A Ballad of Phantoms and Hope

by K.M. Moronova

Lanston, Hey you, where did we leave off? Oh yeah, the beginning of the end. The sick game death likes to play before we ripen. Where do I start my story? I guess where it begins… when I was five, my cousin died by suicide. I didn’t understand the gravity of that yet, but my family said horrible things about her after her funeral. They said she was selfish and was going to hell for “committing the ultimate sin.” That she would burn for what she did. Even at a young age, I thought to myself how unfair it was of them to say. She was a kind person, that is all I remembered of her, but I knew that she wasn’t bad. She was the most generous and caring human I’d known. But I also remembered the things they said about her. I kept it locked away in a compartment in my brain for the day my brain started to turn on me too. Patrick was the first boy I fell in love with. He wasn’t very nice, but we dated for a few years until I turned seventeen. That’s when I learned how much a person could wound you without a weapon. He cheated on me with some tall blonde and that was the end of it. A betrayal that I’d carry with me for the rest of my life. “You aren’t a good person. You know that. It was bound to happen,” my stepmother told me. Little did I know that someone else had their eye on me, on my suffering, like a reaper drawn to rot, waiting patiently for me to ripen. Someone watched me until I fell into ruin. My murderer was always close. Always near. I wish I’d known.