The first sentence of this story came to me on a morning when the wind was blowing and the temperature was below forty. The rest of it had to wait a week to be written.

Rated for suggestive drug use, self-mutilation, and scary images towards the end. I haven't let anyone else read it, so tell me what you think.

~

It is a desolate wind that blows on cold winter mornings, before the sun has risen but after the moon has set, when the sky is cloudy and the street is empty. It howls and moans, cries out over rooftops and through fences. It screams its anger and frustration for all ears to hear. Nothing can understand it. Nothing knows the disgust of the wind as, year after year, it sees the same thing - the deterioration of the earth and the blossoming of human society. The wind that can bite you to the bone cries in an endless, helpless pain through the same mouth.

I am the only one who knows what it says. I am the only one who sits on his roof and lends a sympathetic ear to the never-ending sounds of the wind. It is my only friend, as I am its. We understand each other, the wind and I. I think it is the shared hatred of the human race that connects us.

My mother always yelled at me for sitting on the roof. She thought I would fall off, or that someone would be able to come through the window as it waited for my return. I tuned her out. It is not often, maybe once in a lifetime, that a person can find a friendship like this, so utterly complete. I never expected her to understand. No one I know would.

My mother also thought I was all alone at school. I never talked to her about friends or classmates. She had gotten calls from the principal about fights I had been in, but that was before I realized the wind spoke in an archaic language that it slowly taught me. At school, I take my lunches outside, in a corner where the crosswinds shoot in and ruffle my hair, blow sand on my clothes and face. I know that it is an accident when it does that, so it is not that I mind it. I know the wind would never do anything to spite me on purpose.

It looks out for me like no one could comprehend. In my younger years, before I learned the wind's language, I always thought it soothing to sit on the windowsill and lean out as far as I could, allowing the fair breeze to tease my hair. I would shut my eyes and make believe that I could fly away from my misery, the peer-imposed death of myself. That was in fifth grade and ten years old. That was when I began to hurt myself.

It started small - bruises that I would get on my shins from kicking the gutters. Then, one time, I lost control and fell over the edge of the roof. In desperation, I flailed for the flagpole, but all that gave me was a gash on my left bicep from its jagged edge. I remember a sharp pain and a weightless sensation; then a gust of gale-force wind, and my feet found a solid surface. My knees gave out. I was on the roof again. The wind died down to a gentle, featherlike touch, caressing my face like a parent as I breathed heavily on my side and blood dripped from my arm.

I reveled in the throbbing ache that my left arm had become.

A week later, I brought a kitchen knife onto the roof with me. It was serrated and barely two and a half inches long, but I figured it would serve my purpose. The day at school had been excruciatingly grueling, full of taunts and jeers, and all I wanted was some time with myself. Some time with my pain. But the moment I pressed the knife to the skin of my forearm, the wind howled like a wounded beast. I took the blade away; the wind died down. Smiling, I pushed down and pulled hard enough to draw a few delicate droplets of red, and the wind screamed. An unearthly sound that tore at my eardrums filled the air. I dropped the knife to clap my hands over my ears, and it stopped immediately. The knife clattered over the gutter, but when I peered over the edge of the roof, I saw no evidence that it had skittered to the ground.

My self-mutilation - the consciously destructive aspect of it, anyway - ended there. Thanks to the wind, I am not one of those kids that cannot wait to get home and tear at himself with a knife. The breeze that tutored me and nurtured me in our alternate reality saved me from the imprisoning box of a life of pain.

Later on, however, when the teasings were still there (wherever I turned, in fact) I developed a dependency on narcotics - marijuana in particular. It was not a physical addiction; I just needed the stuff to cool down after a miserable day at school. I loved the feeling that I could do just about anything when I was high, but it was purely mental. Eighth grade, at thirteen, was the first time I tried it, and from then on I was hooked. Occasionally, I would take other things - speed, ecstasy, even acid, once - but in my heart, I knew there was only room for Mary Jane. Well, that, and the wind.

I noticed that the wind mellowed when I smoked on the roof. It sounded not as angry or tortured. For a while, I thought that the smoke went straight to whatever mind it might have had. I learned recently that it quieted because I was happy. What made me happy would make the wind happy. In tenth grade, though, my art teacher caught me with a five-dollar bag of the stuff that I had bought that morning. I was being stupid; I deserved to be caught, staring longingly at it under the table. When my teacher threatened to turn me in to the cops, I stopped doing drugs altogether. The wind and I both grew angrier and more withdrawn.

In high school, people left me alone more than in elementary and middle school, but the jeers were still there. Everything was a ground for torture: my pale, lank limbs as I dressed out for gym, my attentiveness in class, my practiced and hardened glare. . .but as I reached my junior year, the wind became more protective of me then it had ever been. I think it was in part because of the deterioration of my relationship with my mother.

