I missed those late summer days. Messy, lazy, tired. Hair sticking to the sweat on my flushed face in the morning. Sleepy eyes and quick glances. Spilled wine on the hardwood floor. Someone on some drug. Makeup smeared on the couch. Not knowing someone's name but knowing the way they smiled or the way their hand felt in mine. The feeling of the sun against my closed eyes as I dragged my fingers through the tepid lake water. The bitter taste of coffee contrasting with the gentle sweetness of blueberry scones. There was no reason to get up early but I did. I wanted those days to last. I wish they did. Before all of it happened. I could never go back.

I had never meant for it to end like it did. Blood spilled on the floor. Skin pale, a ghostly shade of blue. Eyes open, horrified, unblinking. Swaying to and fro, dangling there, pathetic. Never was it supposed to amount to what it did. As the summer had come to an end I had to go back to doing things. Why, I thought, if only to die must I continue to do these things that I hate so intensely. I had never felt love. I only ever felt the numbing of wine and drugs and the feeling of someone else’s skin on mine. The warmth of that summer was never real. It was temporary. Just like everything else in this shithole. I was alone. The lack of drugs made the voices in my head grow louder. I was never fully there, my brain sending me back in time with flashbacks I never fully remembered occurring. My heart rattled on, and it was tiring. I had no purpose. What was I compared to the billions of others here in this dreadful place? They could do all of the things I couldn’t. They could do the things I was capable of better than I. It wasn’t the sleepy warmth of summer's past. I was exhausted. Cold, dead, blank exhaustion.

Someday, some time in October, I sat outside. The trees were a blinding shade of crimson. I saw past that. I saw their astonishing beauty would only lead to their inevitable death. The beautiful things die. They spend their lives becoming more and more beautiful. Learning and growing only to end up like everyone else before them. A sad pile of worm food in a hole in the ground. It’s a beautiful mess that everyone is forced to live with, without question. If it is questioned then the psych ward it is. I had to go to work that day. The days I worked were the ones I dreaded most of all. It was always the same. I would head to the funeral home, see some lifeless corpse and give it the facade of life with makeup and fancy clothes. I would clean the shit off of it and funnel fluids throughout its body. All for the families to come in and weep for their loved ones who looked so alive and well, face flushed and glowing, when all it really was is taxidermy. All done up to be sent to their little hole in the ground. Some days there would be children. Mutilated. Covered in blood. Mothers wept to me. Fathers, usually so strong and emotionless behind their fragile masculinity, shatter like ice on concrete. 

The funeral home was of course perfect for these kinds of events to take place. Utterly draining, not taking away from the sorrow of the people. There was an atrocious carpet throughout making the room suffocatingly stuffy. The walls were an unbearable greyish-white color, matching the skin of the corpses that were wheeled inside. The musty stench of a grandmother’s perfume and mothballs was intolerable. With each death the photographs were traded in of whoever was gone forever. Their faces, once young, smiling, happy, were displayed all over the room. A still shot of a life that was now still and silent in a wooden box beyond. It was a nightmare. 

On this particular day there was a rock in my stomach. With each step I took it moved up through my throat and into my mouth, desperately trying to break through my teeth. I felt that if I had looked in the mirror my skin would be a gruesome shade of green. I could always sense it on these days. Walking in, the very air had a smothering sense of dread. A child. I had no choice but to look. The rock grew larger. The young boy couldn’t have been older than seven. His eyes bulged from his head. His neck a violent shade of purple, strangulation. I held back the vicious bile in my throat. His hair was missing in giant clumps, crusted with brown blood. He was wearing a little baseball uniform, number 13, the same my little brother sported. His skin was inhuman with a pale blue tint. The smell radiating off of him was vile. I could bear it no longer. My coworker shot me a look.

“This isn’t the worst we’ve had.” He said, wearing a blank and cruel expression. 

His complete numbness, his utter lack of empathy, sent me into a state of mania.

“Not yet.” I replied, coldly.

The nauseating, overwhelming amount of emotions that overcame me gave me the impulse to seize my coworker by the neck, covering his mouth with my free hand. I released his throat in favor of his hair which I grasped so hard my knuckles shone white against the red of my hand. A bit of blood trickled down from his scalp to my wrists, tendons straining. I dragged him down the hall to the dusty supply closet. The voices in my head were overlapping. There was nothing he could have done. Gripping the cowlick at the back of his head I bashed his skull into the door, it swung open and he collapsed into my arms, unconscious, weighted down like a corpse. I switched on the light, my fingers drenched with blood and sweat, reaching for a rope. I swung it over the metal bar above and tied a circle around his throat. It was out of my control. I stood in horror at what I had done. His feet dangled in front of me. His brain a bloody mess. All I ever saw was death. I couldn’t breathe. My brain screamed. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. I swept my blood ridden hand on my sweat covered brow. I slammed my head so hard into the wall that my ears began ringing, hushing the voices. My vision was clouded by a bright light. I headed for the door, closing it behind me, and walked down the hall. 

I dizzily stumbled toward the wooden box where the destroyed child lay. I looked down at his blank, bulging eyes, and put my arms around him. Picking him up, I held his limp body to my heart. I cooed at him and tried to reassure him it would all be okay. I caressed his matted scalp. My chest tightened. I was suffocating. All I wanted was to talk to him. Not even a damn phone call. I didn’t get to see him play. He loved baseball. I was stuck here. Everyone probably thought I was too busy to pick up the stupid, useless phone. Or they hadn’t thought of me at all. It had been so long since I went home for a visit. How could I ever live without him? We shared the same eyes, the only exception being that mine were not sticking out unnaturally, strained from the deathly grip someone had on his neck.  

I took the makeup bag in my hand, and began the job. I put a tan paint like substance on the purple of his once skin colored neck. I didn’t want to have to look anymore. I put gripped pieces of plastic on his eyes, closing them away from the cruel world he had to die in. I changed him out of the baseball uniform holding it tight in my hand. His face looked human again, but not the same. I wanted to talk to him. I needed to know. I couldn’t go on not knowing. He was just a child. I could hear the voices in my head murmuring quietly, the ringing subsiding. A sudden flash made me ill on the floor. Vomit spewing everywhere in a horrible, disordered puddle of yellowy-green. It was in the woods behind the baseball field. I wasn’t there. Couldn’t be. I was sitting outside. Watching the crimson leaves. They were dying in front of me. Slowly, then all at once. My brain was just trying to give me an explanation. There was no other way. I was only watching the leaves. Trying to remember. I saw beyond the crimson trees. I saw it clear. A set of cold, metallic bleachers.