i dont know whats a dream and what isnt anymore. what i do know is that i saw mikes face. i could barely tell it was him because his face was completely burnt away but he was wearing what he was wearing last i saw him. plaid jacket and khakis. i remember saying that he looked like he was auditioning for the divorced dad porn competition and both of us had no idea what i meant by that. i think i was just learning as i went.

i think ive lost something. is there a reason why i didnt react when i saw his face? i should have screamed i should have shouted i should have done something. but i didnt do anything. i just did the closest thing i could to swallowing hard. maybe i did swallow i just cant remember.

the only thing that i can think of is his face. not the face i want to remember. its not the face i want to remember. i dont want to remember the way his blackened skin sunk all the way down to his cheekbones. not the way i could tell those things in his sockets used to be eyes at one point.

I can’t remember his face.

I can’t remember what he looked like.

The vision of his charred face is all that comes to mind.

The way he ushered me into the woods and I helped him pull the legs off salamanders.

The way their small throats hissed and the way he was completely transfixed.

The way that I didn’t complain.

The way I never objected to what he had us both do.

The way I just wanted to be with him

no matter what.

I never apologized to her, did I? Not that an apology would do any good anyway.

I should have done it anyway when the wounds were still fresh. But what would that even accomplish?

Still. I don’t have an excuse, do I? If I had an excuse, I probably wouldn’t be here. I talked a little bit about it, but I was Catholic for like, half of my life, yeah?

Guess this is kind of like a confessional? Fuck do I know about my own religion, huh? Not much. Doubt there’s a priest here anyway. I would know.

No better way to begin than the day me and Mike met. We were in the same fourth grade class and I had just transferred in. I didn’t know anybody. Standard shit. Who cares? What actually matters is that I was too much of a fucking wuss to talk to anybody.

But Mike? He was different. He picked me up almost immediately and decided that I was interesting enough to keep around. We hung around. Hung out a lot. I remember once asking him about what happened to his dad and he clasped his hand around my mouth.

Maybe I was too young to know.

I get it.

Would have fucking sucked to know about what the mafia does at the grand age of twelve.

He was… alluring.

There was something about him that drew me in. I remember a school PSA talking about people like him. They called those kinds of people “venus flytraps”.

Anyway. I got sidetracked.

I invited him to my grandma’s summer house when school let out for Thanksgiving. His family doesn’t really celebrate Thanksgiving, so they didn’t really care that I brought Mike up. It’s pretty deep in the woods. A couple of kids could easily get lost out there and eaten by coyotes or fucking whatever. Not us, however.

Looking back, we did something more fucked up than what those coyotes could muster.

It was Thanksgiving night. My uncle said some dumb shit about something I don’t even remember now. At the moment it really pissed me off though. I do remember not wanting to start anything at the table. I snuck off to my room and went to bed to try and sleep off my anger. Kind of a shit idea, honestly. Ever try sleeping while your blood’s boiling? It doesn’t feel good.

Mike must have noticed my thrashing. They were really shitty attempts at falling asleep. So he came up to me with a plan.

He grabbed my wrist and we snuck out of the house and into the woods. I screamed and shouted at him to stop, that he had no idea what he was doing and that this was dangerous. My grandma had warned us time and time again about specifically not going into these woods. She even said it to Mike, even though he had no motive to even go there in the first place. I still don’t know what he was trying to accomplish.

Was he trying to start shit? Was he trying to tell me to take the stick out of my ass and loosen up? I’ll never know. I asked him about it and he said he had no idea what I was talking about.

Not even in reference to the story I’m telling right now.

He acted like it all never happened.

He took me to the deepest parts of the woods all while I was thrashing and sobbing. Dunno if he was ignoring me or not. I’ll never know.

He took me to a place in the woods I’d never seen. An elementary school that had long since been overrun with vines and animals. There was a path leading to the front door, but it had completely blended in with the grass. I didn’t even notice it was there until my shoe clunked against the rock.

We entered. Papers were still scattered around the place, like everybody left in a hurry. They were both drawings and hand-written paperwork. The whole place smelled like mold, but Mike didn’t seem to give a fuck.

Then we found her.

A girl. Couldn’t have been older than seven. She was sleeping underneath the principal’s desk on a bed of twigs and leaves.

I’ve done some digging into the topic of feral kids since that day. She looked exactly like the pictures in that heavy-ass textbook.

And Mike looked at me in that moment and spoke.

”You’re angry, right? I hurt salamanders when I’m angry. It’s just a big salamander.”

I backed away. That’s probably the most sane thing I did in the span of those couple of hours we were gone. Followed closely by my thrashing, maybe.

It goes without saying that I hurt her. I killed her just because he wanted me to. The part that fucks me up is the fact that she didn’t even react. If I hadn’t felt her pulse fizzle in my hands, I would have assumed she was already dead.

Then we just went back like nothing had happened. We went back to my grandma’s without a word to one another. Such a fucked up thing shouldn’t have gone unchallenged. It did, though. We were never punished and I don’t think anybody ever found out, either.

That made me think. Why the fuck did I even care at all, then?

Under the right circumstances, I could disappear and never be found alive ever again.

So why did I care about anything?

What reason did I have to give a shit?

In recent times, I’ve kind of let go of this idea now that I saw what happened to Mike. That, and how it made me feel.

People would, in fact, miss me.

However, something tells me that we’ve both deserved what happened to us. I still don’t fully understand what happened to me, or where I am, or anything.

I just know that I deserve this.