After the Fires Part 1

2033
Ashes are everywhere. I am used to them, the residue of the world as was. I breathe them into clouds as I sleep, find grey runnels of them in the folds of my clothes, shake them out of my hair each and every time I wake in the underworld. But today it is different. Today I create the ashes. Today I burn the traces of my past, the woman who brought me into being, and her sad story, and her whole humdrum existence, because none of it was enough. Rainer sits beside me and wisely says nothing as I tear the diary into shreds and burn the shreds into ashes and crumble the ashes into fine powder. He knows the whole sorry tale from beginning to end. As we stare into the flames I picture the day everything ended; imagine her glowing with uncharacteristic light as the bloody cage of her body burns. Her spirit, such as it was, is looking back at me with empty eyes.

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Everyone said Katharina Ellenson was different. From the day she was born she was meant to be an outsider. Her sisters were prettier, her schoolmates more outgoing, her peers more wise to the ways of the world. She was like some delicate little flower, white and slender and pathetic, surrounded by choking weeds. She led a pointless life and grew up without a purpose and nothing to her name. The most interesting thing that ever happened to her was her death- and that was her fault. She was a fool who let her emotions dictate her actions. Naive. And it killed her.

Katharina was nineteen and fragilely perfect in grey, her permanently surprised expression a watercolour in rose and cream and peach next to her camerades' spiderleg lashes and orange masks beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. It her cleanness, her goddamned pure virginal bewildered look, whicih made her stand out when she wasn't trying, in a crowd of girls who evidently were. The man who no-one saw enter slid unnoticed along the bar, took her wrist and whispered honeyed poison into her ear, quiet, insistent. No need- she would have followed him like a lamb in any case, followed him mindlessly to the ends of the earth, because he was the first person in years to look at her, to communicate with her, to seem like he actually cared. And who knows- maybe he did- it's not my place to speculate what goes on the minds of people who violate and touch and kiss where they have no right to be.

So anyway, he led her out of the fug of the bar and pulled her round the back. Only the stars and the silent silhouettes of trees paid witness to his hot hands as they trembled with lust, fingers unbuttoning, fondling, caressing. They saw the girl with the long blonde hair arch and moan and gasp as her tender untouched body came alive with a thousand forbidden sensations. It must have felt so good to him to corrupt and destroy something so breakable. Like some fragile-boned bird becomes sickeningly malleable in your hands when you break its wings. He took his pleasure and they stood with the sweat cooling on their backs and necks and the grass soft and yielding beneath their feet. By that time she was convinced she was in love with him. When he ran off into the trees she was sure he'd gone to fetch his car, or some fresh air, or something. She never dreamed he'd take all that she could give him and leave her standing there, in her bloodstained skirt, shivering in the chill breeze. Katharina, young and innocent as she was, never saw herself as prey.

In the months that followed little happened. She sunk even further into her dream world, distancing her mind from the strange and frightening changes going on inside her. But soon it was painfully clear to everyone what had happened on that autumn night. Her mother slapped her and screamed at her that she was a stupid shameless whore and why didn't she open those pretty eyes of hers, to see what was going on in the real world. If she'd had friends to support her, maybe it would've been different. But as it was, the man who'd fucked her never showed his face again, not even when she'd gone quietly into labour and, detached even from her own pain, given birth all alone on her bedroom floor.
I piece the final extracts together with my imagination- her bloodless lips quiver for a moment- the sudden flood of blood seems wrong to her even in her vegetative state- a final panicked look, and she is gone, her mind now empty in the true sense of the word. I writhe beside her, a tiny wrinkled hairless creature on the rank drenched rug.

I never forgave my mother for making such an irreversible mistake. She forced me to be created inside her, to be born and then to grow up in this new hate-filled world. No family. No friends. Just people I use and who use me in return for the most important and fundamental purpose of all-survival.