Remorse

Two of Three

20 ish years later

The fluorescent lights were buzzing overhead. The sickly sweet scent of yesterday’s cut flowers wafted in from outside. He looked around at the store, every wall covered floor to ceiling in food. He could smell the meat over everything. The beef would be bad within the week, and the pork chops were long gone. The jingle of a local carpet cleaning company was stuck in his head, though it had been well over a month since the last time he’d heard it. He’d always thought jingles were a very smart advertising technique. It implanted the idea of the carpet cleaning in his head at all times, so if ever there was a dirty carpet in his path, there would be no
question of who to call. Furthermore, if other people were to hear you humming the jingle of a particular business, it could spark the association in their brain and cause them to hire the company without ever hearing the jingle themselves. And if all else fails, he assumed there was one poor fellow out there who got so annoyed that he acquired the business’ service just to get the song to stop replaying in his brain.

“Caine!”

He looked up. The cashier had called him, and from the look on her face, it wasn’t the first time. He knew her from high school, or perhaps elementary school, though it was possible she could’ve been his neighbor. Living on such a small island, everyone knew everyone in some way or another. Caine had never been good at faces. He was usually in his own head, paying
attention to the images he created rather than the real ones around him.
He put his groceries on the short conveyer belt and waited, continuing to daydream.

Through his thoughts he heard the cashier speak again.

“Huh?”

“I was sorry to hear about your mom,” she repeated. Her tone sounded more irritated than sympathetic. Caine assumed she was still mad about how he failed to acknowledge her massive crush on him for almost a decade. He was terrible at faces, but great with names, and he had just remembered hers.

Sarah Warren. She had two older brothers, lived on the south side of the island, and was in her early twenties, perhaps two years younger than Caine. She also used to paint her nails the exact color of his eyes and ride her bike up and down his street, claiming to be looking for her cat.

“She likes you,” his mother used to say in a singsong voice.

“How do you know?” he would ask, genuinely curious as to how one could possibly know such things without being told.

She chuckled, “No one can lose their cat that often.”

It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for girls to become smitten with him. He was a statue, carved out of olive colored stone. People would stop and stare at the masterpiece, as if in a museum. Even in motion, he seemed static. He moved with such grace and elegance that every move blended into the next. The only hint of life was in his hair. After each movement, his
dark loose curls bounced ever so slightly, as subtle as a blade of grass shaking in the breeze.

Even his eyes looked inanimate. They were shark eyes, the pupil dark and always dilated, as if trying to block out the thin green iris. You could stare into those eyes forever, never lighting up, never darkening. He was frightening, but no one could ever look away.

Sarah was still staring at him. He decided it would be beneficial to everyone present if he was kind to her. He picked up his bags and gave her the biggest smile he could.

“Thank you,” he said cheerily.

He walked the mile to his house and walked up the stairs to the front door. The house was basically a treehouse. It was built straight up, with one spiral staircase going up the middle.
The whole thing smelled of mildew and oak, apart from the rose scented incense that was usually burning. There was only one legitimate door. Caine’s mother, ever the hippie, opted for curtains or beads in the archways. The house was made entirely of stacked logs, like all the buildings in the eighteenth century. His mother claimed it was built by an ancestor of hers and passed down, but Caine had found her purchasing agreement from twenty years ago.