Emma

I never even know their names. I watch their faces melt from their skulls, I hear their screams and I smell their burnt flesh, but I never know their names.

I remember Number 1. I was 13 and happily walking out of the mall after a fun day of shopping and laughing with my friends. I remember the heat of the humid summer afternoon struggling into our lungs after hours of artificial air-conditioned oxygen. I had fallen behind my peers to answer my father’s text. He was always worried like that and I never knew why until that exact day.

I remember the first time I saw Him. The man cloaked in black with hollow pits for facial features, and pallid bony fingers. As soon as I saw Him my feet stuck to the ground like my shoes had sunk into the concrete decades ago. My heart beat like the hooves of a racehorse and my skin felt cold and clammy. I felt sick. I felt sick like you do when you’re sweating cold and the bedcovers stick to your skin and no matter what you do you’re always too cold or too hot.

He was silently standing across the street like he was waiting. It was almost humorous how this occult figure stood close to the bus stop as if His intentions were to take the next one downtown after a long day on the job. Almost, because nothing involving Him could ever be close to humorous. Still, I was mesmerized by Him. I could not look away. His hunched and bony shoulders were tense and His head hung loosely from His neck, hiding behind the dark folds of His hood. His silence and His stillness were almost loud. Overwhelming. It felt wrong and ominous and hypnotizing all at once.

Suddenly, He moved. His movements were small but theatrical. He slowly walked behind a young woman sitting at the bus stop. She was beautiful, brown glossy hair tumbling in loose curls to her shoulders, tanned skin, and slender fingers delicately going through the pages of a little pocket-sized book. Emma. Somehow I remember she was reading Emma.

As He stood directly behind her, those long bony fingers tenderly went through her hair. His left hand went to her shoulders, a finger traced her jawline, her chin, her collarbone. The woman was oblivious. His hands moved like a ballerina’s - slow, theatrical, delicate. It looked beautiful, it looked like a dance, but it felt wrong. It felt oppressive, it felt like an assault. His right hand pulled something out of His cloak that winked in the sunlight. A knife.

I broke out of my haze and tried to warn the woman, tried to scream, to run, but my feet were still deep in the concrete, and my arms still frozen in time, and my tongue glued to the roof of my dry mouth. All I could do was watch. Watch and scream the warnings into my own head.

He gathered the woman’s hair into His left hand and tugged her closer to His chest, chin in the air. That was when she finally seemed to notice what was happening. Her eyes went wide, her scream echoed across the street, filled with unadulterated terror. Her hands flew to His wrists and frantically pulled and scratched but He no longer had ballerina’s hands, His hands were steel, unmoving. As a last resort, the woman searched for sympathy in the crowd. In that moment I realized how clueless the world was. I had been standing here. watching for God knows how long, and an ominous figure was about to murder a young woman at a bus stop, but the world had gone on as usual. My friends had long since gone home. The sun was slowly on its way down. Pedestrians were chatting, shoppers were walking in and out of the mall.

Her eyes landed on me. Her panic infectious, her tears contagious. Eyes boring into mine, she didn’t stop screaming, her neck jutting out vulnerably. I was sobbing now, my heart beating out of my chest. Tears running down and drying on my cheeks, some fell on my lips and I could taste their saltiness.

In a second and one smooth movement, He slid the knife over her throat. The screaming stopped and the gurgling started. My lunch threatened to come back up and my throat burned with bile and the urge to scream. I squeezed my tearful eyes shut but opened them soon after. I had to see, I had to check. Maybe there was time to call 911. The woman was sprawled limply on the bus stop seat, clothes red with blood. The man next to her on the bus stop calmly stood up to board a passing bus. Her book was on the floor, crumpled, and soaked through.

Finally, my legs moved and I frantically ran towards her, barely registering the cars on the street and the people on the sidewalks. As soon as I reached her I couldn’t look any longer. I lowered my eyes and saw her book. Emma. It took me a moment to realize, but it wasn’t red with blood. It wasn’t red. It was just crumpled, on the floor. Puzzled, I took a second to react and picked it up. I could hear my heart in my ears and feel it in the tips of my fingers.

“Thank you”, I heard a soft melodic voice say above me.

I looked up and there she was, the beautiful woman. No blood. No terror. No Death. She smiled and her beauty doubled by the kindness in her eyes. I just stood there, unbelieving. Her delicate and manicured hand was stretched out to me, waiting for the book. I stared at it in shock. But then I really looked at it. she had a tattoo on her inner wrist. No. Not a tattoo, it was moving.

01:08:23. 01:08:22. 01:08:21….

One hour, eight minutes, and twenty seconds of life.

My breath hitched and looked around. Someone must have seen it too. Someone must be here to explain. Someone-

And there He stood. Silent. Knowing. Looking straight into my soul. His hollow mouth did not change shape but it seemed to be grinning at me. He was calm now, relaxed. Satisfied. My stomach knotted and I knew deep down this would not be our last encounter.

It truly wasn’t. I look back down at nameless Number 247. I had gone numb until tonight. In eight years I had watched Number 132 burn, Number 228 drown, Number 53 get shot. But tonight, looking down at the three-year-old boy that was pushed off the balcony of his home, I felt something snap. Something in my own chest break and shatter. I bent down to turn the little baby’s wrist.

02:13:41, 02:13:40, 02:13:39…

01:46:02, 01:46:01, 01:45:59…

My own wrist. I looked up at my old friend. The only one who stuck around after what the others called my ‘psychotic breaks’. The only one in life who does not falter. Does not love but neither does he hate, discriminate or abandon. The only one there to see me in the end - to see me in one hour, forty-five minutes and forty-three seconds, when the only word on my mind as I stepped off the ledge towards my great escape was Emma…