What I Am

Magdeline and I stared down the dark staircase that had just opened itself to us. We walked slowly down the thin stone stairs, the pebbles broken off them tumbling downward. Once we reached the bottom, once again those small balls of light appeared, illuminating the walls between each corner. The room was big, roughly the size of a two story suburban house. In contrast to the halls we past to get here, there was nothing in here that gleamed royalty. All the walls, floor, and ceiling were made of the same rough stone of the ruins below us, only these stones were a much darker shade of grayish yellow. There was not even a semblance of any artisan craft along the stone surfaces; every wall was completely rough with no carved patterns or details. Along the walls, dark wooden tables were scattered about, some broken or fallen over. On the tables and ground, books, paper and strangle looking apparatuses were laying about. At the very center of the room, there was a large circular marking with different shapes and characters drawn within it that were faded. A metal brace with a broken latch was attached to the floor at the very center of the room.

A foul odor suddenly hit my nose, and I looked at the far end of the room to see its source. There laid the bodies of a dozen people, all decayed. Many of them were spread across the edge of the back wall, but one was laying at the edge of the circular marking. I approached the scene, noticing that some of the corpses had been dismembered, their limbs or torsos completely separated from other parts of their bodies. Dark stains of old blood cast like shadows under them. I looked down at the only corpse that was not against the wall, which was also one of the only ones that was still intact. I looked upon the dead man's face realizing the horror of the scene, his face nearly skeletal, but had just enough tissue left that I could not miss it; he had carved his eyes out while he was alive. Upon his shoulder was a short, dark stump, presumably where an extra appendage would have sprouted.

I looked back at Magdeline, and from where I stood something else had clicked into place. This room felt far too familiar, not just to the man within me, but also to me. It was somehow a shared memory between us. Magdeline seemed to have a face of shock, as if she realized something horrific. As I approached her, I found myself in front of the rusty metal brace, right at the center of the circle. Then it suddenly became clear; this circle was once made of black flames, the same one I had seen in my dream. I looked at Magdeline and her figure resembled that of the same figure I had seen standing far outside the circle. I stared at the faded marks and knelt over them. Out of curiosity, I rubbed my fingers against the detailed characters.

 A wave of memories washed over me in an instant. I recalled the two boys I was friends with as a kid while we were playing on top of that hill by the river, only now I no longer saw them as friends. They were pushing me around and saying heinous things to my face, not letting go of me. I tried to shove one of the boys back, but he pushed me and I tumbled down the hill and into the mud where the river met the dirt. I looked up at them, their faces obscured by sunlight, and I slowly got up and pitifully crawled up the steep grassy surface as they laughed.

It was a different day and I stood atop the hill, walking home alone this time, but not for very long. The two boys pushed me from behind and I fell to the dirt. I looked up at them and they laughed and continued spouting horrible words. Something came over me, taken aback by how beautifully blue the sky was that day, and I felt the need to give its beauty contrast. I kicked the boy's shin closest to me and he collapsed. Then I stood up, grabbed his shoulders and shoved him down the hill. In the moments after, the boys friend was suddenly running down the dirt path, crying for someone's help. I looked down to the river, streams of red trailing into the water. The boy's head had landed on a rock, and his blood was spilling into the river. Suddenly, I found myself at home, crying into the arms of my mother about a boy who fell into the river. I hid in my room as my mom tried to diffuse the angry voices downstairs, voices that I finally recognized. It was the voices of the parents whose kid I had just left for dead. The sounds of fighting ensued right outside my bedroom, and once it stopped, I opened the door and looked down the stairs. The parents of the boy had left with the front door still wide open, and my mom laying at the bottom of the stairs.

By my early twenties, I had moved to the city for work and those countrysides were long behind me. My mother was dead at this point, though I remembered taking care of her in her paralyzed state up until her untimely death. I looked at the note on my nightstand that my mother had written a long time ago, realizing that I never made peace with the parents of the kid I murdered. It was an empty feeling that haunted me now and for days to come, and I had no one to talk to. I left the countryside to forget the atrocity of my sin, but to think they would come catching up to me. It was no wonder that man who passed me looked so familiar; he was the father of my childhood bully. As he choked me out and my vision began to blur, I saw tears in his eyes as the pressure around my neck relieved. I defended myself and kicked him off. Any sane person would have ran or talked it out, yet I stuck around, beating the old man until he was black and blue. He looked up at me, blood dripping from his nose and mouth, barely able to breath. I did not go to work that day, but instead ran back home to the roof of my apartment building. I would come here sometime to clear my mind, but this time I came here to clear it for good. It began to rain as I thought of everything I could have done better. Talking civilly with the boy's father, not running from the countryside, facing the boy's parents and asking for forgiveness, even just never shoving the boy back, but I was beyond that now. That child is dead and his father might die too now, and it was all my fault. I remembered the look on the father's face as he began to let go of my neck. It was like he had forgiven me right then and there in the midst of his grieving. I had one last memory, the wind rushing in my face as the ground closed in on me.