Arsenic Weather by Darla Cathilde Cutherford
I am as cold as the moonlit snow that drifts onto a frost-covered grave. I am the reason she is in a casket underground. She was the bane of my existence and a hollow, shallow piece of trash. Now, I live in a storm-colored cell. All I do is avoid the rest of the prison population and read an eternal supply of paperbacks.
I got sentenced in 2019. I was only fifteen at the time and am now twenty. My family completely disowned me. They never come to visit me. Each phone call I have made is a dead end.
“Charlotte, you are dead to me!” my mother screamed as the cops led me out of the mansion. My father glared and kept silent. I was arrested for the murder of Katrina Haze. I killed her in my bedroom when my parents weren’t home. I called 911 and turned myself in. My parents arrived at the house just as the cops were escorting me away from the crime scene. Blood stains and yellow tape and a teacup full of poison. They hate me forever now.
I have many years ahead of me filled with walls and text and dreams of portals that lead me out of the grim cell and into brightly-lit sanctuaries. Flowers as red as wounds, windswept beside a picket fence. A green lawn and a sky as blue as the skin of someone drowned in a pool. I don’t care for the world outside of the prison. All I want to do is read and dream of liminal spaces. I’m glad I don’t have a cell mate. If I did, they would probably end up like Katrina. For years, my rage has festered like a creature trapped in a basement, throwing itself against a bolted door trying to get out. I cried oceans and longed to construct chandeliers out of my teardrops.
Adolescence was a hard road, and I don’t regret the fucked up decision I made in my freshman year of high school. It’s not like I ever wanted a job or a love life or further education. I spent junior high wanting to run out the doors of the school, sprinting until I was out of breath. Away from Katrina, away from her tittering acolytes, away from the classrooms that seemed to suck the air out of my lungs. Katrina Haze transferred to my school in eighth grade. Her eyeliner was like black wings at the corners of her eyes. She had hair dyed purple and a vacant glare. Bow-shaped lips always painted a dark color. Katrina was obsessed with being thin and looked down on everyone who wasn’t skinny. She terrorized anyone that she found weak, inadequate or lacking in any way. I was one of her favorite targets. I remember the first time she ever spoke to me. We were passing by each other on the way to class. She said, “Charlotte Elizabeth Taylor, lose weight!” I thought, who is she? And how does she know my full name? It must have been an old acquaintance of mine who told her. I’m sure their conversation was callous and spiteful. I didn’t reply to her, but felt glum once I reached math class. I learned later from overhearing conversations at school that she transferred from somewhere in Seattle. Her family spoiled her rotten. She had too many followers on her vapid, depthless Instagram. She sometimes smoked and had once been arrested for shoplifting.
We had English class together in freshman year of high school. By then, she had been making my life a living hell with endless comments about my weight and my acne. She stole my clothes from the locker room. She wrote hate messages on pieces of scrap paper and left them on my textbooks and in my locker. As we were sitting at our school desks, studying James Hurst’s short story, The Scarlet Ibis, Mr. Woods received an urgent phone call in the middle of class. He stepped outside the room to take the call. As soon as Katrina noticed his absence, she also noticed an opportunity to tear into me. She was sitting at the desk behind me. She tapped me on the shoulder with a pen. I turned around. She leaned forward, her face close to mine, her eyes lined in black, pupils dilated. “Slit your wrists,” she whispered. A boy sitting nearby laughed as he covered his mouth. I punched her in the face. Her mouth filled with blood as I relished the shock in her wide eyes. Mr. Woods returned into the room after hearing the din of raised voices and urgent calling of his name.
“She hit me!” Katrina shrieked.
“Charlotte, go to the principal’s office!” Mr. Woods commanded.
“She just told me to kill myself!” I screamed at him. Before he could reply, I walked out of the classroom and accepted the principal’s punishment of suspension. He decided that me and Katrina needed to be in separate English classes. A few months later, I discovered that Katrina had developed a cocaine habit. I heard two jocks discussing it during gym class. When they noticed me listening intently, they asked me, “What are you looking at, weirdo?” I shook my head and sauntered away.
One late afternoon, next to the school buses, Katrina walked up to me. I rolled my eyes and pulled my earbuds out, interrupting the Talking Heads song I was listening to. “What is it this time, you stupid cunt?” I asked her.
“I can see why you would say that. I’m very sorry for making fun of you this past year. I don’t think it was right of me, and I feel guilty.”
Pathetic. Suddenly, an idea sparked in me like a red beacon in a dark cavern. It only took me a couple of seconds to jump to the conclusion that Katrina should die. So I fabricated a lie that would lure her into a trap. I can’t believe she bought it. I said, “You know, whatever. It’s in the past now. I want to ask you something, though. I heard some guys say you do cocaine now. Is that true?”
“Uh, yeah! It’s like my favorite thing to do now. I need to get more.”
