Free Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann

left because of my loss of balance and slam backwards against our front door. I take three steps forwards and slam backwards against some kind of ice cream advertising medium set up in the public sphere. I turn around and slam backwards against an acne-ridden guy in a green uniform. The police officer’s progress in terms of non-verbal communication goes like this: he drags me roughly down a stone staircase – how on earth did I get here? – he shoves me in a taxi, the taxi driver drives off and is inspired to turn the radio up out of identification with his aggressor (which is me). I feel transported back to a four-thousand-capacity establishment and start to cry as George Michael wails hysterically ‘Guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm’ at me from the speakers – in a track that makes me suddenly want to give anything for a 2 × 2 metre laminate dance floor. I wail along, still crying, the driver asking me for the third time, ‘Where am I supposed to take you then?’
    * * *
    I take three steps back and slam backwards against the taxi. I lie down in the entrance to the former factory building where Ophelia lives, finally falling victim to an unspecific emotional articulation generally categorized as facial expression and accompanied by floods of tears. Crying is not attached to any particular emotion, occurring frequently, however, in cases of fear, melancholy and aggression, for example. Those who rampage tend to wreak blind destruction. Those who are traumatized (in the broadest sense) tend to find themselves constantly in situations of heightened nervousness.
    I’m standing misplaced in the washroom, eyeing a systematically heterogeneous group of filamentous fungal growths stretching in snaking lines across an organic substance as a greenish coating. My kindergarten’s going mouldy. I’m four years old and very recently puked into the open palms of a trainee nursery nurse.
    I’m standing crying in my mother’s bedroom as two china dishes containing my milk teeth and unfounded accusations are slung in my face. She says she’s going to die. She severs the back of my knee with a spare cutter blade. She severs my tendons with a lightness of hand, she cuts up everything that belongs to me in the slightest, she sets fire to my open wounds with an extra-long refillable electronic lighter printed with an advertisement for cling film and fitted with a child lock. She says I’m the best thing that ever happened to her. SHE SAYS I’M THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO HER.
    * * *
    I say to Alice, ‘Maybe I’ve got borderline personality disorder.’
    Alice answers, ‘Oh, that whole borderline personality syndrome crap is the equivalent of unspecified upper stomach pain. They always say that when they can’t think of anything else.’
    I’m sitting in the church hall of the Düsseldorf-Düsseltal Lutheran Community at the age of six, compelled to celebrate Christmas at an event organized by my teacher. Yellow laminate floor, brown curtains, woodchip wallpaper and homemade posters. My mother gives me two Santas made of Kinder Surprise eggs and cotton wool. I pretend to be moved to tears.
    ‘Can you see all the crap lying around here? That paper and foil over there?’ she asks.
    I nod.
    ‘The other parents all gave their children these Santas, and they just went and broke them because they were so greedy for the bloody chocolate. Their parents went to so much trouble, and the little bastards just go and smash the Santas and chuck them in the corner.’
    My mother starts crying. I hug her. There are no perpetrators, only victims. The younger a child is, the more guilty. The more responsible a child is for his or her sociopath parent, the better he or she can deal with his or her own criminal liability.
    0:08. Perhaps you’re only innocent when you have no idea of morals any more, I think at some point, finding myself completely unlikeable. I really need to get out of this habit of precociousness before it takes