The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

I killed a little boy today. Held my hands around his throat, felt his blood pump hard against my thumbs.

The streets were never going to be the same again. They used to be safe and now they weren’t, and all of it because of one person, one morning, one moment. All of it because of me.

“That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world.

“Soon everything will be back to normal. I’ll forget how it felt to have hands strong enough to squeeze all the life out of someone. I’ll forget how it felt to be God.”

“I need to feel it again. I need to do it again.”

When the ringing stopped, the silence was like cool water closing over my head.

I was the one people needed to watch out for, and being the one people needed to watch out for was the safest way to be.

The fizzing made me feel like a can of paint, like my insides were squeezed into a tight metal case. I knew if someone had pressed down on my head my guts would have sprayed out and coated the walls in words and shapes.

She had sanded away my top layer with her show of helplessness, leaving me with as much armor as a peeled grape. The jab slid through to my jellied inner tissue. It burned.

Nothing could hurt me if I had nothing inside.

That was what happened to kids like Steven: they got frozen in a state of perfection, ever pure, ever wonderful, because they were only ever two years old. Most kids lived long enough to make mistakes and let people down and do bad things, and they weren’t perfect, they were just living. Kids like Steven didn’t get to carry on living, so they got perfection instead.

Sometimes I look at Molly and I wonder if I’ve ever even seen her, ever even seen what she really looks like, because I don’t see her face when I look at her. I see a face with the life squeezed out of it. And there are moments where I forget, where Molly’s laughing, and I catch myself enjoying her, and then I remember I can’t. Because I took that away from other people, and they never get to enjoy their kid laughing, or smiling, or growing. Not ever again. I want them to forgive me, but I know they can’t, because I couldn’t forgive me if it was Molly. Sometimes I think I didn’t need a life sentence, because I got Molly instead. She’s my sentence. As long as I have her I won’t be able to forget what I did. Not ever. Not ever.”

You can’t make me go home. I don’t have a home. I just have a house. You can’t make me go there.”

Only one person in Chrissie’s life had loved her in an ordinary, everyday way, the way you love salt or sunlight. Linda hadn’t been able to tie shoelaces or tell the time, but she had been the cleverest at loving, at loyalty, at giving everything and expecting nothing in return.

When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t real dying, it was just someone caring so little they disappeared.

had got lost in the terror of having a mewing bundle of a person relying on me for everything in her tiny life, and having to hold her with the same hands that had ended two other tiny lives.