To Kill and Forget

It wasn’t as if I wanted to kill Aspen. It wasn’t as if it was my fault.

But when I returned to the academy, the blank faces of my classmates made me feel so little, and the clench in my chest brimmed with silent, echoing cries. My knees were mottled with purple bruises, and the bandages on my hands sagged from where my fingers hit the ground, yet my classmates no longer remembered how they pinned my arms and rolled up my sleeves. They no longer remembered how they unraveled my bandages loop by loop, and how the light held in my arms pooled out through their seams, stripped and spilling. When their jeering faces fell and everybody saw the ovate glow ingrained into my skin, when the plug was pulled and the reflection, reflection chanting drained out of the room in a guttural cry, none of it had been remembered. The only one who did not forget was buried in the forest beyond the grounds.

Aspen’s fate was already set in stone on the day that Aiko mumbled a huh? What’s this? and dug his fingers into my hastily wrapped bandages before I could tear my arm away in alarm. It was set in stone when I paused, then asked, don’t you know what I am? and Aiko said that I was a boy. It was all there, right in front of Aspen when she ran out to the grounds, yelling last one to the swings is a reflection, and when Aiko clawed his way up the hill, panting, it was all laid out for Aspen then.

“Reflections are bad creatures that disguise themselves as humans,” Aspen replied when Aiko asked. “They store light in their limbs.”

Aiko’s legs went limp on his swing, and his shoes left skid marks on the gravel. “Like in the stories?”

“They’re all over the news,” I muttered, staring down at him as I swung higher and higher. “Your parents don’t tell you the news?”

Aiko looked down and shook his head, letting his feet dangle above the ground. The reel of him pulling up my sleeves played back through my mind, and I jumped off the swing.

“...You don’t care?” I asked.

Aiko tilted his head.

“What if…what if I hurt you?”

“You wouldn’t, I’m your best friend!”

Bandages lay in a tangle on the floor of the janitor’s closet. My sleeves were pulled up, and our knees brushed against one another. It was like this the next day, and the next, and the one after that.

“They will confine us to our houses until we become adults,” I told him, my voice low and hanging. “Then, they will kill us. That’s what my father said. He wipes people’s memories so they forget, so they cannot kill us.”

“Will I forget?” Aiko asked. He was holding my arm in his hands and examining the way the light diffused against its translucent sack, and how the iron rack above us refractured its glow into faint chips of light that splattered across our faces.

“If you do not tell anyone, you will never forget,” I replied.

But Aiko did tell someone, and he stopped coming to the closet. When the bell clanged and we were let out to the grounds, I was met with the clench of Aspen’s jaw and the scrape of her shoes against the gravel. I settled down on the swing beside her, but she did not move. Her eyes bore into my arms as if they were on fire, as if the layers of sleeves burned into my bandages until the light pooled out onto the floor like lighter fluid burning white. When she asked me in a cracked hush, “Nico, are you really a reflection?”, I jerked my head towards Aiko’s swing in a frenzy. He was not there. My blood ran cold, my breaths became shallow, and my heart pounded deep into my chest. After a long beat of silence, I stumbled off the swing and ran.

Students in the hallway morphed into inky black shadows, each of them jeering, Nico, are you really a reflection? You’re a reflection, aren’t you? Let me see your arms!

The bandages unraveled in the janitor’s closet, and when I caught the sheen of my arms from the iron rack above, I clawed at them, screaming and crying and screaming. I choked on every breath and dug into my flesh, trying to tear the glow from my skin. Then I cried and cried until I was too tired to cry, and lay lifeless on the cold floor.

Aiko told Aspen, and this is how all rumors spread. It seeped into the veins of the academy like a drop of ink dancing in water, losing its form and filling the walls with black. My stomach was filled with a sickening silence that grew louder and louder, threatening to drown me whole. I felt as if I was a grain of sand trapped in an hourglass, waiting for the stomach-lurching fall.

When I walked out to the grounds the next day, the world dispersed in ripples. I looked to Aiko, who turned his back and ran away, looked to Aspen, who recoiled in my gaze, looked to my classmates, who inched back in waves of muddled fear—I had no one left.

