But I wasn’t just a man.
I sat under a huge umbrella I’d thrust into the thick carpet of wet sand, my back braced against a soggy log, the collar of my cut flipped up against my throat and my chin tucked into the throat of my hoodie. I was cold but mostly dry.
And I liked the sound of the rain pounding with fury against the thin nylon umbrella, and the glass-like shatter of the waves hurling themselves at the rocky shore. It was all violence and temper, all passion. It made me feel human to sit there in the middle of it all and let nature batter me into feeling something.
Before, a night like this would have made me remember how it felt to live inside my own body, which always led to more. It was the key in the lock of the door securing my humanity in its vault inside my chest. Feeling of any sort only led to more feeling. The cold of my hands linked to the cold of the blood in my veins, the wrinkling of my skin to the atrophied set of my heart. I remembered why I was like this, not just broken in the way I’d been bred and born, but in the way I’d grown.
I wore the names of the dead on each knuckle like rings I would never remove. They were the heirlooms of the worthy dead. Some I had killed myself and some at other hands. They said serial killers often had keepsakes, mementos of their kills.
A perversion, they called it.
I called it memory.
It was my refusal to forget those whose death touched me in ways both good and evil.
It was my way of adding worthy scars to the others that riddled my skin like nightmares of the flesh.
There was my mother and my father, so poor that when they died there was no money for a proper burial. I dug out the earth myself, dragged their bodies through dirt turned to mud with rain, happy that the wet made their transport slicker, and then tossed them into their ditches. I jumped down after them, landing in ankle deep mud that sucked at my boots like the hands of demons trying to persuade me after my parents. I jumped in so I might arrange them the way I’d seen at funerals before, their hands across their chests, lids forced closed. It seemed like the logical thing to do.
I said a few words in prayer that felt wrong in my mouth, but by the time I trekked home, thighs quivering from the fatigue of fighting the mud with each step, I'd forgotten tidily about their death and moved forward with my life.
It didn’t do to dwell on the dead.
I don’t know where I learned this or if it was a refrain born into my brain like salt in the sea.
It was good however I came to claim the philosophy because my two sisters, Danae and Keelan, five and three years old respectively, died two days after my parents.
I buried them too.
They died because my parents were sinners.
This I was told by Father O’Neal, the local priest in our parish and the man who ultimately took me into the church for sanctuary when I was orphaned.
I wore his name on my middle finger bracketed by the names of my dead kin on either side, penned in Gaelic, the ink bleeding now, so old and poorly done that my brother, Nova, who ran The Fallen’s tattoo parlour, had begged to redo it for me.
I would not let him.
The tattoos I wore burned into my skin were not art.
They were not even scars.
They were living pain, hurts I chose to see every day because I lived them every day.
This was my self-inflicted torture.
I was equal opportunity about pain. I liked to give it only slightly more than I liked to receive it.
It reminded me, after all the horrors of my life, that I was alive, if only to feel it.
All I ever knew was angst so it became my only joy.
I felt it then, sitting on that night dark beach with cold in my bones and pain the only feeling in my chest. Usually, it didn’t hurt to open a vein like this, alone in the shadows. To be isolated was to be safe. In control of my own environment, separated from the scrutiny and emotional outflow of others. It was in company that I suffered.
So, why did I feel acid in my gums, coursing through my muscles as I sat in the wind and rain and paid my own kind of penance.
Why did I feel so alone in a way I never had before?
Alone in a way that felt unholy and wrong.
Without thinking, I looked up through the sleet at the window to the second-story guest bedroom in Z’s house.