All these long years

I used to be called Carla, I think.

To be honest, i dont remember who i was before i became who i am now. All i can recall are four very white walls and that terrible despair that filled up my lungs, closed a fist around my throat and held me close.

I dont try and remember all my names either. Call me what you want to, it doesn't matter to me.

Sometimes it hurts. I know I will never fall in love or know freedom because I am trapped in this place with this name on my chest and this thick woolen cloak wrapped around my shoulders. My body is still, my mind at ease.

They call me assassin and that is all the name I need now. Anything else would feel too real, too personal and I like the distance. It's easier to kill a beast than one of your own kind and if I dont call myself human i dont have to dwell on what it is that i have done.

When I first came to this place, this dark decrepit crumbling mansion surrounded by deafening waves and the stench of rot I'm sure they had name for me. A number at least as we were no more than cattle to them, a prize, something to be battered and bargained for.

We never got to know the number, or whatever cruel words they had branded us with as identification when the time came for us to be sold. We were simply 'you' or 'it'.

I would like to think that back then I had enough real feeling left for that to hurt but I dont recall even the merest sting from such an address.

How sad, you must think, to be me.

I dont see my life as a misery, though. I dont experience pain, or sadness, or grief or loss. I dont spend every day afraid of losing that which I love or chasing dreams that will inevitably fail me. I do my job and when it is all over I come back here, to where I began and where I will end and I fall into dreamless sleep.

I do know that when I was 8, another girl who was in training with me began to call me Monty. Dont ask me why, she just said I looked like a 'Monty', though I dont particularly know how u can look like a name. Eight year old logic I suppose. She had coined herself Enka and she was a protege. Easily the most talented of all of us. We were in hand to hand combat training then, I remember, as our young limbs bent easier back then and our endless energy propelled us forward.

Enka beat me every time, sent me back to my hard cot with bruised legs, split lips and a wounded pride. I suppose she was a friend but I cant be sure - I'd never had a friend before. Besides, the work pitted us against each other every day so can you really be friends with your competition?

I don't know what happened to Enka. She used to wake me in the dead of the night, her small cold hand over my still weeping lips, ignoring the blood, catching my screams in her palm. She'd take us down the stairs on our tiptoes and she'd teach me. How to be quick and to balance, how to fight against her and easily win.

One of the...sponsors, I guess...found us one day, but she only smiled and stood back at watched. We thought we'd get in trouble but she only watched.

When we finally left, fleeing up to our dorm moments before dawn broke over the craggy hillside we were full of elation, heart beats pounding and giggles spilling forth from lip splitting smiles. We were joyous.

We shouldn't have been.

Enka was sold the next day.

She was only nine, if I recall that day as well as I think.

I should.

As my only maybe friend I owe her that much.

But this job is not cut out for anyone that young and I think I know what happened to her, but it stopped hurting after a while. So long ago now that I'm not entirely sure if it even hurt in the first place.

Nowadays I tell my clients my name is Jones. Just Jones. Generic and dull and entirely unidentifiable. But they know me. They all do. I'm the best at this.

Not too much of a brag. It's not difficult and certainly not an achievement to be proud of but we cant help what we do. I dont know why I'm still here. I could gave left years ago. I suppose, If i felt fear, i might be afraid that theres nothing waiting for me. That this is the only thing I'm good at.

I suppose I should count myself lucky, to have found something I excel in, not many do.

But at what cost?

I turn in the crisp cool sheets and place my bare feet on the slick cobblestones, pulling myself from the uncomfortable cot I've called home for the past 34 years 7 months and 14 days. As I pad to the window, open and bare of any glass, with only thin gauze curtains to keep out the breeze, my breath mists in front of me and even that seems artificial; too white, too thick for this elegant evening where the whole of my little world is bathed in moonlight, silver and dazzling.

As I gaze over the ruins that have become home, one hand on the cool, damp stone ledge to steady myself, I wonder how much longer I will be able to return here before my cracked knees and bruised knuckles give way and I fall into that soft sweet smelling grass to finally sleep.

I'm so tired.

They've called me many things over these long, sweeping years.

But now, now they call me Jones, or the assassin, and that's the only name I need.