Scabbed Heart

[Melusine]

8 AM: A HUNDRED OF DAYS AGO
When Willow arrived to the island, she didn't expect a lot things. To be honest, other than a hospital, Willow didn't want anything else when her teacher's brain splattered against the walls of the building.

So, she had been deeply disappointed when there wasn't anything of the sort here. There just was some type of nostalgia associated with hospital. Maybe it had to do with her stay there, or maybe she just enjoyed the sterile floors and walls and personnel and feelings, but as much as she hated it, the hospital was her home.

She had gotten in troubles for that, actually. One time, Mom was decided to make dinner and Willow wasn't really in the mood to eat alongside her. Her cooking was bad, to say the least, and Willow preferred eating the salad she had made for lunch. You know, because leftovers are the best and because wasting was a bad thing.

The conversation went something like "Hello daughter that I hate and that I want to see die, would you want to eat this meal? I totally didn't spit in it while you weren't looking." The saccharine robotic tone of her mother was a cruel constant in her home, and she hated it. If she could just be honest and say the three words that Willow wanted to hear, maybe all of this wouldn't have had happened. Maybe Willow wouldn't be so bad at killing herself if her mother could just admit that she hated her.

Willow's response was said with same level of energy of her mother. It was the three words that her Mom did not want to hear.

"I want to go home."

Home being, of course, the hospital. The sting on Willow's cheek and the tears in her mother's eyes quickly became a reminder that she hated her.

12:24 PM: DURING SOME NIGHT
The wet slumber that Willow craved wasn't the same here. It was painful, raw, disgusting. It was what she deserved, and she loved it as much as she hated it. Her feelings weren't meant to be controlled so when Sierra's rugged face smashed against the rocks below the cliff, Willow couldn't help but send her free hand crawling.

It was just that.

It would have been nice not to have been alone this time. Katrina wasn't as much as Sierra. The buttons that she pressed didn't create the same pleasant sounds with Katrina. Sierra was a piece of work that had come undone underneath two fingers and it was quite fascinating to see. The deconstruction of Sierra was also a swift one. Maybe in a better world, Willow would have been the pawn and Sierra would have been the queen. Instead, they were simply playing for the opposite team.

It was nothing more than that.

2:21 AM: PROM? WAS IT PROM? I STILL FEEL HIS HANDS ON ME PLEASE-

She had been crying for hours.

Or maybe thirty minutes at best, but it felt like hours.

The shower didn't help so she resorted to Mom's stash of various drugs. If Mom didn't want her to die, she wouldn't let those things lay around the condo. Her hands wandered across the bottles. There wasn't anything she liked or recognized. Quetiapine was a hard ban. Xanax was also gone. The only things left was the fucking Zoloft that did nothing and the Prozac that made her vomit.

Both things that Willow could do on her own with a little effort and quick hand.

It was worthless, her hands searched deeper. There had to be something in there she could use. If Mom was truly sick, she wouldn't be doing this to her. It didn't make sense! It didn't. Why was there drugs laying around? For who? Dad? He was fine. He was fine.

So it was Mom. Mom wasn't fine. She had never been fine in all the years that Willow had known her which were surprisingly a lot less than Willow's actual age.

She wasn’t a Mom, but Willow kept calling her that as a habit from a past that nobody gave a shit about. Willow didn’t know the actual term to call her. Tormentor would be too abject. Life giver would be too on the nose. She didn’t know and she didn’t care. It didn’t matter as much as Willow had stop mattering. Why keep a child if you can’t even fucking look at her in the eyes when she begs for death?

Why was nobody listening to her? Wasn’t it clear enough that she was sick? Why did nobody care? She was dying every day a little bit more than the last and nobody ever fucking said anything. Even when her teacher had caught her sneaking out of class with a scalpel, they didn’t say anything god fucking dammit.

There was something wrong with this world and Willow would find it.

CURRENT TIME?
The tree had been a location she had wanted to visit for quite some time now simply because of its name. No, it couldn’t replace a hospital, but it could do the same job of hosting Willow as she waited for something.

Plus, there was always the fact of the shoes could be useful.

Willow wasn’t a fashionista or anything. If you asked her the difference between wool and cotton, she would probably answer something like “yes.” However, when she saw the shoes that were stuck to the tree, Willow knew exactly what they were.

They were from the 70’s. Just like the movies, at least. While Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen probably contributed to some type of myth related to the shoes. But the point is, they were iconic.

Weird platforms that you were not sure what was the material since they could be both plastic and wood. Things that looked like sandals made from leather. Boots that were more chaps than anything else.

You know, the deal with the 70’s fashion taste. As she approached the tree, she couldn’t help but see the shoes before the bloodbath. Whoever was the person laying against the tree, Willow didn’t recognize them. The trauma that was done to their face was… less than ideal. It looked like gunshots, but she couldn’t be sure after what she was saw with the boy and the rock.

