To Be or Not to Be

CW: abuse, blood, one murder

The first night I can recall, a summer song graced the air with cicada trills and cricket croons, and I could still hear that melody from the eighth floor of my family’s apartment. I curled in my twin-sized bed, feet so far away from the footboard, wondering if a monster would slither out of my closet or from under my bed to eat me.

I know now that it’s not the spikes or scales on cold bodies of gray that make them what they are. Their teeth do not have to be blades, their eyes are not always red, and it’s not just children they will prey on.

But naivete indulges imagination. And I couldn’t help but be gullible.

When the monster I dreaded as a five-year-old barged through my door, my mother behind him with conflictions skewed across her visage, he did nothing but bruise and pull my hair and spit filthy words into my face as I wept on the floor. And when the morning brought its tune of birds and distant droning, I walked into the apartment’s living room—plaster walls with children’s marker drawings—to sit at the wobbly dining table, legs dangling from my chair, across from this monster. As if the night’s ordeal was simply a surreal nightmare. 

I ate breakfast with him through swollen eyelids, and maybe I laughed at myself for being foolish. Because this was a man. Nothing more.

◔

Scarlet.

Little blossoms of red spilling from a dark gash. My brother wailed as his eyes flushed tears onto his small hands, mixed with the color of cherry wine. A corner of the coffee table he ran headfirst into smudged in the same tint.

It should've been too vivid for a fifth-grader, the bloody rivulets streaming down his face and matting his hair into clumps. Maybe I was too busy convincing myself that everything would be okay. That I wasn’t a part of it—because it’s not like I injured him.

I considered blaming him instead. Just say it was his fault for running around when he should’ve been paying attention to his surroundings. The shame didn’t sting as much when I did.

My brother came home from the ER the next morning with four stitches in his head and a lollipop dangling between his sugar-stained teeth. I found him sprawled on the couch by the afternoon—without a care in the world.

If he could brush it off as an accident, I would too. But the edge of the coffee table was still stained, regardless.

The man once brought up this incident years after. He laughingly said I was to blame. If his gaze weren’t so sharp, I would’ve laughed too.

 ◑

Carmine.

There were only bruises this time, colored like plum skins, something more mundane than stitches, yet my brother seemed to weep all the same—pearls leaking out of almond eyes, mouth curved in a way to slight me.

“Control your temper!” yelled my mother. “You’re in high school now—why are you like this?”

“It was his fault. You saw how irritating he was being,” I snarled. The middle joint of my right thumb ached; it was the first time I’d punched someone, after all. I turned to my brother. “And you. Don’t start something you can’t finish.”

There was an ugliness in how my brother cried that reminded me of a younger self, one that buried her face in her hands as he does, wore the same bruises like bandaids, cleaved her heart open to the same mother in hopes of another hug to fix it. Only some of her remained in me, little fragments here and there: faded photographs, a small voice in the back of my mind, childish wishes that, in the end, were just silly pipe dreams.

The man told my brother that tears were a vice for men.

It became a sin to me.

◕

Crimson.

Blood stained my shirt, painted my brother’s sand-colored skin, and poisoned my mother’s hands when she reached over to press a new tissue to his broken nose.

I remember the palpable squirm of guilt. Maggots gnawing under my skin, fleshy and insatiable.

How quickly I buried it.

Blood scorched my knuckles. I remember how it sank and ran through the dry cracks of my skin—hotter than the burn of cracking wooden rulers, than any blistering words the man might’ve threatened.

As I looked to my mother, my brother, it was the wide glassiness of their eyes that caused me to recoil, as if I had been snapped at by a cornered animal. My mother said I ended up no different, the blood in my veins too thick, too convoluted; she said it didn’t matter how many times I was beaten or made to apologize—I would always end up the same.

Malign, she called me. Inhuman.

When the man returned from work, he carved a handprint into my cheek—vivid red between my teeth and rotting in my gums as I watched him with his eyes. He drowned in rage and called it retribution, forgetting guilt is the bane that makes us human.

(But I did too.)

Later, I sat in my room at night to bite on gauze pads, ears still ringing with his shouting, a crawl of cigarettes in the air, belonging to the man.

My mother was right. I had become the same, birthed from the kindling he left in ashes.

⬤

Somewhere behind me, I hear my mother speak frantically over the phone.

The man’s mouth sharpens into a hook, and his shadow stirs, painting his silhouette with harsh, enraged lines. I lift the dull lead in my hands, cast in his very shadow, molded in his image.

We stand on equal footing now—as I grasp metal between my fingers the way children hug their teddy bears. Half-pointed at him. Half-pointed at the space past him. He stalks forward anyway, with his head tipped up as if I can’t see the caution in his hideous features.

There’s a brief moment where his expression shifts—back into a man whose laced words and guilty actions are far too accustomed to my mother turning a blind eye out of fear—maybe to fool me, maybe to taunt me. But the little girl he’s looking for is a long-gone memory. Sleeping on her twin-sized bed—feet far from the other end, listening to crickets and cicadas, and wondering whether or not there’s a monster in her room.

And I’d rather believe the man moved first, an outstretched hand aimed at my face.

Before the bullet ruptures his skin.

It burrows into his flesh, into veins, and I imagine it grating against his ribs before tearing into a cigarette-smoked heart. If monsters have them.

The fixed grin on his face consumes. I try not to mirror it.