Valentine's Day Massacre
I wrote this piece because I wanted to have a go at writing a darker piece about a young girl who was driven insane. I find the inner workings of the mind very interesting and wanted to explore the fragility of the human mind.
The words just swirled and swirled round and round inside her head, threatening to burst out of her ears, her eyes, her nose. The letters merged into foul demons; Os stretching their mouths wide to reveal razor sharp teeth, Ws transforming into wings and beating around and around like the steady beat of a drum. The As joined and whirled together to form a horrific darkness that engulfed her until she shrieked. Yet no sound came out and her mouth gaped in a silent scream as her hands found her head and clawed. And still that beat kept pounding, louder and louder and louder. The marching soldiers stomped to the echoes that slammed into her skull. Again and again.
The beat grew to a crescendo and still no sound could escape her lips as her fingernails dug into the soft flesh around her temples. There was a fire, a fire in her mind and the soldiers of the alphabet stamped their feet and gnashed their teeth and chanted the words over and over again circling in closer and closer. And then there they were, lifted by the beating of the wings, until they floated there above the inferno like ghosts from the grave. But they were, they were ghosts and it was her fault. She watched and clawed as they fell, fell into the flames that roared up to greet them. They were gone and NO ONE CARED!
The flames grew and grew, white hot as the rage coursed through her body. They were gone and NO ONE CARED! Her blood boiled and NO ONE CARED! She was alone and there was no one left to care. She, she had left them to die, she was a coward and the beating wings were still pumping. They beat at her skull and finally, finally, they were free. They burst out of her and poured into the white tiled room. The fire boiled into her veins and out through her finger tips and suddenly she found her voice. ‘COWARD! COWARD! COWARD!’ She screamed it over and over again as the blood poured from the sides of her head where her nails had cut to the bone.
And they let her. Let her lie there on the floor, in a pool of her blood until the fire burned out and her voice was too hoarse to utter anything else. But still, the chant went on inside her head, ‘Coward! Coward! Coward!’ It was her fault, all her fault. She had been too afraid to act, too afraid to move and it had been them that had paid the price. She remembered it as though it had been yesterday. Her mother’s sweet, angelic curls bobbing as she turned laughing to her daughter with the auburn locks and shrieked away from her father’s jabbing fingers.
‘Simon! Stop, stop!’ she giggled.
And her father’s handsome face pulled back into a mischievous grin as he chased her down the High Street, yanking her hair playfully and continually jabbing at her ribs with delicate fingers. The little girl skipped along beside them, laughing openly at their stupidity and revelling in the sheer love that was in the air. They were a family and they always would be and nothing could change that. She shrieked as her father snuck up behind her and swept her up onto his shoulders. She smiled down at him as he fiddled with her shoes and bounced her up and down. Her mother felt it was finally safe to come closer and looped her arm through his and the little girl staring at the map of stars above her and she knew then, young as she was, that this was how she wanted to exist; forever in that moment.
There they walked just down the High Street, enjoying the moment and the love they felt for each other. Suddenly a dark cloud descended on the picture, the street lamps were gone, the stars snuffed out and as she fell, she saw the light in her father’s eyes go out. Red paint stained over his chest and she thought vaguely that Mummy would be so angry at him for ruining his best suit but then she looked up and her world was shattered. The gun was still recoiling and the masked figure behind it still facing her father. In that split moment, she looked from the man to her father and heard the scream of horror, of sheer uncontainable despair, echo from her mother’s mouth as she ran to her husband’s side and knew what had happened. He was gone.
Her mother’s porcelain fingers scrambled at the blood staining his chest as though she could stuff it all back in and that’s when the second gunshot sounded and her mother crumpled onto her father and there they lay, with matching holes in their chest and their blood mixing on the pavement. She turned to the man, the man that had torn apart her world and lashed out, she tried to hit him, to hurt him, to kill him but her little arms would not move. She thrashed and thrashed until she went limp and the man turned and ran to the end of the alley and into the darkness of the night beyond. She surfaced from the memory with a sharp jolt and her eyes blinked at the harshness of the light in the white room. But it wasn’t white anymore, oh no, it was red. The blood was splattered up the walls and the gashes in the man’s face below her made it clear that it wasn’t her own. The doctor looked up in agony and found her eyes. He had tried to detain her, tried in vain to sedate her while she had been reliving that night and he had paid.
‘Good’ she thought and she smiled sweetly into his face as she brought her foot down and stomped at those pitiful eyes. He gasped and moved no more. He had died too quickly but, she reasoned, there were still plenty more in the hallway outside and the asylum beyond. She hummed to herself as she walked out into the corridor, bloodied from head to foot, and started swinging with her scalpel.
