Murderer at the Museum

Darkness eneloped me as I slunk down the wall. There was no way that had just happened, right?

All I could remember was the arm swinging down on me. Over and over again that arm kep swinging as I felt bile rise up my throat. Persperation leaked from my forehead as shivers shook my body. That swinging arm, the sword, the dark museum. It all felt so real but I couldn't believe it had just happened. There was no way I had just killed someone.

I kept telling myself that it was self defense, but that didn't change the fact that I had taken their blade and used it in a haphazard swing, a swing that cleanly choped their head off of their tall shoulders. I hadn't brought myself to look at the head before I had dropped the sword and ran from the scene.

Tears seemed to bleed, as effort and time had left me dehydrated. The salty tears burnt my over-dried eyes and stung my tight cheeks. I'd been told once that tears were good for your skin, maybe one good thing that would come from all this would be less acne.

How had I even ended up here? Everything had gone wrong from the moment my family and I left for the museum that afternoon. We had forgotten the packed lunches and had turned around to get them. That was when we realized that my little brother had also snuck our small poodle into the car. After resolving those issues I had wrongly assumed that the rest of the day would be smooth sailing. A car crash right in front of us had delayed our trip further, dad's phone dying at the gate (he, of course, had the tickets on it), after he charged it in the car we had decided to just eat our lunch before heading in. When we finally breached the doors of the museum, it was already two in the afternoon and most of our day was shot.

Even all of that chaos wouldn't have caused the traggic events of the night, the night in which I had been left alone in the museum. After chasing my brother down a hallway to get away from some of the more questionable art, I'd found myself lost and separated from my family members. I tries to stay calm and hold still in one place, but time wore on and no one came to find me. Discourged, I searched ffor them myself. I wound my way through the maze of hallways, filled with paintings and statues hat seemed to blur as I felt those first tears pool under my lower eyelid.

How could they just leave without me? As the final patrons were leaving the door I made a last dash further into the museum, hoping that my family was searching for me as earnestly as I had searched for them. But as the doors closed and guards were posted, I found myself to be the last visitor left in the building.

Why did they leave me? And now I'd killed someone! Fifteen is too young to be a murderer, whether or not it was in self-defense!

My tears seemed to be evaporating as they turned to salt, crusting my eyelids and refusing to stream any further from my over-worked tear ducts. As I was left a dried out husk of ruined childhood, I felt anger pulsing in my chest, turning the bile in my throat to burning magma. I stumbled up and found my way to a bathroom. Barely reaching a stall in time, my semi-digested lunch found its way out. My stomach clenched and heaved, trying to punish me for the deed I had ccommited in the dark hallway.

Terror ripped through me where anger had been only moments before. I couldn't let them find me out! I couldn't go to prison, I had worked too hard to get my grades up so that I could join the track team, I couldn't get locked up before I'd even gone to a single meet. I would just have to sneak out without being caught somehow. Maybe I could run away. Except then I still wouldn't be able to be on the track team! Nothing was right anymore! How could I even be worrying about track when a man had just died?

I don't know how long I laid on the grimy bathroom floor as waves of sadness, anger, and fear assaulted my body with shaking and tearless sobs. When I finally pulled myself out of the bathroom and fell into a fitful sleep, I knew that morning was around the corner. Soon the entire public would know I was a murderer and my family would let me know that they didn't are about me and had left me here on purpose.

Sun slipped into the hallway as silently as a puff of smoke moving through the sky. Light dipped onto my shaking shoulders as I tried to force myself to get up and run away. My arms pushed against the floor and my chest began to rise from the ground. I tried to give every shred of adrenaline I had left, but my arms failed and Iheard steps advancing on the hall. In a moment of decision, I chose to give up, jail was what I deserved, there was no use running from it.

I felt the guard approach, the slight breeze kicking through the once still space. My breath seemed to stop as I heard his concerned and quiet breathing. I wondered for a minute if he thought I was dead. Maybe it would have been better if I'd let the ffigure kill me, then at least I wouldn't feel the guard's scrutiny as he looked over my collapsed body.

Finally, he exhaled deeply and said, "All right kid, do you wanna explain what happened here last night?"

Surrounded by cops, I felt trepedation as I approached the large round room where the deed had been committed only a few hours before. Some of the guards had told me that I probably wouldn't be in much trouble. Some of them were laughing, which I found both rude and horrifying in the situation. Maybe I had done a wonderful deed and had killed some terrible villain. While that didn't make me feel much better than killing my potential killer, it did at least give me hope that I really wouldn't spend time in jail.

