Free The Toxic Children by Tessa Maurer Page B

humming, something —something with a heartbeat.
    Red . Flashes of that damn red. I am silent. I listen for the sound, the sound in the dead silence of something alive .
    I follow it, letting the animal do what it does best. My eyes scan and my mind shuts off. I move. I hunt.
    Plants brush against my skin. Ravens call. The sun is high and hot. An Adaption is sixty feet to the right. A cool breeze sets in. The sun burns my eyes. My skin sweats. My mouth is dry. Pests buzz. Time passes. Red .
    And it’s gone out of my sight, lost in the brush, in the distance, in my head. Can’t be real. There’s nothing so vivid left. Our toxic forms and toxic minds and toxic urges killed them. Any left hide and never come up.
    The world shifts into focus. I am in the cemetery. I should not be in the cemetery. I can feel death in a way I do not like. I can feel the agony and I can feel the anger and I can feel . I feel everything. The souls swarm to me like moths to a flame, like leaches to flesh, like sharks to blood. They want to rip me up, don’t they? Kill me for what I have done? Make me one of them? Human and Adaption alike, all trapped and wanting out— wanting in .
    It weighs down on me like nothing physical knows how to. I lose my footing. I see faces, and I know I put some of them here. I see a man before me, the one with the messed up eye that always squints.
    “Still feeling, I see.”
    “What do you care for?” I say. I clutch at my chest, but it doesn’t do a thing. Why would it? I cannot touch what’s inside of me.
    “If you have to ask, you care.”
    “I—“ but the souls try to get inside my head and I cannot think. They force guilt down my throat like swollen hands trying to find the soul lost inside this flesh. I drown like thick blood pooling in my lungs.
    “Stop!” yells the voice of a girl, and I must be imagining it.
    Something is shifting, changing… They’re leaving me be. The souls move from me, and my numbness comes back and I feel…nothing. I feel so profoundly nothing .
    I turn towards the voice, and see a girl with fire red hair and sun-specks all over her face, skin burned to a tan. She has a gun, ancient and powerful.
    “What are you?” I ask. I can feel the killer in me slowly waking up.
    “Human. Living, breathing, proper human,” she says. “The ashen skin tells me what I need to know about you, and yet it doesn’t tell me anything. You know you were crying?” she says.
    “What?” I say. My mind never has to process like this. I have seen humans, I have killed humans, but I have not spoken to one in so long save for the ghosts in my head. I run off of something old inside of me that I do not understand. It tells me how to function.
    “I’ll take that as a no. You were crying, sobbing, eyes leaking. Heard of it?”
    I touch my face and feel the dampness. “I don’t understand.” Kill it, kill it, kill it . The urge will not stay asleep.
    “Don’t ask me. Some part of you must still be connected to humanity,” she says. She is silent for a moment, watching me. “Give me one good reason not to kill you. You might love it, but I hate it every time.”
    “I have none. I am going to kill you. That’s the only thing I know,” I say. It feels so unnatural to be speaking with another being outside of my head. I have this rushing feeling in my gut. I think I’m anxious. Nothing feels right. I stopped being able to cry years and years ago. I cannot function in such ways.
    “Come on, just give me something . I want you to be human. Don’t you hate being alone?”
    “I am human. I just evolved. Don’t try to make this my fault. You people, you purists, you made this,” I say. I feel anger.
    Her green eyes widen and she looks down to her gun. “I know that. We kill, we pollute, we destroy, we rape, we harm—we expect it’s only a second, a time period, but we lied to ourselves. We created a world we could barely live in, so we had toxic children and they killed