The Mind of a Hero

Chapter Fourteen: Maria Kasprzak

Want more sad? Listen to "Cancer" by Twenty One Pilots. Enjoy!!

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Elmer chewed on the inside of his cheek, soothing the open wound with his tongue and finger. Jack and Davey stared at him, waiting for an answer. It became clear he was wasting time.

"Answer the question, Kasprzak", Jack sighed, sitting back in his chair cooly, arms crossed over his chest. "Why did you kill your mother?"

"I just got mad", Elmer mumbled dejectedly. He heard Davey's scrawling. "I was having an off day."

"That's a fucked up reason to kill someone."

"So you agree that the others were justified?" Jack stopped talking, pressing his lips into a thin but obviously annoyed line. Davey did his best not to laugh, and cleared his throat.

"Just start talking whenever you want to, Elmer."

He sighed, lolling his head back against the chair. They'd been doing this for so long already. He'd been sitting at a table, chained to it, with a writer and a director—he still wasn't quite sure what Jack did for a living, but he figured it had something to do with the camera he shoved in his face for the past half of a year. A prisoner, he was—he is.

To think, though, that two guys he'd never spoken to in high school were interested in his love story. Immortality wasn't a power he'd been blessed with, but he continued to feel God had a hand resting on his shoulder, and that an Angel watched over him just as he'd done before. He'd reached the closest he could to living forever.

"She'd made breakfast that morning", Elmer sighed, staring at the camera, the blinking red dot with an intensity, nearly burning a hole into the lens. Jack zoomed in. "I had just woken up. As soon as I was within her line of sight, she wouldn't stop complaining."

Elmer rolled his eyes for what seemed like the thousandth time within the hour, wincing again as her mother slapped his head, yelling other Polish words he couldn't catch; that was another thing she complained about, how rusty he was in his mother tongue.

She only seemed to groan on and on about what he didn't do right, what he could do better, and the goddamn news story. Elmer was doing his best to keep calm, but guilt and fury filled him like an overfilled glass of water, and he snapped from the pressure.

So he went to the closet and grabbed Albert's old gun, checked the carriage for a viable amount of bullets—five, exactly—and walked into the living room, where his mother sat sleeping, and he shot her three times.

He saw his mother's gaping mouth and wide opened eyes. She sat lucidly in her favorite chair, arms hanging over the sides, with blood spilling from her neck. A little bullet lodged itself in there, staying rather than flying through flesh like its sisters—through her muscle and out the other end, and she sat, choking.

She couldn't speak, but Elmer felt her eyes watching him, waiting for him to do something. She waited for him to call the police, to hide from an intruder, to get the doctor from next door, but he didn't move. He stood there, gun in hand, and stood over her dying body.

He knows the last thing she ever saw was her baby boy's gunned hand, his eyes blinking at her with a glass-like effect. She could see herself in them, she was there, but he wasn't.

The light in her eyes faded slowly, as if she was fighting what was meant to happen, clinging to the final ropes her life depended on, yet she let go, and fell into a pit of death.

Elmer sat quietly with his head down, hoping he could disappear just as the life in his mother's eyes did. He could see Davey's writing hands and Jack's shaking ones, taking in what he said. He wanted to admit he didn't remember the rest, but he knew that would be lying. He'd done enough of that.

"Someone heard the gunshot and called the police", Elmer sighed, closing his eyes shamefully. His eyes burned with the desire to cry. "Um...they came to my house, and arrested me. I think I was crying."

"About what?" Davey asked, rather stoically. Elmer shrugged.

"Everything", Elmer chuckled, allowing his tears to free fall. He wiped them away with his shoulder, sniffling. "Albert was...he was my best friend, and my mom, she, she loved me and I- I killed her. I miss them."

Elmer sobbed, squeezing his eyes shut embarrassingly. He felt as if the whole world was watching, and he wanted to crawl into a ball and die. Already—he wanted to die.

"I hate myself", he shouted through snot and tears, and Davey continued writing. "It should've been me, it...I should've died with him. I loved him and they took him away from me! They- He's gone! They took him away from me."

Davey and Jack watched as a grown man cried, fat tears rushing down his face filled with what could only be shame. To think Elmer could show sadness would be an accusation unheard of—Jack thinks the person who assessed him misdiagnosed him. He clearly didn't think about people empathetically, and he had not one kind bone in his body. He was a "eat or be eaten" kind of person. He was a sociopath.

His friend and partner, however, saw him differently. He saw a little boy, a boy who'd never been given a chance. A little boy who'd been used and abused since he was old enough to comprehend death. Elmer was just a messed up little kid—and that scared him. Davey had to admit Elmer's reluctance to feel, to be human, terrified him.

It was the rawness in Elmer's performance that hit their hearts. His thick tears and inability to breathe through them—it was vengeful. He deserved it, they knew that. He deserved to feel that way for every life he'd ever be given after that. He deserved to die.

But who were they to decide that?