Consider this a confession, the only one you’ll ever wring out of me. I was fourteen when I murdered my father and thus the sheriff of this town. I won’t be telling you where I live since not only do I not want any of you sniffing around my home, but I also don’t want to lure any close and have their potential blood on my hands.
I was ten when I realized my father didn’t love me, fairly early as far as most go but not an altogether uncommon occurrence. He was a mean man, most of his ire being directed at me for having caused the death of his wife. It’s never a child’s fault that a mother dies in childbirth, but he had abandoned most of his sense after her death.
She was his everything, even more than his own child. In that, he was a weak man. Before her death they were madly in love, truly inseparable. The old pictures he took down and hid in the attic pictured them smiling and happy, pictured in front of the very house in which I became caged. He’d often speak of her from the top of that staircase, telling me about her smile and her dreams of what we’d become.
She was a dreamer, a real light of this world. Without her he became nothing but darkness.
He hurt me often. Not by raising a hand to me, no he was never a hitter. His abuse came in the name of fixing me. Of fixing the wrong he had created.
At first it was the little things. Tests. He’d lock me in a room for days without food or water. He stopped doing that after my first escape, learning quickly not to tempt the hunger. It would take, and it would take deeply even if I fought against it.
Sometimes days would pass where stings were calm and I’d live just as I had before, like the eye of a storm, but then he’d feed me once more and the cycle would renew. Another meal another test.
Once he’d lock me outside under the heat of the sun so it burned my flesh. He’d force food down my throat that turned my stomach and left me sick and weak for days. Sometimes he’d call the men with the black coats and white collars to come fix me.
Those were the worst. Hours spend chained to a bed, or chair, or radiator. They’d speak in languages I didn’t understand and my father would weep. They’d look at me like I was hell-spawn and I’d answer with animal hisses and growls.
That was after all what they wanted me to be. An animal, a beast. Anything to excuse the wrongs they committed in order to make their drives home less weighted with guilt. If I was an animal then what they did to me wasn’t truly wrong.
Perhaps in the eyes of their God that sentiment held weight.
Four years passed like that. At the tail end of it he seemed to give up hope. He’d lock me away in that cold damp cellar and only take me out to feed. Months passed, years with my only companion being that cold dark and my driving hunger.
I became something different in that dark quiet place. I lost the last of what kept me that little girl I had been. I think he knew that at the end. He had stood there at the top of those steps, the dim light of the single bulb floating above illuminating his sunken features. He was thin, weary, a different man himself.
He was nothing like the man smiling in those pictures and I was nothing like the girl that had been shoved in here before. Two strangers.
He looked down at me without a shred of recognition, a shotgun in his hand. I remembered that shotgun. He had me shoot a squirrel with it once. The thing made me sick for days when he tried to get me to eat it.
I thought that would be the end of me. Fire and lead. Both had been tried before but never together. Never shot. He’d never had the stomach for something like that.
I said nothing as he raised the gun, pointing it at my skeletal frame. I didn’t even move. I just watched him, watched as he tried so hard to feel nothing but ultimately succumbed to his own weakness. The very weakness that forged the both of us.
He didn’t pull the trigger. Instead he dropped the weapon with a low keening sob that wracked his entire body. Even in my youth and inexperience, I knew what it looked like when a man had fully given up. As he sat there crying I felt the first pang of sadness I had in years, and the last I would for years until writing this now. It was then I crawled forward, emerging from the dark to comfort what had once been my father.
He let me. He took me in his arms for the first time in four years and cried into my shoulder. It must have been hours, though I would not know. Time had escaped me long ago in the dark. All I knew was the sound of his heartbeat and the warmth of his body bleeding into my own.
“I just wanted you to live. That’s all I wanted. I just wanted my little girl.” His voice was desolate, empty and broken.
I pulled him closer, burying my face into the warmth of his neck. My stomach throbbed with hunger, my body screaming for an end to the need.
“It’s okay dad, I forgive you.”
But it was a lie. I would never forgive him. Not for what he did. Not when every time I looked in the mirror I saw the same face. Eternally youthful despite my age. Pale as moonbeams and lacking any source of warmth.
Forever I would be the same as I was on the day that I welcomed the pale man into my home. Forever I would have to live with the hunger gnawing at my bones and the cold soaking through my still heart.
And I was so hungry. I was so very hungry.
Dad never seemed to understand that hunger, though I like to think he just didn’t accept it. He didn’t want to think about how his selfish decision to keep me alive led to all this. Before then he was a good man, and perhaps he still was.
I never had the choice to be good. That was taken from me. Over and over again I was forced to give away what made me myself. Every time the hunger called I became less even as I stayed the same.
It wasn’t my fault Mama gave me a river to drink. It wasn’t my fault that the small babe I held in my arms so many years ago had skin as thin as paper and blood that tasted like sweet milk.
Oh, the blood. Oh, the blood.
My father’s was nothing like it, bitter and warm. Perhaps it was that he wasn’t scared. When I held him in my arms that last time he was resigned, ready I think. He didn’t fight even as his body grew cold and mine grew warm. I stole that warmth, took it for my own for the fleeting few minutes it held.
It was only once I felt almost myself again that he breathed his last breath.
He simply died, as I never would. For that, I may never forgive him.