One for Sorrow

“Rose, what are you doing? You can’t stay here!”

“I’m here to help you! Come on! We can escape!”

“No, we can’t. Not this time.”

“But we can still win!”

“Just go, Rose! There’s no need for you to die here, too.”

Bang! A door slams open, and footsteps thunder in. Fear clogs my throat, but I force myself to remember–I’m hidden. They don’t know I’m here.

The world is a blur of color and sound, and I can’t seem to get my bearings. My fingers brush something on my waistband, and I pull it free, unable to quite get my thoughts around what it is. But my swirling mind is overcome by instinct as my small fingers fumble with it, and I lift it to eye-level. It takes both hands to hold it, and for an eternal moment, I wonder if I can cock it. Then the sweet click fills my ears.

Am I deaf with fear? Or has the room gone silent? I can’t afford to wonder. A shape steps into view, and for a moment my heart stops.

The world is still.

Everything jolts into crisp clarity. I’m crouching behind a box in the corner of a painfully bright room. My parents are standing a few paces away, hands cuffed behind their backs. Before them, a black-clad man with ferocious eyes turns.

…turns

…turns

His eyes find mine. They drop to the muzzle, widen, return to mine.

He leaps forward to meet the bullet as a devastating bang tears through the room.

My eyes fly open.

Breathe.

Cool air swooshes through my nose and fills my stomach with light before leaving my mouth in a rush of heat.

Again.

I force myself to take breath after breath, imagining that each one is like a gust of wind, blowing the black nightmare away like storm clouds from a dawning sky. It’s not that the dream frightens me exactly, but it always seems to leave that man’s lifeless eyes peering at me from shadows for the rest of the day. It’s distracting more than anything.

I heave myself up off the cold ground and roll up my sleeping bag mechanically. One of the irritating things about hunting is the redundancy of it all. Every day the same routine. Pack up camp, check the tracking device, walk for hours through the same dark forest, then set up camp again. All the while, my mind is spinning, running my plan over and over again like a movie on endless repeat. Have I accounted for every variable? Can I adapt at every turn? At the end of it all, do I have what it takes to plunge the knife?

There. I shove aside all of my whispered thoughts and focus on the scene ahead. The trees are growing more sparse, and if I squint, I can see a clearing.

Voices.

Casting a quick glance around, I drop my pack with a quiet thud and advance. My every sense is on alert as I creep ever closer. Far above, an unseen crow cackles at me maniacally. My heart beats a funeral march in my chest, and I can’t help but wonder who it’s for.

Words slip across the breeze to me now. They’re jumbled. Nonsensical. Like actions, they seem strange and twisted without the larger context.

Another bird joins the first in its raucous call, as if to warn of my presence, and an old nursery rhyme tugs at my memory.

One for sorrow. Two for mirth.

A grin tugs at my lips as I pull a knife from my boot.

Three for a wedding, four for a birth.

I can see them clearly now. A boy and a girl. Under other circumstances this might be a tryst. I can picture it. He is Romeo, and she is Juliet. Who am I, then? Tybalt, maybe? The over-zealous cousin who forces tension into conflict, and conflict to violence.

No. I grip my knife tighter, clenching my teeth. I didn’t start this. That man in black with the malevolent eyes–he started it. He was Tybalt.

Lord Capulet, then, who forced Juliet into ruin? No, that was the other one. The man who seldom appears in my dreams. I close my eyes, trying to remember. Trying to feel the anger, to let it spur me on.

After the gun fires, another man bursts into the room, his eyes immediately landing on his fallen comrade. He looks to my parents, then, seeing them still bound, turns just as his friend did. His reaction, also, is the same. His eyes meet mine, fall to my pistol, and then slowly drag back up to me. What does he see there? I wonder. What can this man, who has taken so much from my family see in me that makes him hate me so? What can he see but the face of justice, cold and serene?

Whatever it is, for some reason it makes him smile. He takes a deep breath and shoves his hands in his pockets, proud in the face of his fate.

“I’ll shoot you, too,” I whisper.

He quirks an eyebrow. “I’m sure you will.” His tone is perfectly sincere. “However, if you do, you can be sure that you will meet the same end as your parents.”

I open my mouth to speak, but he raises a finger to silence me.

“But, if you drop your weapon and surrender, I will ensure that you go to a good home, get a good education, and have all the possible chances for a bright future. What do you say?”

