The Birthday Suicide

“You put the weights around yourself.”

-Interpol (Slow Hands)

One.

She always hated her birthday, not because it was the day she broke up with her boyfriend nor the day when Tommy Williams poured red paint down her shirt. Sophie Quarter always hated August Seventeenth as the day, though as irrelevant as it was to her, the day the DeLione Family was murdered next door. A rich neighborhood as it was, with the tall, bleach houses miles apart (making neighbors seem more like a distant city).

Sophie remembers it being her third birthday when she first sees him (Not that you can remember anything at that age, argued her mother). He was a tall boy, most likely her older brother, Tom’s age. He was leaning over the table casually, his palm cupping his chin as he stared at her through his frosty blonde hair. Commotion ignored the boy as a child spilled Sophie’s birthday cake near, but did not apologize. A woman was talking loudly while taking heavy steps, but did not excuse herself as she ran dangerously through the boy. Eyes as dark as sin, the boy thinly smiled at Sophie, curving his lips so upwards and wide she thought of him uncannily like a Cheshire Cat.

He doesn’t quite walk as he does glide across the open space. But when he reached the young Sophie, he swooped down, only patting her gently over her heart with a faint request,

“Come find me.”

Sirens roar only seconds after the last word was uttered and as Sophie looked behind her, she could only find traces of finger prints on her shoulder and a lingering smell of pungent charcoal.

It happened every year after that.

Every year on Sophie birthday that the boy somehow always showed up, always in the same outfit, and always smiling. At first Sophie assumed it was her brother’s friends or her mother’s doing. But after cornering the two in what was Sophie’s seventh birthday, where she found the Cheshire boy loitering behind her in the bathroom, they both shook their heads at knowing the boy. In fact, although questioned at different times, both said not remembering seeing the boy at all.

Needless to say, Sophie started looking forward to her birthday less and less.

It was Sophie’s twelfth birthday that was the final straw.

By now, Sophie had forced herself to latch onto anyone she could meet on her birthday. She learned the Cheshire’s habits now, knowing he disappeared around Seven-thirty. Until then, Sophie didn’t even go to the bathroom or change until eighth hour came about, but ghosts keep their state of emotion when they die, and the Cheshire didn’t necessarily die with a patient virtue.

It was three hours before Tom found his little sister. Cold and unconscious, he cradled her out from underneath the bed. Unfortunately, if Tom wasn’t so focused on the gashes and bruises on Sophie, would he have noticed the faint hand gripping on her ankle.

One year later they moved.

So now, only instead of a tall, bleach house with acres of open fields, it is now in an urban apartment with a hand full of friends and foul beer instead of cake that Sophie sees him again. Her middle school friends are bounding off the walls with raw excitement but he doesn’t seem to care. In fact, leaning there against Sophie’s door frame, looking through his frosty hair with dark sinned eyes, his eyes are passionately focused on Sophie.

And oh, Sophie realizes with a chilling realization, his smile seems to get wider every year she grows older.

Sophie always hated her birthday, because destiny had decided to send her a corpse as a gift-

Every year.