We With Daisies Lie

The Mercy of Living

   There was a moment when Bambi and I were children when I thought she was going to die. It was the birthday of one of the boys in her class. Bambi and I were invited by his mother, neither one of us had friends because of the way we dressed, white trash poor. We stuck together since we knew the other kids wouldn't let us play with them. When it was time to eat the cake, we sat closer to the grownups than the kids. Bambi ate a piece of the strawberry cake, as soon as she put down the fork, her throat closed up. I laughed when I saw her. I thought she was kidding, we used to make faces at each other when we felt uncomfortable in crowds. Her face got big and red and her eyes wild and confused. She rolled off the chair, slamming backwards to the ground. Everyone looked- their smiles slowly fading. She should have died that day. The bite she took was too big and her reaction so severe that she would have been dead by the time the ambulance got there. But on this particular day, the birthday boy's older brother was home from school, med school.       

They made me look away, so I never did see what he did. All I know was that her dress was covered in blood and she was breathing again. I knew she wasn't supposed to die yet, I could feel it like I had never felt anything before. That night as I lay in bed to go to sleep, I realized that things only happened when they were supposed to. I am going to die. Even as a child I knew that. But I also knew, when I was lying on the blood-soaked grass outside the abandoned high school, that that wasn't my day. I knew it, and so did whoever sent that deer.       

It had been weeks since we saw any living animals in the woods. Squirrels were rare, but deer, they were gone. Regardless, as I lay there bleeding, she stepped into the clearing and saw me on the ground. She trotted up to me like we were old pals who hadn't seen one another in ages. I raised a hand to pet her, she licked it. I could hear the dead approaching from the school, and I had the stark realization that nothing is saved unless something is lost. The deer was a miracle, but miracles weren't free.       

All at once the dead stumbled absently from the door, most of them had drifted through the front door long ago, and Spencer had killed almost all the rest. But there were enough left enough alive to tear me to shreds, about six all together. The deer saw them and tried to run- she tried to break free but I had my hands wrapped around her neck. This time I knew the tears were there. I'm not ashamed of what I did. I wish I didn't have to do it but I, like anyone else, know there was no other choice. She fought against me- she too wanted to live, to run into the woods and never look back. The dead were just about on top of us, they saw me just as they did her- I reached down and grabbed her front leg. I pulled hard and it cracked. She crumbed on top of me, the dead feasted.       

I pulled my legs in so I was completely hidden beneath her. Blood rained from above, it covered my face red like a warrior's mask. They chewed through her organs, her flesh. They ripped her bones away as one would the wrappings on a candy bar. I closed my eyes and saw what my sister saw when she ate the strawberry that closed her throat. I saw myself after this. I saw Emily laughing by a river. She looked at me, not the way someone looks at a gravestone, but the way someone looks at their best friend, their partner.By nightfall, most of the dead had left. And the drop in temperate along with the blood which had now congealed and stuck to every part of me had begun to make me shiver. The three dead men that stayed simply sat, as if their brains' drive to feed had, for the moment, been satisfied. I had to move or I would die here. This would be the best opportunity I would ever have for escape. But I was still wounded, and I knew it wouldn't be easy but it was now or never. I reached around the deer's body and found what I was looking for- one of the rib bones the dead had snapped off and left behind. It had a slight curve and sharp edge.        

In a way I guess you could say I did die there. Everything I was up to that point died that day.  As I pushed the carcass of the animal off of me and stood up, I could feel I was not myself anymore. I wasn't the kid who cried at the end of sad movies, I wasn't the scared writer who let a little boy run off into the woods. I didn't know who I was, but neither did the dead sitting on the lawn.      

I hit the one first so hard that his right eye exploded out of his face and landed in the brush. The other two stood simultaneously, the drive to feed had returned. I wasn't afraid. I jammed the bone beneath the first one's chin- it went so far up I lost it in his head. The other tried to grab me but I stepped to the side and got behind him, I placed my hand on the back of his head and rammed it into the brick wall of the school. Over and over I slammed his face until every bone was broken, until all that was left was scalp. I went back into the school, first thing was first, I had to stitch myself up and get warm. First stop was the nurse's station. I didn't see any wounds on those girls who were here save for the ones that took their lives. They probably never had a reason to take the first-aid kit.       

Emily would later tell me that she spent that night crying beside Spencer. He told her to be quiet but she couldn't. He beat her as Ryan pretended to sleep. She told me the beating wasn't nearly as painful as the thought of me dying. I spent that night piercing a needle and thread through the ripped gash on my side. There was a window in the nurse's station, anytime the pain was too much I looked out hoping the see the moon. It finally came, and seeing it there as I had when things had been okay helped me to finish what I had to do. My hands trembled, my heart beat hard and fast.        

When it was all over I stumbled to the cabinet and poured rubbing alcohol on it. I moved to the little mirror over the broken sink and what I saw was unrecognizable to me. Blood covered my face red, but it wasn't my face that I couldn't recognize, it was the eyes that looked back at me. They were not my eyes.