Your mother wept in the kitchen and didn’t touch the landline, and she waited for what you would do. Your father had his hands squeezed around your broken throat so he could break it more, and he waited for what you would do. By all logic, you should’ve just died like they thought you would. It could have been over then if you’d frozen, but despite everything, you didn’t freeze.

And for the first time in your miserable existence, even if only for a moment, you were hungry. You were insatiable. The universe was about to feed you.

Because despite swallowing lifetimes of torment by your teens, you have never wanted to die. You only wanted relief. You wished it upon an uncaring horizon only because it brought you comfort to pretend it was listening. You wanted so badly to live, and you had never felt it more fiercely than then, when death was sitting on top of you and life was a split-second decision away.

You were never anything but dust on your father’s shoes. So, when you wrapped your small fingers around the discarded handle of the kitchen knife, you hadn’t much time to think, but you distinctly remembered two things, though you only articulated them later: The first was that your father did not believe you had the guts to grab that knife, or else he never would have left it where he dropped it. The second was that by all logic you had ever known, this would feel good. You weren’t afraid to grab the knife. You were only afraid of what would happen if it didn’t kill him.

He might have died proud of you for the first time. You did not care to think about it.

You don’t remember much about killing him. It was as if you were ripped from your body and your soul commanded its movements without need for any presence of thought. You stabbed him. You kept going. You did not stop, because you were smart. You wanted this, and you weren’t going to do it halfway. That man was dead on the kitchen floor with red light from the sunset soaking through the curtains long before you finished bringing down the knife. You only stopped because you exhausted yourself and could not afford to be out of breath.

When it was over, you were covered in blood, and it didn’t matter who it belonged to. You looked upon your work, upon the puncture wounds turning your father’s chest to raw meat.

The thought that came to you was a piercing clap of thunder, the kind that scared you so badly you cried when you were young (before you learned to do that quietly because your mother could not help you). You looked into his wide, dead eyes with your own wide, dead eyes of the same shape and color, and you saw all the evil in the universe broken open and bleeding on the floor. It didn’t feel good.  

None of it felt like your thought it would. It was supposed to feel good. Why didn’t it feel good? If your existence was anything, it was consistent, except for now when all you understood suddenly broke apart in your hands and left you to figure out the repulsive implications. But you didn’t want to figure them out. You didn’t even want it to feel good anymore. You just didn’t want it to feel unbearable. But you have never gotten anything you wished for onto a sky that you knew was never listening, and you suddenly hated it viscerally. You hated every wish you had ever made onto that uncaring vast emptiness that fell upon deafness. And it did not even have the decency to let you scream with the pain of it.  

It was evil what your father had done to you, and what he had demanded of you tonight. And you had never been more horrified because you did not feel good. If you had a working throat and weren’t wheezing for scraps of air, you could have wailed. You could have torn your hair out and choked up bile and wailed for your mother, for not your mother, for the world to eat itself quickly before you had to live with this knowledge for another second. Before you had to risk anyone ever finding out the truth like you, because surely no one else could know. How could they endure it? You have seen the most terrible monster and it is not dead. It would never, ever die. You knew then that this would eat you forever. You would be saddled with this burden until you died and it would outlive you. It would kill the world and everyone inside of it and eat the earth hollow, and it was so patient. You were helpless against it. Everyone was.