Samara felt sorry for the creature.
It tried so hard to look like the people in the city, strove to act like them, sound like them, be one of them. Yet the alienist nature, a miasma of the strange, hung about her. In the film, the characters were either immediately disturbed or outright hostile the moment they set eyes on her. And then…was it easier for her to smile and continue the act, or to finally let go, reveal her veracity, no matter the bloody consequences?
The two leads pressed their backs against the grimy dumpster, holding their breaths, trying not to make a sound.
Woe had pursued them halfway down the alleyway; her dark eyes glinted in the light from the street, the only feature from the stalking, shadowed form. Did she hunt them for food? Sport? Samara believed differently. She’d seen it at high schooclass="underline" the unpopular girls, perhaps first years blessed with neither looks nor ability, following the older or more popular girls like lost little puppies.
Accept me, their faces pleaded. I’m human just like you. If you’d just give me time.
Please, accept me.
Woe chased the couple, just like the lost little girls at high school. But the popular, good looking kids, shitting themselves behind a dumpster, would never give her what she needed. They never do. Her difference hung about her like an aura, an almost physical barrier between the typical and atypical.
All refused to cross it; all paid the price.
Samara’s desk lamp cast a low golden glow across the room, the dark scene on her television almost ruined by the reflection. The ghostly image of herself, curled up in bed with streaks of thick mascara running down her wan cheeks, overlaid the drama in the alleyway. She failed to sink into the fantasy. Her own image anchored her to reality, a constant reminder of the trouble she found herself in, the yet unknown repercussions, the feeling of a lead ball in the pit of her stomach. She even ruined her favourite movie. Her own sense of disparity had spoiled her time to heal.
Samara sat up, ready to turn it all off. If one was forced to ponder all this, better to do it in the dark, to see nothing, rather than witness the ruin.
On the bright screen, her own reflection a veil on the scene, she sat on her bed as Woe reared up beside her.
Samara raised the remote control and clicked the standby button, plunging the screen to black.
For a second, Woe remained, her shape sitting on the bed beside her. The image flickered.
No reflection. Only darkness.
In the bathroom, Samara refrained from pulling the cord that turned on the bright fluoro tube. The mirror of the medicine cabinet reflected only ghosts as she swept it aside, fingers seeking out her prize. Toothbrushes, cans of deodorant, her father’s hair gel. A packet crinkled under her touch. She probed the opening, finding one of many long plastic handles. Samara blindly selected one and brought it close to her face.
She had not lied to her mother. This was art.
Art required tools.
She resisted the temptation to run her thumb across the sharp edge, having done something similar as a child, finding her father’s razor at the side of the bath. So sharp, right? The two blades contained in his razor, held within wires, appeared innocent enough. She’d run her thumb across the innocuous edge, feeling nothing. Then the pain had hit: thin ribbons across the pad of her thumb, blood trickling from the two vents that blurred into a single slash. A subdued agony.
Her replacement tool was still trapped in its plastic frame: unwieldy for intricate work. One could cut, but not intricately carve, in the present state.
She’d brought another tool from her collection, one that could create as well as the brushes and pencils it laid between. The art knife, with its dented metal casing and short triangular blade, lacked the finesse of the razor she sought, yet what it failed in intricacy, it triumphed in destruction.
Samara plunged it deep, prying the cheap, brittle plastic from the metal razor. Snapping the outer casing, she had more work ahead for both blades.
She returned to her open bedroom doorway, having stashed the new acquisition in a fresh envelope. Her father had ditched her painting of Woe onto her desk, so she had no need to paint a fresh guardian. A quick fold and the replacement was hidden away, now stored at the bottom of her art supplies box. They had no call to look in there.
Samara looked down the hallway, considering her next move. It made sense to pass by her parents’ room and visit her sister…minimise the risk. However, it would only take a cry from Kelly for both her mum and dad to come barrelling on top of her in a blind panic. No. Time to think. To plan.
She took a few steps along the hallway, past her now dark and empty bathroom and paused in the open doorway of her parents’ bedroom. They lay in two heaps, side by side. The radio alarm clock on her mother’s bedside table showed just after eleven. Her father snored, probably due to the afternoon beers and the few cans he’d had after coming home. His arm draped over the slumbering form beside him. Her mother laid on her side, facing away, barely tolerating his touch, even in deep sleep. Samara could just make out her face, fitful within her dreams. Did she watch her failures, the pathways cut off by time?
Samara stepped deeper into the bedroom, her body casting a long shadow across the carpet and across her sleeping parents, long and distorted. Pausing at the foot of the bed, she raised the art knife, swaying the triangular blade back and forth. Her father was clearly the more physical of the two, yet his afternoon at the pub would have dulled him. His discovery had surely driven him back to his remaining cans of cold beer.
Her mother, on the other hand, never drank and was a light sleeper.
Samara walked to the other side of the bed, her footsteps light on the carpet. She fidgeted with the art knife, spinning the metal handle between her fingers despite the slight rattle of the blade in the housing. The fingers of her other hand twitched and drummed in the air, the movement somehow offering comfort in light of the hard work ahead.
She looked down upon her mother trapped in the slideshow of sleep. What did she dream? Unemployment? The monthly budget? A daughter who didn’t fit? The twitches and frowns darting across her face belied the mundane visions. She had no idea of terror. The fantastic and horrific had been purposely avoided, and the ladder of suburbia, no matter what the rung, provided a step away from real fear.
Samara plunged the art knife into her mother’s neck just below the jawbone.
She expected a Hollywood reaction: her mother’s eyes flicking open, a hand shooting to the wound. Her mother’s neck failed to gush and spray, but the blood flowed and spread, creeping through the bed sheets in a gory chromatography. Her eyes half opened, a disturbed sleeper, confused by the sudden interruption. Fingers found the opening and, now slick with blood, fluttered around the wet skin. Her mother released a long sigh, already appearing to go back to sleep.
Samara headed around to the other side of the bed.
Back in the hallway, she fought the urge to return to the bathroom and wash her hands. The blood bothered her, tacky and drying to flakes on her fingers. No matter. She could wash soon. No point cleaning just to get dirty all over again. The logic soothed the itch of her skin.
Kelly had left her bedroom door open. Never a fan of the dark, she preferred the light from the upstairs hallway to shine into her room. Their mother had left the light burning every night, always worried that one would awaken in the early hours and in need of the bathroom, and in the dark somehow trip and break their neck.