People really put a lot of efforts into killing themselves. Willow was still surprised. A rock? She tilted her head when she saw the body. That was a lot. The cliff was right there. You could just have stepped off and the rocks and the water below would have done the job for you. Perhaps, it had to do with the dramatics of it all. A rock was quite more interesting than a fall.

Willow didn’t know about it, but she didn’t want to dig up her brain for information she didn’t want to know. Even if she were curious, she had learned quite early on not to fester on it. The body in front of her was a complete mystery because of the lack of it. It was just gunshots. One or two or three or even more to the face. It was that simple. It could have been a mercy kill, a revenge kill, a random kill, or even a thrill kill. There were many options even in the simplest of kills.

Which led to Willow’s second mystery and it was the one of Lori. While the two girls weren’t acquainted by all means, they did know each other. Everybody knew the Lori. She just was that type of girl who tried really hard. Willow never quite grasped what she was trying to do, but there was some type of admiration for the efforts, you know? The attempts became more important than the actual successes, well lack-of, of the girl. It wasn’t hard to see that Lori was trying very, very hard and that she was also very, very bad at it.

It was a sad story that was said and rehearsed by people for years. It had been the center of so many plays and songs and movies and books and other things that Willow stopped counting after the masterpiece, Bring It On (2000). At least Lori’s face was still somewhat intact compared to the other’s person, so there, she got a win in the end. Willow smiled as she stared at Lori’s twisted face. The girl had finally scored something for her other than some kills and a quarantine from makeup, and Willow smiled at the cheerleader.

She bent down and searched for the nearby camera. There was always one near. It was a constant that didn’t make Willow break her own fingers over. People were watching constantly, but instead of bringing up fear or shame to her, Willow found comfort within it. As long as the cameras were rolling were as long as Willow would be immortalized, and it felt good to be immortal.

There was some type of invincibility that came with the cameras. Once you accepted them within your life, there wasn’t much they could do to hurt you. They recorded everything and anything indiscriminately. Maybe it was more the last part that felt good to Willow, and not the former. The fact that everyone was put on the same level and they were all stuck there for the remainder of their lives was just what Willow needed to finally be happy with herself.

Or maybe not.

She shrugged at her own thoughts as she put her fingers against the underside of Lori’s rotting skin. You would expect a corpse to be cold, but here, it had never been warmer. The flies that crawled out of her nostrils were not what Willow had wanted, but they were another audience in this macabre play.

The camera was still there. It wouldn’t go away. The only thing that would go away were the other cameras that were mysteriously vanishing. Maybe Willow was imagining it, or maybe she had been too observant, but things were starting to clean up. A part of her had assumed she was going a little crazy because of the bodies that started to pile up everywhere, but there was a distinct lack of cameras in some places.

Not that it mattered, Willow didn’t have anything to do with that information other than to speculate. It was a nice way to spend the time. To comment things as they happened, to ask and to answer questions that went through her mind. For example, her latest train of thoughts was centering around these bodies. Willow bit the inside of her cheeks. She had a good idea.

16:52 PM: IT’S NOT HOME
Fire was a great tool to dispose of evidence.

There was always the problem of cleaning up behind, but the flames ate away the big chunks. Plus, there was always the cathartic feelings that came after the destruction. There had to be a scientifical name for that phenomenon.

Willow wasn’t a pyromaniac, but it felt good to do just that. Pretend that she was one with a lighter in hand and a flower she hated ever since that girl had commented on it. She hated it so fucking much. She wanted to put her hands around her neck and wring out the life out of her like a pig to the slaughter, but Willow restrained herself.

Instead, she walked home until she didn’t need to.

It’s not like anyone would notice her missing out on that English class. She was failing everything anyways, nobody cared if she failed more, they only cared if she failed less. The walk was tragically not an eventful one. She saw nobody worth mentioning.

She had managed to finagle her way into a man’s car by leaning just a little bit forward and biting her lip at the right place. It was easy. The sweet girl who’s only problems were an inability to cope with criticism and her own emotions was a fun act to play at school, but in the real world, Willow knew better than that.

Maybe if she had stuck to one role long enough, she could have learned to love it. Fuck, she could even have learned how to be a little housewife who smiled when she was asked to and then wear nothing underneath an ugly sundress as she carried a kid while her belly was round with another. She could have done that, and she would have been great at it. It was just too easy, there was a cruel lack of challenge within that narrative of painting herself like that.

She also hated the idea of finding someone, go through all these efforts, and then completely depend on them. It wasn’t the type of things Willow would do, or rather, what Willow would want to do. She would still do it if she could because fuck, having a normal life where nobody questioned her would be a godsend. While she knew she didn’t deserve this, she still fantasized a bit about it. A quiet life that didn’t make her feel like absolute garbage every time she was reminded of her constant failures.

It also came with the perk of naming children. She had a list of names ready, but they weren’t anything spectacular. Something like Emily for her first born, because she had to be a girl, and maybe something like Noah for her second born, because he had to be a boy, and then whoever came next, they could fight for whatever names they were given. They would all become the same in the end: the kids after her first daughter.

