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The first observation that Simmy made was that this box was a lot larger than it appeared from the outside. This was a bit of an obvious observation, considering the fact that she was now looking at three doors. The box that she had seen could not even hold one door, let alone three. Curiouser and curiouser.

She inspected them all because she had to, her fingers hovering just inches away as she passed them all. The invitation of simplicity from the first door was uninviting, the idea of taking the easiest route as unnerving as the feeling she found from the second door. She skipped both, her eager, scissor-bearing hand reaching towards the third.

This one. This one filled her with something she couldn't describe, of fight or flight and acknowledgement of wrongdoing. This one with its symbol that lacked symmetry and reached for its borders.

This one was right.

[I SPLIT MY POSTS WRONG ONE SEC]

A. C. E. G.

Her thoughts worked in overtime, tripping over themselves to be the first to find the solution. They tangled and tried and failed and became a mess of nonsense and guessed that meant nothing. Letters were not numbers. They would never be numbers.

She glanced over her shoulder - she didn't know why she'd done that, it was still there, but there was a compulsion, like she needed to see it - and crumpled the paper in her hands, an echo of her thoughts, tightly smashed into a distorted mess she couldn't understand.


distance: 30

Despite her pleas, it didn't stop. It was not going to stop.

She swallowed a sob and tried the door again. No movement. Nothing to save her.

distance: 20

This was not freedom.

She was lost. She had no recollection of this place, no way to navigate the forest without carelessly risking her safety. But she was safe, at least. Wasn't she?

Another glance over her shoulder.

This was not safety.

Uncertainty found the forest through her eyes, and the forest called to her, words steadfast and strong and wrapped in a fog of unstable promises. Brittle branches caught her arms as she passed them (she didn't remember starting to run but she must have, she was moving and it still felt like it wasn't enough, it was always going to find her, everywhere, always) and the fog was thick in her throat--

--and the steady thump of her feet with the rapid thump of her heart and she tried to pretend there wasn't another source of thumping and tried not to think about the scissors in its hand and tried not to know that she was never going to escape it, she wasn't--

It called that familiar-but-unrecognizable name again, in a way that implied it's said it so many times before, learned it, known it, cared for it, and she breathed out and tried to send the thoughts away with it. But after the name came something worse, something that sent a shiver through her greyed body, left a prickling feeling on the back of her neck, as if it were exhaling there before breathing her in:

'I have seen into your heart, and there is a curiosity, a flame, a fear. I know it like I know the shadows.'

The trees rattled with the breeze (or its approach) and she noticed she had stopped, immobile on the first rung of a bridge, and everything felt...

'Absolutely. Completely. Intimately.' Snip. 'As if it were my own.'

The grating sound of rusted scissor blades filled her ear. The featherlight weight of a tuft of muted hair landed on one shoulder. The sickening weight of long, blackened fingers curled around the other.

Its palm was heavy against her shoulder as it moved, its fingertips brushing her neck, thumb exploring the length of her jaw with carefully increasing pressure, deliberate and practiced and cautious. She was still, weary eyes unblinking and brimming with tears, sick with the comfort she felt beneath its touch. She didn't have to run anymore. Its fingers found her hair and unwound a braid from its base, twining thick chunks of faded grey strands between them, pulling tightly with every few thumps of her heart, ensuring that she wouldn't leave too soon.

But she was still. Prey that failed her attempt to flee, foregoing the 'fight' response, frozen in acceptance of her fate. This was survival.

It leaned in close, face empty and wrong and blank and unnatural, its free hand brushing her cheek while her unfocused eyes were distracted. Sentimental. This meant something, having her heart as its own.

'Don't worry.' The voice was too pleasant to be so close to her face, and for a moment she thought she was imagining it. Maybe she was - how could something speak without a mouth, anyway? Her lip quivered and the pulse of her heart quickened. 'It only hurts once.'

She believed it. She always would.

The heel of one blackened hand pushed against her chest. It hurt once (and she was counting, holding her breath, hoping it had been truthful) and her body stiffened; she whimpered through clenched teeth, but the pain quickly faded into nothing.

It released her and she waited, quietly watching it leave her, watching it steal her heart. Her lips parted, but all the loneliness and desperation didn't escape, and she froze instead of pleading for companionship, because she was prey, and that was what prey deserved.

This is my purpose.

This is my destiny.

She was six.

He was screaming, crying thick tears of frantic refusal, coughing up spit and desperation when the air he swallowed betrayed him. She was smiling, pulse dancing erratically beneath her skin, carrying an impatient urge to learn what this meant. He wriggled in a way that she had not quite anticipated; from where she sat firmly on top of him, she inspected the jump rope she'd used to tie his hands, pleased to see that it still held fast.

(It was for his safety, after all.)

