11:31 am

I killed Lisa.

I followed her footprints through the forest. The pines were just standing awfully straight and they covered the sky and even the sun. Their thickets roofed the place to allow no light to come through. Summer was gone within that forest, everything was gone and I walked through there listening to my footsteps and waiting for someone to shout. But the footsteps kept yelling to my ears instead while I waited. And the footprints seemed to stretch for leagues and leagues, but they still weren't before me.

I walked for a while. Would I even find them by following the footprints? And Aurora… Aurora wouldn't leave my mind. I expected her ghost each time I raised up my head after looking at the footprints. She nearly died yesterday, because of me, but there was more certainty at that moment; Lisa would kill her. I think I understood why. But another certainty grew in my mind; I'd kill Lisa if she did something to her.

The woods were so thick that rain would barely come in too or straight up absorbed by the ground. But the sound, the white sound of the rain whipping up everything stayed in background.

Lisa saw me.

In a corner of the wood, right under a pine, Lisa was holding her pocket knife across Aurora's throat. Both were positively scared. Though, Lisa didn't tremble like she used to. And the smile on her face almost covered up her fear. Aurora was the one trembling, most likely of cold and dread, her dress wet and tarnished by the mud scattered about everywhere. The thicket of pine above them only darkened the scene further. I raised the gun toward her face.

"Why don't you shoot? I'll die and she'll die," she mimicked cutting her throat, "Don't you wanna be alone?"

I lowered the gun so slightly that I only straighten my aim.

"Please, Lisa. Why are you doing this?"

"Why, why, WHY, WHY? I'm fed up with whys. Right now, I just wanna kill her and don't talk about not being satisfied. I'll kill myself then, I should've done so since a while ago. Thanks to a certain someone, I couldn't. Now, this is only his payback."

I didn't lower the gun. The sun was absent within these woods. Everything was absent. Still, her knife gleamed so blindly amid shadows. A blazing knife, ready to kill and put an end on everything.

"But I'll answer you: I can't stand it. I can't stand seeing her," the edge of the knife was on Aurora's throat, "I CAN'T STAND HER DREAM. She makes me sick, so FUCKING sick, it just makes want me to kill her. I wanna annihilate her, all of her with her being, with her dream; so that everything will be as empty as myself. And even myself, I'll empty it. Because all she does—all everything does—is reminding me of that emptiness."

A shouting transcended the woods. Aurora was writhing in pain and Lisa's smile stood on her face and I shoot and somebody yelled and I shoot four more times for god knows why and the barrel was empty like her and she was dead and Aurora too and the blood spilled everywhere and I could even feel the blood on my hand and the sun was still absent and Aurora just kept on suffering and shouting and I yelled too and the unreal blood that stained my hand blended with the tears and I wanted to kill myself but I killed Lisa.

Aurora just shrieked for too long but she wouldn't stop moving, she'd just convulse. She wasn't dead. My head cooled down as soon as I noticed it: she wasn't dead. The blood on her dress wasn't even hers and her throat was still as delicate and undisrupted, without a scratch on it. But why was she so in pain then?

An epileptic fit. She said it the first time we met. But it was supposed to come. Did her condition worsen already?

I didn't know what to do. I grabbed her and hurried back to the camper. I looked around me again; Lisa was still dead on the ground, poked with five bullets and pouring down her blood like the rain outside the woods. That too, I realized it; she was dead and I killed her. I didn't feel that much regret, but what I mostly felt was compassion for her. I might've understood why she killed her mom. 'There was no other way,' she repeated that. Now it was done and I'd die in a day anyway, so I didn't feel that much guilty. But I didn't feel less miserable. Compassion, regret—wasn't it the same anyway?

By the time I got to the camper, the rain was still as vehement, filled-up with hatred for all humankind and trying to drown each one of us before the meteor kill us all. Aurora was no longer convulsing, but she was a corpse. She didn't move the slightest, her breathing was almost inexistent, she was pale, her eyes were cloudy and fixed at somewhere inexistent too. She didn't even recognize me, in fact, she recognized nothing. Her state is most likely akin with paralysis, but I would even wonder if there was still a mind in there.

I gently dropped on her seat, looked at her again, she wouldn't move, I started the engine, the rain carried on, and the sea was still miles away.