I noticed the way she looks at me again today. The look of a blank stare, but it is not a blank stare. It is as if she is trying to tell me something that words could never really say. I see it in her eyes. Those cold green eyes. They appear almost gray as though something is hidden in them. Ten years I have stared into these eyes. Ten years I have study these particular eyes. I have watched as she has gone from child to woman and it is as though nothing has ever changed. Ten years of failure. Ten years of silence. I’ve run every test possible up to this point. Everything in the book just to hear her speak. Electroshock therapy, two electrodes attached to her head and enough electrical current to wake the dead. Not a god damn peep. If it wasn’t for her pulse and her eyes, I would’ve ruled her dead years ago. I fought tooth and nail to keep her after she turned eighteen. The state told me she had served her time. I argued that she still needs to server more, but like this? Was it worth it?
Her crimes though not as extensive as the others leave a lot to the imagine nation as to why. Why a child would commit such a crime? A silent hour every week for ten years and I am not any closer to finding out the answer. Her eyes motionless as if she is trying to tell me something. Maybe it is a neurological condition? No, I’ve tested that and came up with nothing. She chooses not to say anything at all. Ten years and I have never heard her voice. Witness, the neighbors claim to have heard her scream awakening them from a dead sleep. A scream like a siren only to stop. Replaced with silence. Imagine my jealousy to these complete strangers. Her eyes tease me like a loaded gun. Her eyes so innocent, so green, could they really have comprehended what she had done? Could anyone?
Could anyone understand fully the act of killing their parents? Witness testified that she was often beaten. Appeared to have bruises, black eyes, cuts all over her body. Never enough to raise alarm, but enough to noticed. The scars though faint are still there. Proved to be self-inflicted. Even at such a young age. What all her parents had done to protect her from herself is lost to time, but what she did has been well documented. The simplest of them all murder. The more complex. The ones I want to know, to understand? Hidden behind those eyes.
How does a child carefully remove the skin of a person? Let alone their own parents? I know surgeons. Doctors paid to be precise every day and every time. Even they do not understand how a child could be so methodic in one’s actions. A pile of skin laid on the floor as she began the real work, she had set out to do. As one police officer stated in their report, “The organs were laid out. Laid out on display like we had to do in basic training for our rifles. Laid there ready to be put back in if need be.” Their husk like bodies resting on the floor.
No, a child could not understand what they have done? Or could they? None of it makes any sense. The answers I seek sits before me waiting to be discovered. No evil in sight only a blank stare. Yet she sits before me. A child capable of tearing apart her whole family. A child who shaped the bones of her parents to that of some kind of monster. A child who took the skin of her mother from the floor and wore it like a costume until the police arrived. What kind of evil truly lives behind those green eyes?
Valerie Hannigan
My eyes are brown just so you know and why the hell would anyone want to dress up like their mother? It is unsettling enough knowing that I am slowly becoming like her.
Is That A Funeral? 