He was screaming her name, except her name wasn't 'Millie', because that name was a stupid name and she was not stupid, and if he'd only changed a handful of letters, she really might have stopped. She stared at him, and he caught a look in her eye that made his cries shrink into feeble whimpers, stamped out by the empty detachment of a girl who had begun to break.

This was wrong and ten steps from perfect, but all she had was the most scalpel-like kitchen knife they owned and a grey concrete garden bench that was almost a slab. It was wrong, but it was all that she needed.

(And wrong in a hundred ways she'd never notice. On the forefront sat the fact that she was preparing to make an incision on a seven-year-old boy's exposed chest. From there fell varying degrees of unempathetic behavior, of going farther than a child her age developmentally should, of 'playing' in such a way with the last neighbor that wanted to be friends with her.)

She tested the elasticity of his skin with the tip of the knife, and he bit through his lip so hard that it bled before his chest did. Her smile twitched into a frown. This was wrong again, and he was trying to ruin it but she was smarter than he was, she could find this out all by herself.

She pressed harder, surprised by the resistance that she met, the scrape of the skin...

Oh, that was bone. Neat!

He stopped moving, aside from the normalized breathing, the up-and-down-and-up-and-down of his split-open chest.

"Trevor? What's all that screaming for? You're supposed to play gentle with the little girl, remember, honey?"

The cut continued to lengthen, the red continued to bubble past the glimmering stainless steel, and nobody answered his mother. She almost had it - just a little more, the perfect amount to give her room to see and touch if she needed to. Her hand pushed against his chest just above the start of that necessary opening, that window to understanding that she'd made all by herself (daddy would be really proud of her scientific process this time, she thought), and she used it to brace herself so she could pull harder on the knife, to fight against the protests of his stubborn flesh. He loved her, didn't he? Why was his body fighting against her?

In the same moment, the knife caught something too deep, someone shouted from the gate to the backyard, and the incision went crooked. She looked at it in horror, knowing that she'd ruined it, and ruining it meant that nobody could be proud of this, nobody would be proud of her, and the whole experiment was lost, all of her curiosity seeping out (like the dark, sluggish blood that washed over her hand), and she'd never know what it looked like.

She'd never know. She'd never know and now she couldn't fix it and--

"MILDRED!" Someone shoved her and she fell backwards, leaving all of the breath in her lungs behind. "Get AWAY from him, you...you...God, what have you done, God, please...!"

Startled, flashes of color darted into the edges of her vision as her head struck the cobblestone, a haphazard visual accompaniment to the shuddering wailing that filled her ears. Her fingers clutched the knife so tightly that they began to hurt, shaking with shock and the enveloping sense of loss that came with the knowledge that things would be worse than they were to begin with: still nobody proud of her, now nobody who loved her.

Someone kicked her and she stared up at them with wide blue-green eyes full of destruction. His mother was holding him in her arms (holding him like that would worsen the blood loss, she assumed, judging her for her idiocy), rocking him, and she couldn't help giggling when she saw that the woman was moving her mouth kind of like a fish instead of finding any words. How silly!

Then her mouth stopped moving at all, and she was so disgusted that she didn't see his fingers twitch and reach for her.

"You're...you're a monster." Her voice was low and hardly more than a whisper, but she heard her. She heard her very clearly. "A heartless...inhuman...monster. You'll rot in hell one day, you..you..."

The words trailed into sobs, but she'd stopped listening anyway, bewildered gaze following the stumbling woman as she carried the bleeding bundle of flesh and muscle and bone (but probably not any love, not now). She hadn't been as careful as she should have been, and there were a few things that weren't right in the first place, like a knife instead of a scalpel, but she hadn't ruined it that badly, had she?

She stared until she couldn't see them anymore and never felt any less lost. She wished she wasn't alone. If someone was here with her, she might be able to ask what part was so incorrect that it earned that response. If she had someone here with her, she could question what it meant to be a monster...and why it hurt so badly that she'd been called such a thing, even if she didn't know exactly why.

There was an ache spreading through her, and she sat there long after the blood had dried, ticking off a recounting of today's events to see where she'd gone wrong:

• she was reading in the yard, and
• he dropped his bicycle next to her and took her book, and
• he said he'd decided something: she was his girlfriend now, and
• he explained she's gotta love him back, that's the rules, and
• she didn't know how, but she couldn't tell him that, because she had to pretend she knew everything, and
• she remembered her mother telling her daddy in a hushed voice 'she has no love in her heart', and
• she thought that she could play girlfriend if she saw what the love in his heart looked like, and
• copied it so she could have love in her heart too, and
• she told him they had to play doctor first, and
• he agreed, so
• she found the jump rope in the shed and the knife from the kitchen, and
• he let her tie him to the bench, and said it reminded him of Indiana Jones, which she didn't understand, and
• he laughed until he saw the 'surgical instrument', and
• she was very careful with her cutting, like she knew how to do this, and
• and
• ....and
• she was a monster.