She combed her fingers through her hair, chewed on the cap of her plain boring black pen. There was nothing around to distract her mind, her sight getting blurred and making black spots out of the latin words laid before her.
"This seat is taken." Kenna didn't bother to look up, still acting on her reherased scene of studying while she, in realitly, was allowing her mind to simply wander aimlessly. Â
It reminded her of the critical moans of the windowpanes when thunders rumbled outside, casting the god’s wrath upon mere mortals with his unyielding tempest sweeping the shore, dragging and drowning secrets in the boundless ocean. It reminds her of the way she covered her eyes, ashamed of the fear that such natural and inevitable act, caused her.
It made her want to cover her eyes, for the same wrath was constrained, housed inside her bones and came bursting at her joints, staining the world she knew with crimson and and rimmed rose, like the refined wine her parents savoured in the evening before.
And in the static, sound moment, she felt it — she remembered the discussion in which she was barely interested, half listening, half lazily running her pen on the edges of a library book, the question that only then she could understand the weight and meaning in her life.
Why do people kill?
It was in the tip of her tongue, the answer. Her shaken hand printed, claiming that profane work as hers, binding her soul and spirit to it. It was a mess, she was a mess. The contrast of two states of the deteriorated, poor human flesh and mind — with the only difference that Kenna, murderous, corrupted, guilty, would clean up herself, get cleaned up, and start again.
She wasn’t.
A laugh ripped through her throat, parted her dried lips. Euphorically, madly. She felt the thrilling curse run through her veins, she could see, enlighted, spared from clouded judgement, the why of the whole question. Â
Well, of course, it was a simple answer. Laid there, exposed like a literal corpse, spasming and holding to her last whims of a possible life. The tips of her hair soaked in the viscous matter sticked to her face, trailed, like war paint. Blood clinged to, she noticed. She could notice so many things.
Why do people kill?
To feel like god.
How do you justify, though, such a violent act? Mutilated, ripped, choked in her own blood. Kenna Pearson was thirteen, and had red half moons of nails from rusted blood that she didn’t care to rinse out. It tasted viciously metallic every time she lead her fingers to her mouth, to accomplish with her usual mannerism of biting her nails. It was a simple reminder of why she had the spotlight lit over her head, and disgust scattered all over people’s face when eyes were averted from her.
Kenna Pearson was thirteen, and she was a murderer. Thirteen and would never measure nor suffer the extension of her acts. Killed someone for the mere caprice, killed someone because she could. They claimed an accident, a fight between two girls that ended up as an unfortunate event for one of them.
Her dad cleaned his hands, spread his his fingers with his palms turned down against the fabric of his expansive tailored trousers. It’s the fight for survival, he said. The stronger will always win.
She was sixteen, and the rumours started to tune down. The inconsequent act that had turned her into a monster in a school skirt and tied up hair with matching ribbons, started losing shape and form. Took her three years, three years and a considerable amount of money to fully absorb and understand, once for all, that she never really cared. At all.
Human beings are fragile things anyway.
Now those heels of hers, clicking against the marbled floors, resonate with more intensity; and people only phantom that she has, indeed, a heavy weight to carry. She clutches at her books, tightly against her chest, painfully heaving through the grip.
Why such fascination towards something dead?
She only has an affinity for dead things. Dead languages, dead cultures, dead myth, dead rituals. Dead and Death. Greeks and Romans had a crude, raw view of the world that she, even speaking fluently both equally dead languages and sharing a keen dedication to the matters of both cultures, could never grasp its concept.
The world would be so pleasant to live in.
The bench had never been used by any other couple with eager mouths and burning finger since she had claimed as hers; with silent stares and wicked twist of her ever puckered lips. Kenna flipped through the pages, absentmindedly — that was not what she was aiming for.
Four minutes, he was always on time.
He came, with his hoard of friends, composed, for her, by one acquaintance, his ever disposable companion, and two other insignificant paws. Paws, nonetheless, that had their use in the game. He came, and obliterated anything else. From the arc of his bowed lips, and his messy bundle of curls. She could perfectly draw him, or paint him, or even patiently expatiate about him. It was profoundly disturbing, but she didn’t have better judgment of character to identify such thing.
But there was a things diverging from the perfect picture.
Restless eyes and anxious twisting palms discoursing through the open fields, acknowledging things that, for them, passed unnoticed to the naked eyes. They were misaligned, broken for the united formation they had constructed, and yet, they seemed bound by an invisible string.
And when his eyes met hers, she would understand what she had recognized shadowing the bottom of his orbs; later that night, the realization had became undone. The cards had been turned, her opportunity shown.
