Chapter One

In order to understand my end, we must revisit my beginning.

But as I am lying here, flames roaring in front of me, filling the night sky with a bright orange glow, it’s not my birth that comes to mind. Nor my first day at school, my childhood home, my mother.

I think my true beginning was the day when all of those things ended.

It was because of me. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it’s just how things took their course and nothing I could’ve done would have stopped it. Either way, I lost everything I had that day, and in doing so, I guess one could say I was given the chance to restart. A new beginning. A proper one.

I didn’t want it at first. But I don’t think it was up to me. I didn’t know what I do now, and I think even if I had, I wouldn’t have chosen differently. So now things come to an end in the same way that they began. With flames.

When I began, it was because I had no other choice. She was lying dead on the living room floor and there was nothing I could do. I tried to find help, but every door that opened for me was shut as soon as they realized who was knocking. Not even her parents would help me. In fact, they made it worse.

They believed I was a bad omen, some kind of devil sent to punish them for their sins. I’ve always wondered — was it always my fate to do to them what they feared, or did they mould me into that person as a result of their fear? If they had not treated me as a bringer of death, would I not have become one?

The problem with looking for someone to blame is that there will always be someone to blame for that blame. And then how far back do I go? If I am not to blame for what happened, then is it her, for contracting the infection in the first place? Or is it her father, for entertaining our delusions that she could get better? Or her mother, for entertaining his delusions that he could help? The village, for entertaining theirs? Or maybe it was my parents, who set this all into motion in the very first place. My mother, whose face I will never know, who created me and then was punished for it. At this rate I could blame the creation of the universe for what I have done. Yet it doesn’t negate the fact that I have done it.

When I began, when everything else ended, it was because I lost the one thing that meant everything to me. Yes, I am to blame, because if it had been anyone else, she would’ve lived. But it was me, and so she died. And I thought that maybe they would be able to reach into themselves and find one single shred of empathy for me, just one. One would have been enough to save her. But they didn’t, and instead turned what little empathy they might’ve had into hate. One’s down, why not take the other as well? Two birds with one stone? The young woman with the thrown-away potential and the demon child she had pity on?

I did not even have time to take her away from the house, let alone bury her. And so she died twice that night, slowly and painfully. And sixteen years’ worth of me died alongside her. They thought that was the end of me, and I thought so, too, for a while. But I like to think that when they searched the ashes for us and only retrieved one body, the thought was slowly creeping up the backs of their necks. And when the body was not me, the one they had wanted all along, it was creeping into the backs of their minds. And when they gave the lifeless figure back to her parents and it was her, not me, it finally clicked for them and the thought struck them so viscerally: in trying to erase me they had erased one of their own, one of their best and brightest. And in doing so, they had made me into what they most feared I would become.