10:51 pm

I cooled down a bit before quitting the stairs and heading over our room. The girl outside was frightening; it's not fear from her gun, but a repellant dread from the darling features of her face, from her. I tried to walk to the room as casually as possible, ignoring the gun, ignoring her, but I could feel the cigarettes in their pack crumpling under my fist. My footsteps on the polished concrete were going accelerando, perhaps in my mind, before I was few feet away from her.

Her eyes wouldn't take off me since the beginning. I grabbed the doorknob.

"Give me a cigarette, would ya?"

I stopped for some reason to finally look at her in the chasm of her eyes. They reflected nothing.

She aimed the revolver at me, "Didn't you hear? A cigarette please."

I recoiled two inches back. She didn't lower the gun. So I extended the pack in my hand to her and she instantly lowered it. She tore it open and grabbed a cigarette.

"Any lighter?"

I extended the lighter to her with my other hand, but she wouldn't take it. It was already between her lips and she glanced at it to tell me to light it. I lit it up and waited for her. She said nothing and started puffing out her miasma by the veranda. I turned back quickly.

"Huh… could you stay a bit?" she called out in a soft voice. "I won't kill you, don't worry," she morbidly joked, almost shyly.

I went back next to her by the veranda and lit a cigarette for myself. I glanced at her several times, but her eyes were casted towards the distant chasms of the night. For the first time, I saw something in them. The tiny blaze of her cigarette barely reflected off her irides.

"The name's Lisa."

"Mr. Burglar," I didn't mean that one but Aurora just kept repeating it…

"Mr. Burglar? …Pfff, you're a weird one," she immediately replied.

She puffed at her cigarette before the smoke vanished into the night.

"Can I confess something to you, fellow criminal?"

"Go on."

"I just killed Mom."

After a pause, she brought the gun to her temple and mimicked a shot with it. In the somber night, her mask decayed little by little in an indifferent silence. She started to sob, very quietly, as if it were shameful, and she wrapped her hands on her head and she hid and the cigarette would still burn away. I put my hand on her shoulder.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" she hysterically cried.

A second after realizing her shout, she jumped up and looked at my eyes with a regrettable face. Despair was but a fleeting emotion to her, and it fleeted in her eyes while she looked at me.

"No, I'm very sorry…" her eyes dug into mines. "Would you hold me a second?"

I did it in a second, because she would surely have changed her mind in two seconds. At first, she was indeed tense, but she gradually loosened to finally tremble.

"There was no other way, there was no other way," she repeated in a whisper.

If she weren't in my arms, her cry would've surely disappear into the indifferent cries of the crickets.

"What happened?" I asked, as gently as I could.

"I… I didn't… No…!" she broke away from my arms and began to be restless. "No… NO! This is what I wanted! SHE'S DEAD! That woman is DEAD! DEAD! She deserved it so badly… so badly! Can you understand that? This… This is what I… THIS IS WHAT I WANTED! MOM'S DEAD!" she was walking to and fro between me and the room 107's door.

For some reason again, I grabbed her again into a hug but she struggled and struggled as though I just sealed her.

"GET OFF ME! GET OFF ME OR…! I'LL KILL YA, I… I'll… I'll kill ya…" her voice muted in diminuendo. She hugged me back, "It's not enough… nothing is enough! I thought… it's the end of the world, so I'll kill her. But I don't feel the more satisfied… Worse, I realized I would've done it even if the world were to carry on and I wouldn't be satisfied… That's the worst!"

"Hey Lisa, calm down, alright? You're practically choking."

"I don't care, I'm better dead anyway…"

"Don't say things like that. What happened? I mean, why did you shoot—why did you shoot your mom?"

"…She deserved it… You hear me? SHE DESERVED IT!" she tried to get away but I sized her hand. My hand on her wrist, her hand floating between us, she looked down, "She's—she was the worst. She made me do… stuff… with the men and then they'd give her money and then I'd beg her to stop forcing me doing these stuff… She never listened, never—each time I cried but she'd beat me and tell me how ungrateful I was. Why was it me—why was it me and not her? …She's—she was the ungrateful one! It was my PUSSY, my ASS, my TITS—IT WAS THANKS TO ME, AND ONLY ME SHE COULD CARRY ON HER FUCKING LOUSY LIFE!" her eyes stabbed me and she took her hand away at once.

"Killing her didn't lessen your suffering the slightest," I replied. Don't know what went through my head then.

"I WANTED IT. …How come the pain isn't going away?..."

That last question is indeed disturbing.

"It doesn't matter. I'm gonna kill 'em all. All the ones who fucked me, I'M GONNA KILL 'EM ALL!"

"And that's what you want?"

"Of course it is…"

"What then if that question—how come the pain isn't going away—spring back into your mind? You just gonna kill 'em all 'till your mind goes numb?"

"DON'T SAY THAT! I WANT IT! SURELY I'LL BE SATISFIED!"

"Lisa, when will you be satisfied with that logic? You're just following desires after desires, you'll keep killing 'em, and then what?" she looked at me with her lost eyes.

"What am I gonna do then? …WHAT AM I GONNA DO?" she reiterated.

Again, she brought the gun to her temple; her hand was shaking but as soon as it touched her head, she was perfectly still like the night. She wasn't going to mimic this time.

"Give me that gun, Lisa, please. You don't have to shoot. Why—why don't you come with us?"

"Us?" she quivered again.

"There's a girl with me, Aurora. Maybe you can be friends," I didn't know what to say. "She… she is sick, you see? And she also have, huh… dreams like you. She wants to touch the sky—"

"The hell are you talking about?" she lowered her gun a bit.

"Why don't you come with us? We're heading for the sea, don't you think it'll be fun?"

Her hand dropped before she fell into her inexistent thoughts. I took the gun from her in a flash but even that, she wouldn't react to. She was plunged in some sort of void.

"She wanna touch… the sky?"

"Yeah, I know—"

"Where's that girl?"

Given she was no longer a threat (and even if she was no longer, there was still that threatening and freighting thing in her), I pointed at room 106's door. Lisa got nearer and stopped at the light filtering through the room's curtain. The fading light painted her grim face. I bet she was looking at Aurora sleeping on the bed; she was mesmerized by the Sleeping Beauty, peaceful in her slumber and away from this sensible, decaying, ending world.

"She's asleep."

"I don't think she'll wake up soon—"

"I don't want anything. I won't come with you," there was nothing in her tone. As though she just gave up.

Lisa sighed once. Then she headed for the room 107 where the body of her mom was lifeless, somewhere in there. Her change in tone reminded me of how gruesome the situation was in truth. At least, I had the revolver with me, but there were other ways for her to not assist to the end of the world. Her movements were inert enough she could've missed her door. She closed it.