crazy after they arrived.
I sleep in the church’s basement now. I do odd jobs, so they let me. I sleep well there, despite the unbelief of the old priest who saved me.
I miss my mother.
I work hard to avenge her. That’s what she did, worked hard. Maybe it will all end with me. Or end me.