ACT ONE DEATH BY NUMBERS CHAPTER TWO HOW I'VE SINNED
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AT FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, Rosalind Powers discovers what it is to kill. Violet eyes wide in horror, polish-coated nails forming bloody crescents in the flesh of her palm; her teeth clamps onto her tongue where a scream is buried. A crippling sensation, no?
Death—in its rawest form—its life fading into nothing, an inevitable plateau destined for all things. Little Rosalind is not a taker of life. She is a girl who does extra homework for fun, with a crush on the boy sitting beside her in Geography and races between the aisles of stores with giggles fluttering in her chest. She is fourteen years old and she is not a killer.
Even as she stares into the eyes of a corpse, she repeats it to herself. No, she screams it. I am not a killer. And she keeps saying it until she convinces herself it's true. So that when the police finally arrive, they believe her too.
Can you tell me what happened here? She can barely hang onto their words. There is a hollowness inside of her. How did you know this boy? they keep talking.
I sat beside him in Geography. That was all she could manage. There is no blood. There is no weapon. There is only a corpse, and a girl.
The police say it's a brain haemorrhage, because it was all they could make of it. It was as if the boy had dropped dead (and he had). Little Rosalind gets off scot-free with a sorrowful pat on the shoulder, and an ice cream on the drive home. Poor thing, they say, so much pain in those doe eyes.
They don't give her the same sympathy when it happens again.
Barely even three weeks later, another corpse is decomposing. It happens in school, Ms. Smith is teaching Spanish—the sweetest thing to grace the state of Missouri—until she's gasping, horrifically. Her hands are almost bound to her throat, grasping for something that simply isn't there anymore. Rosalind can only stare in horror as she did three weeks ago. And in her head, she is mentally preparing to brainwash herself; except this time there are witnesses, so many witnesses.
Witch. Heathen. Demon. All those pretty words you could imagine from the lips of terrible teenagers. Although, the ones who despised Spanish seems to smile at her, and Rosalind finds that incredibly disturbing. I didn't do anything, she cries out to the same police officers. Now, they only look at her in disdain.
In actuality, Rosalind didn't do anything. . . not in conscious thought anyway. But she isn't so foolish to think a curse of Missouri (or misery) is not following her like a looming cloud. 'I am not a killer,' has morphed into 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.'
Her mother isn't looking at her the same. She's scared. They should be scared, Rosalind thinks.
On a Sunday morning, her mother asks her to get in the car. There's a hopeful glint in her eye that makes her daughter shiver. It feels like they're driving for hours, miles and miles of tarmac roads until the roads are nothing but dirt paths. Death protects me, because nothing else will.
