NoBODIES left

The first thing I remember is the smell. Rotten fruit and stale beer, a perfume that clung to my mother like a second skin. Her final gift to me, slurred from a mouth slick with vodka and spite, was a truth I’ve carried in my bones ever since: “You don’t deserve to be born. You should never have been loved at all.”

My father’s truth came later, wrapped in the acrid smoke of a crack pipe. He was a deadbeat prophet, forcing the glass stem into my hands before he’d share. His last sermon, eyes wide and vacant as he convulsed on our filthy kitchen floor, was simpler: “Life isn’t worth anything. You’ll never be loved. You’ll die alone and burn in hell, like everything else.”

My sister, Elara, provided the daily practice for their philosophies. She was the sculptor, and I was her clay—pinched, bruised, and molded into something small and terrified. Her cruelty was creative, a bright, sharp contrast to our parents’ blunt, chemical neglect.

Then, the state came. They saw the squalor, the track marks, the little boy who wouldn’t speak. They called it rescue. They took us away in different cars. Elara, with her tear-streaked, pretty face, went to a home with a golden retriever and family therapy. I went into the system. A cold, gray series of government rooms and calculating stares. The world had confirmed what my family preached: I was unlovable. So, I stopped trying to be anything else. The fear curdled, hardened into something quiet, patient, and utterly ruthless. I learned to be a ghost in plain sight. A NoBODY.

Years later, she found me while i was still commited in a asylum alone and forgotten. Elara. Not my sister—that creature died in my memory. This was a stranger plucked from a glossy magazine. An extroverted success, a social media analyst with a life so vibrant it hurt to look at. A character straight out of a chick flick, all brunch and empowerment. She’d tracked me down, she said. Wanted to make amends profusely apologizing to me for what has happened to me and her and how none of us deserved that treatment and how they both deserved better and she really wishes to fix the past and make ammends complteltly. Her eyes were wide with a performative grief that made my teeth ache.

I smiled. It felt like cracking ice on a pond. I played the part of the damaged, reclusive brother, cautiously accepting her olive branch. She was so pleased with herself, so convinced of her own redemption arc.

She never saw the hunter behind my eyes.

The work was meticulous. The old landlord who’d turned a blind eye to our screams? A faulty gas line in his basement. The school counselor who’d sent me back home with a note after I showed up with a black eye? A tragic mugging gone wrong. One by one, the faces from the gray hell of my childhood were erased. I was pruning a rotten family tree.

Elara was the centerpiece. She invited me to her sleek apartment, a monument to her normalcy. We drank expensive wine. She talked about her followers, her brand partnerships, her healing journey. I listened, nodding, until the conversation lulled.

“Do you remember,” I asked softly, “the time you locked me in the crawlspace for two days? You told Mom I’d run away.”

Her smile faltered and immediatly the excuses came. “Leo… that was a lifetime ago. We were children.”

“We were,” I agreed, standing up. “But the crawlspace is always there, Elara. You just learn to carry it with you.”

The realization dawned in her eyes too late. The cunning, seclusive ghost she’d pitied was gone. In its place was the vicious, final truth of our bloodline. It wasn’t quick. It needed to be understood.

After, there was a profound silence. Not peace. The silence of a vacuum. The last wrong had been righted, according to my own dark calculus. There was nothing left to hate, and therefore, nothing left to be.

Detective Miller, who’d handled our CPS case all those years ago, pieced it together eventually. A sad story, he called it in his report. No heroes. Just villains in a tragedy that started before the curtain ever rose. He visited the old family home, a decaying shell. He didn’t find clues there; he found an epitaph. In a final act that felt more like tidying up than arson, he struck a match and watched it burn. No one was left to care.

I’d already booked a one-way ticket. Not to a gray city or a lonely room. Somewhere primal. Somewhere final.

Hawaii. The land of fire and creation.

The hike up the volcano at dawn was beautiful. The air was thin and clean, scoured of memory. I stood at the jagged rim, peering into the immense, glowing throat of the earth. It pulsed with a slow, orange heartbeat. It smelled of sulfur and eternity.

My family was wrong about hell. Hell isn’t fire. Hell is the cold, dark room of your own unloved mind. This? This was warmth. This was an embrace.

I didn’t jump. I stepped forward, into the source of all heat and light. There was a moment of blinding, purifying agony—a billion times worse than my father’s needles, my sister’s taunts, my mother’s curses. Then, it was over. My body, the hated vessel of all that pain, unknit itself into a wisp of smoke, a scatter of ash on the wind.

The detective closed the file. The social media feeds forgot Elara. The volcano simmered. The old lot stood empty, a scorched patch of earth.

In the end, there were no lessons learned, no moral victories, no lingering ghosts. Just a series of brutal equations that ended in zero. A cold, dark, harsh subtraction until there was nothing left to subtract.

NoBODIES left. No bodies. No stories. Just the indifferent wind, and the ash, and the nothing.