Page 1 of The Bleeding Woods

The night I killed my parents, I felt no guilt.

I was fourteen years old, and the tears I cried were a by-product of human hardware.

Humans cry for a lot of reasons. That night, I was stranded on the edge of a snow-slickened highway illuminated only by two upturned headlights and the reddish glow of a friction-fractured guardrail.

Shards of glass were embedded under my skin, sending rivers of red from every incision.

I was cold. I was hurt. I was alive.

They were liars.

I descended the icy slope their car had tumbled down, the pastel ballet shoes on my feet filled with clumps of powdery snow. We’d been headed to a dance recital, and I was about to pirouette my way out of the junior company. The show, in my case, had always extended far beyond the stage.

The car produced a plume of black smoke and orange embers. In the front seats, two mutilated bodies dangled, arms limp, eyes agape, and mouths overflowing with blood and saliva.

My parents.

Liars.

I straightened my spine and brought my eyes skyward. The frigid air froze my tears. The blizzard speckled my hair with glittery white evanescence. The quiet abyss of the cliffside void swallowed me whole, a reminder that darkness was home to all demons born to dwell in it.

The quiet did not last very long.

Sirens raged through the winter winds, and ribbons of red light came right along with them.

Some kind, foolish soul had called the authorities, and it became abundantly clear that I’d have to put on a show tonight after all.

I took my dominant dancing leg and slammed it onto a spire of windshield glass with all my might.

Once it was thoroughly, convincingly impaled, I lay face down near my mother and father.

Despite every emotion their eternally vacant stares made me feel, I willed myself in the direction of grief.

Tears began to trickle, and soon, the trickle became a roar.

I had to play the part, and I had to play it well.

There could be no reason to accuse me of malice, no inkling of how or why I could cause an event like this.

Thankfully, no one dared—no one except my sister, but she could barely form words, what with her sob-ravaged throat making her voice scratchy and incoherent.

Even if I had been swarmed by questions at the time, I wouldn’t have known the answers.

All I’d known then, and all I know now, was that I’d missed a pill.

I lived out the remainder of my adolescence as quietly as possible. Placed in the custody of my grandparents, I kept my head down and my lips sealed. I was good. I was hidden.

Kill them all. Kill them all. Kill them all.

A diabolical thing, my deviant self, grew louder whenever I waited too long to repeat my daily dosage.

It raged violently against the soft pink gel orbs stockpiled beneath my childhood home.

But I was good. I was hidden. Since the night I killed my parents, I’ve kept it under control, and I will continue to keep it under control until—

Oh no.

A sight I knew I’d someday face mocks me like a carnival clown before a crying child.

My inconspicuously unlabeled metallic canister of concentrated control produces not two, not three, but one pill upon being diagonally tipped.

The terrified child hiding behind my heart convinced herself the supply was infinite, but the adult guiding her knew. She always knew.

I give the canister a few desperate shakes, and the puff of air it produces is as good of a laugh as any.

My apartment is a micro-studio one zero above affordable, but right now, it feels infinitely tinier.

The walls are closing in, and talons are tightening around my throat.

The world is burning, and I am burning with it.

Chemicals.

It’s just chemicals. Obnoxiously named, multisyllabic chemicals that no overworked pharmacist in their right mind would bother to investigate.

I’ve investigated plenty and arrived at nothing but dead ends.

If I can take them without question, they can make them without question.

I’ll bring the final dosage to the sleepiest drugstore in the city and act like a customer in need of an immediate refill.

I’ll play the irresponsible twentysomething-year-old who partied too hard the night prior to remember her medicinal needs.

I’ll play innocent. No one pays much attention these days anyway.

We’re all existing in our own pocket dimensions, impatiently waiting for intruders to leave us to our daydreams. I’ll become an intruder, and then I’ll be ushered out.

It could work. It has to work.

I gather my everyday belongings in a flurry of motion. A cell phone, a wallet, and my final pill, sealed in a sandwich bag. I change into a dainty white top, blue jeans, and a pair of kitten heels hoping to look as harmless as I had in my tutu.

My home city is entropy incarnate. As I step into the exhausting frenzy of fast-paced humanity, I am blinded by buttery midmorning sunlight and overwhelmed by every honk, hiss, and conversation within a ten-mile radius. My presence is mousy, so I am bumped into no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

“’S’cuse me, ’s’cuse me—sorry,” I mutter. “Excuse me. Sorry . . .”

No one accepts or returns my apologies. They’re too busy making it big or making it by, and I’m too busy trying not to be bulldozed by someone tall enough to have their own zip code.

It doesn’t work out well. My heel catches on a lifted sliver of cement, and I plummet toward a sea of dried gum and discarded cigarettes.

Ire burns in my veins, but I let none of it seep out.

I cannot let it, not with my dosage flushing away like this.

Silently, with as much control as possible, I rise back to my feet and choose a family-owned drugstore nestled on a street just busy enough to be found.

It borders a far more commercial area, one with bigger, flashier pharmacies.

The mere fact that I’ve chosen this one should come across as an act of rebellion against the capitalist tyranny of the neighboring consumerist hub.

