What You Can't See

The adolescent girl, waking from a troubling dream that had wrapped around her like a straitjacket, sits up in bed, trembling. Deep in the depths of her reptile brain, where instincts are kept hidden away where humans can no more use them than touch them, this girl knows that there was a reason that she awoke. 1

The shadows danced on the wall, open for her mind to play with and contort. It does not occur to her that there shouldn't be shadows playing against the white paint at three in the morning, as there is no light. Well, except reflections off the switchblade from its holders icy eyes. 2

The girl, feeling that she is still dreaming, puts her feet on the cool hardwood, hoping that will both calm her nerves and wake her up. But instead of feeling the worn wood that has greeted her feet for fourteen years, a pool of surprisingly warm liquid from a slit wrist envelopes her feet. Thinking that it is simply spilled water that she will clean up later, she pads across the room in her mother's blood. 3

The cat, who had been sleeping next to the humming radiator, is no longer purring, though she assumed that it had made itself scarce or gone out. But, once again, this victim of ignorance is wrong. Not three feet away from her, dangling from a fan blade, hangs the cat from its mutilated tail.4

As the girl runs her hand around the wall, feeling blindly for the light switch, that's when it happens. But she doesn't know because she only knew it as relief.5

Later the killer, her own uncle, says he killed her out of compassion for the girl. If she had turned on the switch to see the remnants of her family, she would have been scarred and mentally insane for her living days. He said he wanted to limit those. 6

But did he really care? I don't think so.7

If you want to know who the victim is, you might want to ask yourself who was hurt most. Your choices: the girl, her uncle, or you. Not choice A, she didn't feel any pain and was blissfully unaware throughout the whole ordeal. The second choice, maybe, but he only had to live with himself for a little while. Then it was the chair. Ten-thousand volts of painful relief for an act of hatred toward his sister. But personally, I think the last choice, you, felt the most pain. Wanna know why? The other two choices, the girl and her uncle, they didn't have to live a long, drawn out life having read this, but you're going to have to know in your bowels what happened to them because you made the mistake of reading this story.8