“Monster!” Aspen yelled. It started with one shriek, then rippled outwards across the sea of students, enveloping them into the chant.

Monster, monster, monster.

This is how it was, for hours, days, weeks. This is how it was until they started poking me with sticks when they realized that I had given up the fight. This is how it was until the poking turned into kicking, and the kicking turned into grabbing. A month after Aiko pulled up my sleeves, I was dragged by the hair and pushed down the slide until woodchips danced in little red welts across my face. On the occasions when Aiko interfered, I looked him dead in the eye and muttered a go away before a fist split us in two.

“Nico, wait!” he yelled one day. We were the last ones left outside.

“What do you want?” I spat.

Aiko caught up to me and slid his hands to his knees, panting.

“I’m–”

“What, you’re sorry now?”

“No, please listen to me, Nico!” he took a shaky breath, “I didn’t know it would go this far, I didn’t know… I wish I could–”

“Don’t you understand?” I gnashed my teeth, whipping myself around to stare into his pleading eyes. “Nothing is going to change.”

“Nico–”

“From the beginning, nothing has ever changed.”

When I set foot in the academy the next day, my classmates blatantly ignored my shift in temperament as I kicked and thrashed, deriding. They heaved me onto the ground’s highest structure and strung rope across my neck.

“Hey, watch this!” A familiar voice rang behind the back of my head.

Before I could whip myself around, the soles of Aspen’s shoes were pressed against my backside. Within a fleeting moment, I was flying.

On the next beat, the noose pulled tight.

Monster, monster, kill the monster.

I gasped, and my air was knocked out with a snuff. I thrashed and twitched like an ant smeared on the sidewalk, its limbs fluttering with the last surge of energy to keep living.

“Stop it, stop! You’re going to kill him!”

The ringing in my ears muffled Aiko’s shrill scream as he shoved through the river of bodies. The grounds were blurring at their edges, and my feet felt like they were kicking through water, then honey, then ice, slowing until I knew that I was going to die, that nothing mattered anymore, that nothing mattered. The last thing that flashed before my eyes was the mound of classmates gathered beneath me before the rope snapped loose, my shirt ripped off, and I plummeted. When my bandages unraveled, light poured out of my arms like it was the sun.

A hand against the back of my head. Aiko pulled me tightly into his arms. Silence fell through the crowd. When the world refocused around me, Aspen inched back from her platform above.

“No way…” she mouthed, dropping to her knees.

I let the bandages fall in ropes of white to my feet. My head thrummed, and the blood ran fervid through my veins. My legs bolted to the platform ladder and I climbed, clammy hands skipping over bundles of slippery rungs. When I heaved myself up, Aspen was blanched and keeling, her fingers fumbling on the scaffolding of the platform. Then, I grabbed her shoulders with both hands and jumped.

A cracking thud rang in my ears, and it all went silent. I could not feel my hands, my knees, and my body felt like it had been left behind in the sky. Red seeped from Aspen’s head and ran down the cement in a steady gush, soaking deep into its clefts like spider veins.

“Monster.”

Aspen’s blood-stained lips drank up the rest of her unspoken words, and the pool of blackish blood bloomed red into her shirt. My knees were soaked in it, my hands, my arms, and when I tried to wipe my face of tears, my eyes dripped the same red back onto her limp body. The sirens rang in the distance and muffled yelling wrapped over the academy in an orchestra of screaming, and when I took her hand, it was cold. I tried to swallow the breath down my throat, but the screaming slowed and drained to the rhythm of the blood pulsing in my brain until all I could hear was my shallow, quivering breathing, and all I could see were the pair of blood-strewn hands covering my ample eyes.

Somewhere in the distance, a stretcher was carried out and the body was lifted from the cement. They peeled me off of the floor as if I was a wad of chewed gum and stuck me into the back of their car. I was in a room, and then I was in the car, and then Father was planting a kiss on my forehead telling me that it was okay, that it was okay now, that no one will remember now, and that everything will return to the way it was before. When I asked him why he could not make me forget too, he tightened his jaw.

Then, he told me that if he did, I would kill and forget, and kill and forget, and kill and forget why I was the only one sitting in the classroom, and why the forest beyond the grounds was piled knee-deep with the unmarked graves of the dead.