A jingling bell welcomes me inside, and suddenly I am ten steps from salvation.

The woman behind the counter has the squat, plump build of a fairy godmother.

Her hair is lined with highlights to lessen the appearance of the places its melanin has given out, and it sits in the shape of a neatly styled bowl-cut dome.

If not for the white lab coat with her name, Denise, stitched below the breast pocket, I’d have taken her for a librarian whose consciousness has yet to escape the 1980s.

I approach her and shove both hands into my pockets, swaying back and forth on my heels. The casual fidgeting is designed to appear as bubbly nervousness with a side of social anxiety. This is the role I’ve chosen, for now.

“How can I help you?” says Denise, her words riding the tail end of a sharp sigh.

She seems tired. I can work with that. I slip a palm-sized pill canister out from my pocket as quickly as possible. Then, with a sheepish smile, I slide it across the desk.

“Hi. I’m here to grab a refill on my anxiety prescription.”

Her eyes move up and down my body like searchlights over a crime scene. “I’ve never seen you come in before.”

She’s more investigative than I planned on. I pivot.

“I’m new to the area. I know you probably need a doctor’s note, or a fax, or something, but I couldn’t get in touch with my home office this morning, and I really need these,” I ramble, lining up each point with a shivery hand gesture.

“I saved my last pill hoping you might be able to copy and paste it back there. Pharmacies here do that sort of thing, right?”

At her own languid pace, she pulls out a pair of thick eyeglasses and fastens them atop the bridge of her nose. With a purse of the lips, she examines the orb and gives the canister a shake for good measure.

“Do you know the name of the medication? I can’t tell what it is by just looking at it, hon.”

“Um . . .” I sway once more, throwing my gaze to the ceiling. “I’m really not sure. I’m not good with names. It’s not a name brand one, though. I needed it personalized because I’ve got all kinds of allergies.”

“You had it compounded?”

I tilt my head until my ear grazes a shoulder and say, “Compounded?” I know what it means, but few things look as innocent as ignorance.

“Right.” She snorts, smiling with sudden amusement. “Okay. I’ll run it through the system and see what I can do. I will need your general practitioner’s information, though. I really can’t move forward without a prescription.”

“My psychiatrist prescribed them. I’ve been calling her all morning, but she’s, like, seventy, and the original prescription note was handwritten. I’m still living out of boxes and haven’t been able to find it. If I could just get a few pills—even just a week’s worth—I would be so grateful.”

I could get a week’s worth of pills from every pharmacy in the city until I figure out how to properly forge a doctor’s authorization.

For now, I’m hoping that Denise, with her eighties haircut and retro-chic glasses, will be too caught up in nostalgia to criticize my imaginary psychiatrist’s old way of handling patients.

She clicks her tongue, then her pen, to scribble something on the lid of my pill container.

“Get me that note as soon as you can.”

I perk up, but not enough to insinuate excitement. Only relief. Respectful, health-conscious relief. “Of course. Thank you so much,” I say.

She nods, then slides a form layered in triplicate across the counter. “Write down your name and contact information.”

It’s almost too easy. A friendly wave and a farewell jingle from the doorway bell send me back onto the street.

The promise of more pills lingers beyond the threshold between today and tomorrow.

I’d only have to make it through the next twenty-four hours, and in solitude, I could effectively avoid a repeat of what happened on that highway.

The day moves at a snail’s pace, and my senses heighten as the hours pass by.

Lights become brighter. Sounds become sharper.

Smells become individually divided and precise.

Each tick of the clock that hangs above my stovetop is a tock toward complete destabilization.

Destabilization and the dangerous curiosity it comes packaged alongside.

When I was under the age of seven, my parents would crush up my pills and pour the dust into the sugariest cereal possible.

They demonstrated for me once, hiding their lies in plain sight.

After that, they called them vitamins and assured me every growing girl needed her vitamins.

Only on the day of my recital did I find out they weren’t for growing girls at all.

Before the massacre of my parents, I took those pills with a mind made absent by comfort.

Afterward, I took them because I didn’t want to know exactly what kind of growing thing they were for.

Now I feel dangerously close to finding out.

My veins sting as though a string of fiery parasites is rolling within them.

The muscles beneath my skin writhe like the tectonic plates of the earth before a quake.

Everything is an inferno, and despite the horrific discomfort of it all, sinful questions sit cross-legged at the back of my brain: Do I want to know what I am?

Do I want to know how I killed them so easily?

Was it me or the missed dosage that wanted to see my parents splattered across a shelf of ice and snow?

A siren wails in the distance, but my eardrums quickly tune it out.

It is deafeningly loud—loud enough to pull a cry from my throat.

I abandon the window and the overcast sky beyond, slink under my comforter, and pile pillows atop my aching head.

I close my eyes, listening to the gentle rumble of thunder, and beg sleep to steal me.

In any way and every way, I beg for darkness, silence, and freedom from the sensations of my body.

I beg for someone to alleviate the pain, heal my horrors, and make me human.

I hope for someone who doesn’t exist—someone capable of keeping me me.