I eye him up and down. “What about them?” I nod to my parents. “If I surrender, you have to let them go, too.”

They stir and open their mouths to speak, but before they can, the man smiles. “Deal.”

I hold his gaze, my mind racing. Once we’re out, there will be a hundred chances to escape. But if we don’t? I know enough to know that “a good home” means life in the prison of the wrong world. Their world. Not my family’s world. I chew my lip, thinking, thinking.

I toss the gun into the middle of the floor. Life in prison is better than no life at all.

A wicked smile twists his face. He draws a hand from his pocket.

Recognition and terror roar to life in my chest, and I spring forward.

But it’s too late.

Two shots, clear and precise and as loud as the one from my own pistol ring out. My mother crumples to the floor, my father landing on top of her.

Dead.

That was Lord Capulet. He set these unassuming figures before me to their ruin.

No, I am not Tybalt or Capulet. I’m the apothecary. I will be the one to administer the poison and settle all of this for good. I am the solemn, resolute hand of justice, sweeping down to smite the ones who stole my parents.

Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.

I run the plan over again in my head. Did I forget a single detail? I’ll kill the boy first. I’ll have the element of surprise, so he won’t struggle as much. I’ll let the girl watch him die, and then end her as well. It doesn’t need to be complicated or drawn out. Her father is the greater prize. He’s the one who murdered my parents. I want him to see how deep the pain of loss really is. Of course, he’ll never know what happened. I’ll just be the devastated witness who finds them in the woods. I’ll notify the police and be there to offer my condolences. No one would suspect me. Not the victims’ closest friend and advisor. Not the grieving father’s second in command.

Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss. Ten for a bird you should never miss.

Again, the crows frantically cry out as if to say, “She’s coming! She’s coming! Run for your lives! She’s coming for you!” No one takes notice.

Eleven for health.

I suck in a few deep breaths, testing the weight of my knife. This is what I’ve trained for. This is what has kept me going. Vengeance for my father. Vengeance for my mother. Vengeance for my little brother and the life he should have had.

Twelve for wealth.

We were kings. We ruled the world, it seemed. Then, in a flash, it was all gone.

I can still hear my mother’s voice. “Don’t listen to what anyone tells you, Rose. Morality isn’t what they make it out to be. We make our own rules. Justice isn’t real! It’s a made-up code for sore losers to cheat the system. They’re just angry that we won.”

They’re so close now. A silent dash, the plunge of my knife, and it will all be over. Maybe my parents were right, or maybe they were criminals. Either way, they’re dead. All I know now are the words of a long-passed philosopher. “If you kill a cockroach you are a hero, if you kill a butterfly you are bad.”

Thirteen: beware! It’s the devil himself.

“Morality,” I mutter, “has aesthetic standards.”

***

All is quiet. The crows are gone, and the wind has stopped. It’s the screams in my head that refuse to go away.

“I did it,” I whisper. “I finally did it.”

Should I feel triumphant? Victorious? Or should I mourn?

Really, what I’m mourning is the fact that I feel nothing.

Sweat drips down my face, but I’m cold.

Grass pokes at my exposed skin, but it soothes instead of irritates.

It’s over.

It’s all over.

I always wondered what I would do afterward, but now that I’ve done it, I don’t think I can bring myself to do anything. I’ve slain my enemies.

I killed my best friends.

The story of Romeo and Juliet nags at my brain, and it takes me a moment to remember why. Before, in the woods, I told myself I was the apothecary. The unfeeling hand of justice. A moment later, I told myself that justice was a myth. I hated that man for killing my parents, so I killed his daughter and her friend.

My best friends.

No. I’m no hand of justice. I’m just… Rose.

I see the police arrive in a haze, having completely forgotten the fact that I called them to begin with. I called them, but I’m sitting in a field with two bodies holding a knife.

Turns out I wanted to be caught.

As they take me away, I reflect back again.

They were Romeo and Juliet. Two innocents caught in the crossfire of a terrible war. My parents were the Montagues, and the people who killed them were the Capulets. The man in black was Tybalt, the man who smiled wickedly was Lord Capulet, and I…

I was not the apothecary after all. I was merely the poison.

In seeking my revenge, I have in turn destroyed myself.

Poetic, I suppose.

Poetic? What’s poetic? I seem to have lost my train of thought.

Oh, that’s right.

A poem.

About crows.

One for sorrow. Two for mirth…