As we approached, I kept my eyes trained on the floor. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing the headless body, even though I knew I would probably have to eventually. The cops in front of me stepped over an object and I soon saw the sword. I expected it to be dripping with blood, but it was unnervingly clean and bare. The hair on my neck straightened with elecric panic surging through my body as I felt us getting closer to the body.

Keeping my eyes on the tile, I found myself standing still. I felt the guards turn toward me, as if cofused, and discomfort rippled through the room for a moment. The discomfort was broken with someone laughing, laughs echoed slowly around the room as the men seemed to come to a realization that I felt I was missing. Tears threatened to resume their previous trails down my cheeks and I decided I would rather be sitting in jail than listening to these men laugh over my murdered victim. I knew the best way to shut them up would be to look up and admit to the murder.

Counting down in my head, I raised my gaze toward the scene in front of me. I saw a pair of tall, muscular legs. Morbidly, I realized that the body had somehow remained standing when I had expected it to have slumped to the ground without its head. A jolt of nausea nearly knocked me over as I forced myself to look at the severed head on the ground near the dead mans shoes. Once again, I was surprised by the astounding lack of blood. Hair covered the facial features and obscured the slashed neck, which I was immensly grateful for.

Finally, I raised my eyes to look at the arm that had swung that sword at me only a short while previously. Feeling sick, I saw that here wasn't any blood here either. In fact I had yet to see a single drop of blood in the entire room. I wondered for a moment if the officers had cleaned up the area before bringing me in, but I was distracted by a slight motion.

My heart threatened to burst and my brain explode as the arm of the dead man swung at me again. I screamed and tried to run, but the wall off guards and the laughs coming from them stopped me in my tracks. I took a deep breath and turned to face my fear again. As I watched, I realized that there was something almost mechanical about it's swinging, it would swing four times and then stop for a bit. The laughter had died down and a silence covered the room as the gears in my brain tried to compute what ws happening. Finally the silence was broken by a screech as an ecclectic, and surely wealthy, woman burst nto the room. As she screamed I understood two words, broken and automaton. Only a second of relief passed through me before I passed out.

I woke up on a bench near the entrance of the museum. I turned my head to see my mom crying on a bench across from me, near an office from which I could hear my dad's voice carrying. A figure ran up and down the hall, who I soon recognized as my little brother. My mom quickly closed the distance to me and asked me about what had happened. I was torn between sobbing uncontrollably and telling her the truth while acting cool and unaffected. I think I pulled off something in the middle as I choked out the words of a partial explanation. My dads voice grew in intensity and I could make out some words trying to defend me. Then they quieted again.

Finally, the occupants of the room exited. There was a man and a woman with my ad. I recognized the woman and she clearly recognized me and I was afraid for a minute that her hand would be lunging to hurt me and this time I would not have a sword. And she would not be an animated sculpture. A sculpture! I hadn't killed anyone! I was a free man! I could run on the track team and I wouldn't have to explain how I had killed someone to everyone I would meet in the future. I'd be able to get a job and-

"You're in pretty big trouble kiddo," my dad ruined my moment of elation. "They're willing to drop any criminal charges against you, but your allowance will be going away from this point forward and you'll need to figure out a way to to pay off the small fine they've given you."

The man spoke as well, a laugh on the edge of his lips the entire time, "I suppose we should have taken your parents seriously when they came to the desk trying to locate you at closing time, we just assumed that they were trying to stay in the museum overnight or steal something, but somehow you were missed by every security sweep and managed to close our newest exhibit two days after it opened. I can only assume you thought it was a real soldier, and honestly I'm glad that we can get insurance on it and don't have to keep showing that horrendous exhibit, but why did you slice its head off insead of just run away?"

I had noticed the head sitting on his desk while he had been talking. Without realizing what I was doing, I shuffled toward the desk. As silence filled the space open for my answer, I finally saw the face of my tormenter. It was...hideous! The two eyes were uneven and placed in the wrong spot, the mouth seemed to have been ripped off of a woman in the middle of her botox surgery, and the hairline and eyebrows ran into each other awkwardly. Speechless, I turned toward my concerned parents and the museum man who seemed to be biting back a laugh.

His question bounced around in my head. I walked back to my parents, ready to be done with this horrid place. The man raised an eyebrow inquisitively. Why did you slice its head off instead of just run away?

"It was self defense," I said with a shrug. His laughter bounced through the hall as we left, and I finally felt a sadistic smile creep onto my face.

I held it together until we left the museum, then I let it all free on the steps. I laughed, I cried, I screamed, and I probably scared everyone watching. But at least I wasn't a murderer, and that was all that mattered.