Eventually his father finished speaking. He said nothing for a full minute, still nodding every few seconds as he pretended to listen.
“Son?” his father asked, lowering his wild, stringy eyebrows down over his tiny sunken eyes.
“Alex?” his mother called, speaking finally.
The sound snapped him out of his trance and he turned towards them, giving them one final, curt nod. “Yes,” he said, trying hard to keep all emotion out of his voice. He didn’t think he had it in him to fake anything at the moment, like he had in all the pictures upstairs. He knew that if he pretended to be okay or happy, the real thing would come pouring out and he didn’t want that, not now. “I have to go.”
“Maybe we should - -”
“Have to go,” he said quietly again as he turned and grabbed his shoes, avoiding eye contact with both of them the entire time.
He closed the door behind him and the second he did his mother began to cry again, burying her head into the crook of her husband’s neck.
Xander tripped on the chipped concrete stair leading up to his front door, tumbling face first into the purple shale walkway leading up to it. The brittle stone broke on impact, sending tiny shards of it into his hands and chin as friction ripped the skin raw once more.
He stayed there for over a minute, staring at the shadow image that the morning sun had made. In it he couldn’t see the outline of his short-cut hair, and his muscles looked more defined, his jaw slightly squarer. He looked bald and made of darkness, like a demon sprung from a child’s nightmare. Blood dripped from his chin and fell to the ground, looking like two beady red eyes in the center of the shadow-demon’s head.
“You son of a bitch,” he whispered, sweat gleaming off his moist lips. He drew back and punched it right between the ‘eyes,’ shattered the shale and digging more of it into his hand. Gritting his teeth as his face became livid with anger, he drew back and slammed down again, creating an eruption of blood from the open wound. “You son of abitch!” he screamed louder, raising both hands high into the air now and hammer-fisting his shadow. He felt his voice crackle with the vomit-like urge that came with the Womb. Curling his lip as he recognized it, he punched himself in the jaw.
Something in his mouth snapped and then righted itself almost instantly. He felt the top of his jaw split, blood and spit streaming down his throat until the wound knitted itself back together. He laughed at himself as blood started to drool from his mouth and down his chin, tapping onto the ground. If anyone had walked by or seen, they might have called the men in the clean white coats to come and take him away.
His heart started to pump harder and faster, his blood starting to feel hot. Like it was boiling in his veins. Letting out a bubbly laugh as he started to wind down, he peered down at the shadow puppet version of the Womb he’d been so angry at a moment ago.
It was bleeding black ooze, just the way the creature did in real life, the blood-red colored eyes squinting into a long, angry scowl at him.
He stared back at it, afraid and confused with the excitement and grief and pain. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were no longer forcing pulses of red-celled blood from between the spikes of purple rock, but was now producing a thick black substance that stuck to his hands like stringy tar.
“What’dyou do?” he spat, reaching a palm over the shadow-womb’s face to rub out the eyes completely. Even now, he could still feel them burning holes into his face. He tried to stand up, wreathing over in pain as the blood vessels inside him exploded again and again, at war with themselves, until finally the veins in his neck and wrists sprang open through the skin. Bending over in pain, he hobbled to the small space under a tree where he and Sara used to play as children between their two houses, where nobody could see. Where he’d imagined kissing her since before he’d even really wanted to kiss girls. To his surprise, he found himself laughing a little again, though nothing was funny. He fell to the ground next to that old oak, his eyes rolled back in his head as black blood squirted upward in tiny splashes and slowly covered his entire body, hardening quickly into a second skin.
One last bit of black blood threw itself out of his mouth, his taste buds singing a brief celebration at being rid of it. He felt the adrenalin push him to anger but not take over.“Black Womb lives,” he heard himself say as he stood, almost choking on the words. His red eyes slit open. As tenuous as the hold might be, he had the driver’s seat for the moment.
He popped all eight of his claws, then clenched his fists, digging them into his own palm. What have I done?
Cathy stared at the fleckled white wall of her hospital room, her eyes focusing on random clumps of stucco. Each time, an image almost appeared out of the wall and then slipped away just as it was coming into view. Trains of thought kept occurring to her and then drifted off, but one remained as constant as her heartbeat.
Not good enough. Not worth it. Too much trouble. Not worth the trouble. Not worth the trouble.
The words had been ringing
