Chapter 1 - Tandem: I

There is a child.

She has no mother.

Perhaps, in a time long forgotten, hidden within the depths of those joyous (terrible) childhood years, she remembered her mother. But those memories are buried under multitudinous layers of other more important events.

Such as when she was eight, and went from a child to a jaded adult within fifteen minutes, completely circumventing puberty, the certified ‘first love’ and ‘first heartbreak’, and all other hallmarks of the lengthy tween- then teen-hood other children encounter prior to becoming adults.

Or when she was twelve and quite tragically, her father was killed in a freak accident involving lemonade, hospital grade detergent and his falling victim to the flu.

Don’t ask.

Occasionally, she dreams of two pairs of eyes, one blue and one green, twinkling at each other, one flirtatious and the other amiable in intent. But ever since she began to forget everything and anything she encountered that had any connection with her mother, those dreams grew ever distant. The only influence they ever had was her rather subconscious penchant for stealing the gaze of blue- and green-eyed people everywhere.

She enjoys cutting the eyes out with a dull blade. Watching as those eyes cloud over, their owners screaming in agony as they are sent (she reasons, remembering her father’s rather heavy-handed teachings of ‘ignorance is bliss’) into transient bliss, a precursor to their imminent sending into eternal paradise.

Perhaps somewhere inside she wishes someone out there could have cut her own eyes out when she was eight. She would have much rather preferred if she had been unable to see her birthday ‘present’. It had, if not anything else, most definitely been a surprise, one that threw up other ‘surprises’ that she looked upon with bright-eyed (occasionally attributed to tears) childhood innocence inversely proportional to the number of gifts her father had bestowed upon her within those fifteen minutes.

So she enacted revenge upon her long since perished parents in the only way she knew how.

She punished those that reminded her of her mother, for not being there and protecting her when she needed protection.

She punished those that reminded her of her father, for what was once safe… became decidedly unsafe.

Some might say she is looking for two people, blue- and green-eyed each, that are capable of being the parents she never had.

Because aren’t parents supposed to reign their children in when they get out of control?