I’m Cam. I have a nine-year-old kid, a sweet wife, and a job I love. It seems perfect. But as with everything this ideal, it didn’t last long.
Our marriage started failing with the birth of our son. As much as I don’t want to admit it, she just wasn’t the same after James. Something in her just.. disappeared. It has left a void that is now consuming her. She stopped cracking jokes or laughing, it has been ages since I’ve seen her smile. She just isn’t the jovial and caring person I had married.
She stopped caring for James and was very cold towards him. Postpartum depression? Maybe, who knows? I’ve always tried being kind to her and to understand her but honestly, I’d be lying if I said I still love her new self as I loved her before.
James was such an adorable kid. He’s so amenable and easy to handle! He never disobeyed me. We spent lots of time together, we go fishing every Saturday, we make snowmen(?lol) every time it snows and for some goddamn reason he’d always name it “snow.”
Monday morning though, she woke up and told me our son was possessed and was trying to kill her. For the first time in a million years, I saw emotion in her usually robotic face. I could see the fear in her eyes but then I looked at James. He looks so meek and timid.. he could never.
It took me two hours to reassure her that our son isn’t trying to kill us. Well, she was never really convinced though– she keeps looking at James every second they were in the same room. She completely stopped sleeping and talking, and she refused to eat with us. She was turning into a fucking zombie.
I looked after James for three whole months, and nothing strange happened. Just when I thought she was loosening up a bit.. this happened.
I was woken up by her wails, she was in the kitchen; with a blood-stained knife in her hand and with James on the floor. Her eyes had a mixture of anger and fear that sent shivers down my spine. I felt like I was looking at a lion that was released from harrowing captivity. She was unhinged. She started breaking things and she just wouldn’t stop yelling.
She started to slow down, all of a sudden. Then a moment later, she was struck with terror. She froze and then promptly fell to the floor, staining it with her blood. There he was, James. The poor little boy, standing there and looking at what he has done. He was filled with remorse. He fell on her and started crying profusely.
He then looked at me, his eyes filled with pure wrath. Before things could get worse, I took him by his neck and… I did it. Strangely enough, I felt nothing. No penitence, no guilt, no remorse. Plain nothingness, as if what I did was as just normal as drinking a cup of tea or brushing your teeth. It was so.. easy to do that. Even when I saw life slowly drain out of his eyes, I did not once feel sad about what I was doing.
Out of the corner of my eyes, I could still see her breathing. Ah fuck, he couldn’t even do the one thing he was supposed to, he absolutely deserved what he was getting, he was the reason all this happened. He deserved it all along.