“I’ve tried it myself,” I lied. “I have some at my house. You want to come over and get high?”
“Sure,” Katrina said. We decided to take the bus up the hill to the Tudor mansion I lived in.
To this day, I have no idea why she apologized for all of the things she said and did. I don’t know why she was stupid enough to believe that I would sincerely forgive her. I wonder what the last thing she thought of was before I killed her.
The mansion I once lived in was once owned by the Mulvenna family. They were a family of four, a husband and wife with two daughters. Sinead and Mathilde. Sinead committed suicide by slitting her throat while sitting at her vanity table. Later, Mathilde died when the cops showed up outside the estate, accusing her of the murders of Jamie Frances and Stormy Hale. She shot herself in the head. Unlike me, she was desperate to avoid prison. She killed them on a hilltop at Cliff Park and a witness her saw her in that area had turned her in. The police had also received tips that she was involved in other dangerous, homicidal situations. Her parents sold the house to mine and they moved away from the city. It was a more exciting house than the one we lived in before.
Mathilde Mulvenna was an enigma to me. I found her journal in a hidden compartment and was enamored by her prose, about the dead speaking to her from underground, her addiction to methamphetamine, and the glimpses of a ghost with glitter tears gliding down her cheekbones. The ghost, according to her, was haunting the same foyer I walk into every day. I didn’t ever see the ghost until right after Katrina died. Sinead and Mathilde (I recognized their faces from true crime blogs and news headlines) were standing beside the ghost with tears of red glitter blood. She is still anonymous to me. But before I get to that, here’s what happened in Katrina’s last moments on earth. The bus let us off on Grove Street. We walked up to the door and let ourselves inside.
I told Katrina my parents weren’t home, which gave me the opportunity to carry out my plan. I led her into my room. “Where’s the coke?” She asked.
“Just a minute, let me go to the other room to get it,” I said.
Instead of cocaine in the other room, there was chloroform in a cloth. I kept it hidden in case I needed to use it someday. I returned to my bedroom and rushed at Katrina as fast as I could, pressing the cloth over her face. I stifled her screams and her protests. She went limp. I tied her to the bedpost. I left her there, unconscious, while I went downstairs to fill a teacup of water with powdered arsenic. I sprinkled in many spoonfuls. I went back upstairs and forcefully poured the water down Katrina’s throat. I slashed it and laughed as her blood gushed all over me. Once I realized she was dead, I was startled by three people standing over me. Sinead and Mathilde Mulvenna. A girl with bleeding glitter eyes. My mouth dropped open. I suddenly knew that ghosts are real. They didn’t say anything. They just smiled at me beatifically and nodded their approval before they vanished. I decided to call 911 and tell them what happened, unafraid to do time. Now I am here and I feel a strange sense of peace. I only leave my cell to eat or watch the occasional TV. I keep to myself so I don’t have to use my claws.
I don’t believe in purgatory, but I wander through a garden of it every night in dreams. I love the liminal spaces that seem boring to some, like the concrete parking garages, roadsides, riversides, waterparks and red doors of backrooms. Sleeping in my cell at night is a divine escape from reality. I dream of strangers with blurred features in unfamiliar houses, letting me kneel in front of a TV to gaze at flickering images. None of it ever makes sense. The screen shows a golden key, a wrought iron fence, a pink, bloodstained room. Many would say that I’m an evil bitch and that I’m forever doomed by now. But I’ve found that the mind can conjure a paradise out of a hell. My life was always hell before prison, and of course, prison is hellish, too.
So I transcended that in my mind, willing myself into different dimensions, fictional kingdoms, places full of foliage and blooms, where the sun never dies and the sky never screams. I’ve lost my ability to cry or care when I’m taunted. I shut down my emotions. I write all over my walls. Outside in the prison yard, I watch a group of birds circling a piece of animal carrion on the ground. I peer through the fence, watching them eat the dead thing, their black wings spreading as they fight over it. A fight breaks out between two inmates. They are at each other’s throats, attempting to strangle each other. Guards intervene and threaten them both with solitary confinement. I smile placidly. I wonder what the birds are eating. I see one woman crying silently in the corner of the chain-link fence. Another is on the outdoor phone, promising whoever she’s talking to that she’ll follow the conditions of her probation when she’s released. Nobody addresses me. Once it’s time to go inside, I’ll crawl into another world through the wall. Somewhere pretend, but ideal. I’ll stare at that wall until I see it turn to woodlands or meadows. I’ll stare at the ceiling light until it becomes a sunburst and my bed becomes a moor beneath my tired body. In my mind, I can go wherever I please, even if I’m locked up and damned. I can live inside of books. Pretend I’m sitting in a cottage or a gazebo. I can ignore the real world and live in an illusion, if I please.
I don’t miss what I left behind. I feel calmer since I got incarcerated.
I saw Katrina as a problem that needed to be eliminated, and I did the eliminating.