During their messy divorce when I was fifteen, both my parents laid the blame on me. Had I not come along, my father told me, problems would be nonexistent, and he and Mother would never fight. However, once my father moved out permanently, the house was emptier than it had been when we first moved in. With him, he took much of the furniture and all of the happy memories of years gone. It was a different place without him.

My mother tried to mend our family as I grew more sullen. We would argue for hours over my grades, my homework, my drugs, my social life. When we were finished, I would storm onto the roof and slam the window down. The wind would embrace me then and wipe the tears from my face. The wind would make everything feel okay again, enough so that I could sleep at night.

One Friday, after a horrible week at school and at home, I poured my aching heart into a chalice and offered it to the wind. I told it of everything, but I kept names out of it, which was how I still wonder about what happened next.

Things began to change at school. At first, it was subtle - the cheerleader who gave me a disgusted look as I passed sprained her ankle. The captain of the lacrosse team who tripped me in the hallway broke his elbow during a game. Then it became more obvious what was happening, what the wind was doing. A teacher who had once failed me because of my poor social skills tripped on the balcony of his ninth floor apartment and fell through the flimsy guard to his death on the sidewalk below. The valedictorian who had mocked and bullied me since sixth grade dropped out of school a week before her graduation and jumped off a skyscraper during a school-sponsored tour of the capital district. There was no explanation as to the sudden suicide. The memorial service for both was put off several times and finally cancelled because of an unrelenting storm that had blown in and flooded half the town.

The truth is, I am a little frightened as to what the wind is doing. It wants to protect me, and I understand that. I have appreciated this friendship to its full extent; I still do, in fact, but it scares me now what is happening in my life. It may be my best friend, my only friend, but that does not stop me from being afraid.

Last night, my mother and I fought about college. I have never wanted to go; she has always wanted me to. The fight ended in tears and screams. I was so upset that the window shattered as I slammed it shut. Shards of glass littered my floor and followed me onto the roof. The sounds of them falling and dying on the concrete slab below me blended with my sobs. Rubbing my eyes, I told the wind that I hated her, and it new automatically of whom I spoke. With the wind's knowledge came an absolute rage that I had never felt before.

Then came the biggest mistake of my mother's life: she stepped out the front door and into the yard for the entire world to see.

Immediately, the wind intensified. Having trouble sitting upright, I pulled myself into the alcove provided by the roof and the jutting structure that held my window and listened to the wind roar by. My mother was shoved against our old station wagon, her clothes pressed tightly to her body and her skin stretched tightly across her cheekbones. I covered my ears and shut my eyes. I screamed for the wind to stop - no one deserved this. What had my mother done?

The sound of tearing cloth and her terrified scream forced my eyes open. She was naked, her clothes stripped away by the ferocious wind. She screamed again as her eyelids peeled back and the whites of her eyes were exposed.

Then they ripped off, blown away with a bloody trail in the wind. This time, we both screamed, and my eyes closed of their own accord.

Tiles began to fly off the roof to either side of me. My mother cried for my help, and I pried my eyes open again. Her skin looked like it was splitting at the seams. Tender beads of blood formed at her shoulders and, gradually, down the insides of her arms. A trail formed between her breasts, in a ring around her nipples, at each of her hips. Her face was bisected by a line of red. Then the rending began. A solid line formed wherever the red had been, and crimson trickled out. All at once, her face flew off and left only a skull and bleeding muscle and drying eyeballs in their sockets. The skin on her arms and chest separated and raised like paper caught in a draft, and then that too was gone. Dying muscle was exposed and soon began to peel off; bone and tendon alike glistened. She raised her arms with a tremendous effort and tried to claw her way to safety along the car, but soon, her fingernails snapped off. Her scalp with all that hair flapped back to the farther side of her head.

I could not control it then. I bent over out of my shelter and emptied what seemed to be everything I had ingested in the past three days onto the concrete. I retched until nothing but bile came up, stared at the faint splatter on the concrete and screamed as I willed myself to look at my mother again. Much of her flesh and tissue was gone; her jaw opened and closed, but I was deafened by the wind and could not hear her. I saw her picked up and flung down the street, far out of the neighborhood, more likely than not out of town, and then all was blackness and I was riding on a cushion of air.

I awoke this morning with a headache and a stomachache - dehydration and hunger, for certain, but I have not left my bed yet today. Still frightened, I can hear the wind calling me. I have been paralyzed with uncertainty all day.

I suppose in a few hours I will venture out onto the roof and face my mother's murderer. Until then, the voice is only wind, and I can listen to its familiar, comforting howl until I am ready to confront it.