0.2 The Blood Tree: Raccoon Boy

Even with steam filling my lungs as I shower, I just can't seem to get warm anymore. Not since...wincing against the hot bullets, I turn the temperature up to try and get some heat past my skin. It doesn't work of course, but it gives the illusion of color to my skin for a moment, beating it red. Not red hot, but oh well. The ritual is completed, and I turn the water off without any real thought. Pushing the curtains out of the way, I reach for the towel I left outside before I got in in the first place. Finding it blindly, I dry off my face before wrapping it around my waist and clearing off the steam from the mirror, examining my face once again.

This is just part of the ritual, though it serves a different purpose than it did when I was younger. When I was about ten, I always jumped out of the shower to see if maybe this would be the time that I would definitely need to start shaving. That time never really came, but my body still goes through the motions, giving clear view of what I am now instead of the man that I'd always thought I'd become.

The holes that stare back at me are familiar in their strangeness. I still can't reconcile what I look like and my inner image. I know the dark circles belong to me, I can feel the puffy quality to the near black skin. I don't know, on the other hand, when it was that I stopped sleeping. I had never had too much color, but save for the back of my arms, I am so pale now. Like a ghost. Like her ghost might look, maybe.

"You don't deserve to think of her, you know." I am no longer surprised when the face in the mirror talks to me. I talk back these days. But then, I started in the first place. It'd be rude to ignore myself, I think. Maybe. It's mostly circles, the same old ones, the ones that lead me nowhere at all. But that's what circles are all about, aren't they? Going nowhere?

So I play along again. "I don't deserve the relief of not thinking about her." I retaliate, and off I go, and I argue the case down to nothing but the facts. If there is such a thing as truth anymore when I spend my mornings talking to myself in the mirror. A knock sounds off the door, and the face in the mirror winces in a foul way, bringing the monster out of the features I can't call mine.

"Evan...I have work in an hour. I need the shower." Pereginne says through the door, continuing to pretend that she does not hear the discussions I have with myself. She is a good little sister for that, for ignoring my madness. Though even that she does not do all of her own accord, I think. I think I did something to make her ignore it on purpose. I don't remember doing anything specific, but I spent weeks in the depths of my booze pit, and I do not trust my memory of those times.

"I'm out...just a sec Ginne." I utter in the voice that no longer belongs to me. My hand moves to check the security of the towel in ritual action. Then I open the door and sacrifice the heat that had let me forget for a moment of the perpetual inward cold. The air stings just as the hot water had and I do my best to smile for my little sister. She doesn't look up as I exit. Maybe one day she will be able to see me and not think of whatever it was that I did or did not do.

I'm fairly certain that it is on that day I will sleep once more.

So I smile, weak as the expression is on my deformed face, hoping for the day that she will see it and return it.

WC: 671