Free Black Feathers by Robert J. Wiersema

stopped, the tip of her tongue pressing against her lower lip like she was frozen in mid-word.
    “It’s all right,” Cassie said, not really sure if it was. “I’ve met some people. There’s this—”
    “In Centennial Square.”
    “—community,” she finished, then nodded. “Yes. How—”
    “It was in the paper,” she said, gesturing toward the back of the restaurant. “Are they all right? Is it okay?”
    “It seems okay. I haven’t been there long.” She picked up her cup, willing her hand not to shake, and drank the last of her hot chocolate. “I only met them yesterday. They’re not a cult or anything.”
    Ali’s expression of concern shifted to mild bemusement. “Well, if you say so.”
    It was nice to have someone worried about her.
    “What were you drawing?”
    The question seemed to come out of nowhere, but Ali pointed down at Cassie’s sketchbook and pencil: “What are you working on?”
    “Oh.” Cassie felt herself starting to blush again. “It’s just my journal. I haven’t … It’s been a while.”
    “You were pretty focused on it. Like that day with the book.”
    Blushing more now, hearing that Ali had remembered. “Yeah.”
    “I tried keeping a diary when I was younger. A few times, actually. But I never stuck with it. Does it help?”
    Cassie took a long moment to answer. “Yes. It does.”
    Ali stood up. “I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll be back with some more hot chocolate in a bit. You take all the time you need.”
    Cassie just smiled. “Thank you.”
    Leaning back over her journal, she began to flip through the pages, the echo of Ali’s question still reverberating in her mind.
    Yes, it helped. It helped in so many ways. The journal kept her grounded, reminded her of who she was, her true self, no matter how far things drifted.
    It was all her, all right there.
    She turned to the first page, the first writing in the new journal she had started in the hospital the month before.
    She stared at the words, her truth, her self.
    November 15, 1997
    I killed Daddy last night.

 

    Scientists believe that light can be both wave and particle. Not that light exists in different states at different times, the way that water can be ice or steam with the application or reduction of heat, but that light exists as both a wave and a particle at the same moment. It is not either/or. It is both/and.
    This is also true of the Darkness.
    It exists not within paradox, but as a paradox itself.
    It is both energy and form.
    Both without and within.
    It moves within us and outside us. Like a man and like the arc of electricity.
    I knew this from the moment the Darkness first came to me.
    But even that is wrong. The Darkness was always within me. It is always within all of us. But even though it was within me, it came to me too. I could feel it moving over me, brushing across my face and watching through my eyes as I held the kitten in the kitchen sink, as I turned the water on and let the basin fill.
    I could feel the Darkness within me, my Darkness, growing as the kitten struggled, and I could feel the Darkness outside looking on, watching me and watching through my eyes.
    The Darkness within me grew with every desperate attempt the kitten made to escape. And the Darkness outside fed off the kitten’s death, and from every scratch it inflicted on me, every drop of my blood it spilled in its dying.
    The Darkness fed from both of us. And fed. And fed.

 

    As she opened the door from the restaurant, the cold wind was like a slap in the face, stinging and sharp. Cassie took a startled breath that burned all the way down, and stopped short to shift her scarf up over her mouth and nose. It took only seconds for her to feel like she might never be warm again.
    And she had been so warm.
    It was like waking into a nightmare.
    Hunching her shoulders forward, she turned away from the wind, ducking her head. As she scurried past, she caught a glimpse of Ali standing in the window, watching her