Beauty in the Ashes

I closed my eyes swallowing thickly. Listening to her voice, I tried to envision what a twenty-one year old Cayla would have looked like. But I couldn’t. I could barely remember what any of them looked like. Time had slowly erased my memories of them. The most vivid recollection I had of them was when I found them…like that. While I’d forgotten everything else, that was one thing that refused to leave. I wished it would. I’d often woken up from a nightmare feeling like their blood was caked into my skin, seeping into my pores. No matter how raw I scrubbed my skin, it was there. Some things never left.

I took a deep breath, trying to remember something from before, but all that existed was the after.

As I slowly drifted to sleep there in the cemetery, the memory of the day I had to bury them resurfaced.

Was it possible to have a heart attack at eighteen?

I was no doctor, but it sure felt like I was having one. The pain in my chest was unbearable, like a heavy weight sat atop it.

My breaths were loud and people kept staring.

I knew I looked like a zombie. My hair was limp, my skin was gray, and even in a weeks time I’d lost so much weight that if a heavy gust of wind surfaced it would blow me over.

I was a mess.

Staring at their coffins, all three lined up in a row, I felt the overwhelming need to join them.

I was alone.

I literally had no one.

I was drowning in my grief, trying to stay afloat, but I wanted nothing more than to sink beneath the surface into oblivion.

“Hey,” Kyle said, walking up and standing beside me. “You okay?”

Why did everyone keep asking me that? How could I possibly be okay?

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

They kept saying that too. ‘I’m sorry’. What did they have to be sorry for? They hadn’t killed my parents and my sister. They hadn’t taken a knife to them and ripped them to shreds, gutting them like fucking animals. If I ever found out who had done this, they’d suffer ten-fold of what my family did. I’d make them pay.

“Just stop,” I mumbled, staring ahead. The clouds above were dark gray, the threat of a storm looming. How appropriate.

“What do you mean?” He asked.

I turned to my best friend. My grief and anger evident in my posture and facial features. “Everyone else is asking the same fucking questions. I’m sick of it. I don’t need you doing it too.”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, I won’t.”

I turned back to face the caskets.

People were crying and chatter abounded.

“Such a tragedy,” someone said.

“Can’t believe something like this would happen here.” Another piped in.

“I heard the son was a suspect.”

I felt eyes boring into the back of my skull.

I bet most of the people here didn’t even know my family. They were just curious about the murders that had taken place in their own backyard.

“Shut up!” Kyle yelled. “What the hell is your problem?” He turned to face the group of gossiping women behind us. I didn’t turn to see their reaction. I didn’t care. I knew people thought I’d killed them. After all, there was more evidence pointing at me having done it than a stranger. The police hadn’t been able to find anything left behind by the killer—oddly enough, that was what kept them from pining the murder on me. Without a murder weapon, they could only speculate as to what happened. I knew some of the officers, as well as the community, believed something had made me snap and I’d done it. Innocent before proven guilty was a bunch of bullshit. Everyone always thought you were guilty before evidence showed otherwise.

I grabbed Kyle’s arm. “Leave it.”