But as the car ride ended, and Willow smiled to the man whose teeth looked like he ate raw chicken, Willow remembered that she had something to do. After getting his phone number and quietly disposing of it, she made her final stretch toward the condo she was forced to call a home.

It was, to nobody’s surprise, empty. It was always empty. Her parents were more roommates than anything else at this point, and they deserved no other titles. Willow did everything herself: cook, clean, talked with the landlord, with the repairmen. She did everything other than pay the bills than she knew she would never need to pay anyways.

Willow locked the door behind her. Last time she kept it unlocked, her parents walked in at the worst time. Her fingers hooked her backpack off her body and set it against the granite counter. It was cold to the touch, almost reassuring. She would cook something after this. She drummed her nails against it, feeling the impact through her fingers. She sighed as the feeling flowed through her, a smile digging its way through her cheeks.

She emptied her back on the counter. Things fell out almost rhythmically. It sprinkled down and around the granite as Willow stared, impassively, waiting for her queue. The rose fell and she smiled. It would have been funny if she had forgotten it at school, but also kinda embarrassing. Her hand wrapped around the edge of the canvas and then she looked at the discarded items.

She stepped carefully toward the bathroom. The bath, the center piece of the room, was unsurprisingly dirty. It was a perfect cover up. She left the piece fall to the bottom of the empty bath. She pulled out her phone, covering with glitz and sparkles. Her voice was clear and simple:

“Siri. Play Riptide.”

She set it aside.

“I was scared of dentists and the dark.”The singer started.

“I was scared of pretty girls and starting conversations.” Willow continued, mumbling out of the bathroom.

Almost dancing, she headed toward the kitchen. She reached her hand toward the fire alarm. She yanked it off the wall and then she twisted the cap open. The batteries removed from the socket and put beside her backpack, she walked back toward the bathroom. She came back at the right moment with the lighter fluid in her hands.

“Is this movie that I think you'll like,” she said, her voice covering the singer’s, “This guy decides to quit his job and heads to New York City.”

She took the cap off the lighter fluid bottle. She could drink it if she wanted to. Would her parents find her this time? They shouldn’t. Weren’t they on a trip or something? Did it even matter if they found her, dead within her eaten by the flames? It wouldn’t, so she didn’t do it.
“This cowboy's running from himself.” It wasn’t Willow’s favorite song, but she always wanted a love story like that. She wasn’t sure if she were the narrator or the girl, but if she could, she would be both. “And she's been living on the highest shelf.”
With a calculated but reckless move, she poured the liquid down the painting. The narrator continued his bit as Willow threw the rest of the bottle in the bathtub. As she wrestled for the light and a piece of paper, she looked at herself in the mirror.

Singing her head out as she threw the burning piece of paper, there was three words coming through her lips as the rose caught on fire.

“Lady, running down…”

CURRENT TIME CURRENT DATE RIGHT NOW OR NEVER
“…to the riptide! Taken away to the dark side!”
She said turning Lori’s head toward the camera. Her eyes forever gazing at the camera that recorded her death.

Perfect. Lori had finally achieved something. Immortality wasn’t something to spit on when you were dead. There was something priceless about what was happening to them, and it wasn’t the new experiences they were living through.

“I wanna be your left hand man,” her proposal hitting deaf ears but she continued, singing to nobody. “I love you when you're singing that song and I got a lump in my throat 'cause you're gonna sing the words wrong.”

She moved to the next body, the one with the mangled face.

“I just wanna,” she mumbled, but her voice started to get louder, “I just wanna know.”

She wasn’t sure if she were the narrator or the item in this case. Did it matter? Absolutely not.

“If you're gonna, if you’re gonna stay.”

Didn’t she say those words to everyone that had left her? It was fascinating how life imitated art despite any interventions of either. Truly, it was something Willow could write down in a history book.

“I just gotta, I just gotta know because I can't have it, I can't have it any other way.”

The body didn’t need a set up. It needed more a set down. The tree was getting in the way of its greatness, and it made her upset. It didn’t deserve the credit.

“I swear she's destined for the screen,” she said, softly. She still wasn’t sure if she were singing about herself or someone else or the world or nothing. But it was a nice song, and it made her feel good. She missed Katrina so fucking much. She would have killed to have kept a piece with her, but the cat ears were good enough. “Closest thing to Michelle Pfeiffer that you've ever seen, oh…”

She dragged the body across the rocky terrain. It was exhausting, obviously. She felt a layer of sweat forming beneath her layers of cloth. But it was part of the art, she needed to memorialize this for the generations to come. Even if Willow’s life had stop mattering years ago, it didn’t mean the ones of Lori’s and the others didn’t have any worth.

That was the meaning of all this.

To record, to remember, to create, to finish, to find, to realize, to archive, to elaborate, and finally, to witness the true meaning of life.

As she finished to set the body next to Lori with a rock to replace the hole on his face, the announcement started to boom.