My mother used to say not sleeping was the sign of a guilty mind. It could have been. There was a lot in my mind to feel guilty about. When you__e drunk and trying to sleep, your thoughts are visited by the ghosts of those deeds whose heat still glows hottest in your personal darkness. Our actions burn much longer than the moments in which they occur. And drunks like me, we hide from the glow of the embers by fueling other fires and hiding within the flames.

The dead pull the living down.

People never think of a child as being a monster, because if they did, they would never be able to sleep at night. Children are where lies peoples hopes, dreams, innocence... Not where lies murder.

I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind me, while weeds sought to shackle my ankles, so that I could go no further. The pain they caused was minor, when I compared it to the searing inferno at my core.

We're all hunters in my family, you know. Deer, ducks_damsels.

There would be no salvaging this. I was going to die a spinster with cobwebs feasting on my vagina, I just knew it.