If they turn you into a disaster, why wouldn’t you answer in kind?
Why wouldn’t you take everything they poured into you and give it back tenfold?
Tell me, little Ghost, is it better to become the thing that destroys, or the thing that gets eaten alive piece by piece without ever making a sound?
I used to think there was a difference, but that stopped quickly. You want to kill something, you have to name it first. You have to look at it without flinching, without dressing it up. That’s the part that no one tells you. They act disgusted by what runs through your veins, like it’s something unnatural, something they could never touch, but they watch. They always watch. They lean in when you start to bleed, study it, they whisper about it, they pass it around like it’s something fascinating.
You think they don’t want it?
They do, they just don't want to admit it. And you, you sit there, little Ghost, on the other side of all of this, listening to me, letting me spill everything out in a way I never did back then and you can leave whenever you want. That’s the difference between you and me. You can close this, walk away, try to forget it.
I don’t get that. I don’t get to step outside of myself, I don’t get distance, I don’t get silence unless I force it. I am stuck here, with everything, always.
I have never been homesick, you know?
Not once. Because there was never a place that felt like mine inthe first place. When you grow up on something poisonous, you stop calling it poison. You start calling it normal, comfort even. That’s what they made. That’s what I became. And after six months of that, of silence, isolation, of being left alone with something that didn’t quiet down no matter how long I sat with it, they decided I was ready. Ready for a room, a judge. Words spoken around me instead of to me, my name reduced to something clinical, something procedural, something that could be written down and filed away.
Desecration of human remains, two years.
That’s what they gave me. Two years for what I did. Nine months already gone, swallowed by those walls, leaving the rest to be served out like it was something that could contain what I had become. To be completely honest, it didn’t feel like punishment. It felt more like something that had been waiting for me long before I ever set foot in that cemetery, long before I ever knew what I was capable of. And as they led me away, as the door closed behind me again, as the sound echoed in that same hollow way it always did, I remember thinking something that should have scared me, but it didn’t. It didn’t scare me at all actually, because for the first time in a long time, it felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
The Regression
Chapter 43
They moved me after the sentence was handed down, no explanation beyond what was necessary. Just a different set of hands on me, a different vehicle, a longer drive where the world passed by through reinforced glass. Grey roads, trees stripped bare, buildings that all looked the same after a while. Closed prison. You feel the difference immediately, little Ghost. The isolation wing had felt dead in a way that crawled under your skin after long enough. This place was different. The noise never fully stopped here. Voices bleeding through walls. Metal doors slamming shut somewhere down the corridor. There was always something happening around you, and after months of silence, it made the entire building feel almost alive. Like the place was constantly watching itself through the people trapped inside it.
The gates opened in layers, one after the other, steel on steel, each one locking behind me before the next one moved. You don’t walk into a place like that, you get swallowed. And the moment I stepped inside, I knew something was different. Out there, I had been alone with what I was, and in there, I was surrounded by it.
They processed me the same way they process everyone else: numbers, forms, instructions delivered in voices that didn’t expect a reply. Clothes exchanged, rules listed. Wake up early, lights on before your body is ready for it. Metal doors opening down the corridor one by one, the sound traveling like a warning before it reaches you. Roll call, always roll call. Stand, be counted, be seen. Food at fixed times. Not because anyone cares if you eat, but because structure is control and control is everything in a place like that. Yard time, shared then, that was the biggest difference. No more solitude. Just a concrete squaresurrounded by walls too high to look over, filled with men who had nothing to do but exist in the same space as each other, each one carrying their own version of ruin.
You learn quickly where to stand, where not to stand, who to look at, who to avoid. It’s not taught, it’s understood, a language without words. Funny thing is, I didn’t need to understand it, I already knew. I’d spent my whole life reading rooms like that. Measuring distance, calculating risk, knowing when something was about to snap before it actually did.
The guards watched from above. Always watching, always ready to step in just late enough that whatever was about to happen had already started, because it always starts. And then, there were the others. You’d think men like that would ignore someone like me. That I’d just blend into the background, another body in a place full of them, but I didn’t, I never do. It started with looks, assessing. Like they were trying to figure out what category I fit into and getting irritated when I didn’t. I didn’t talk, you know that, and silence in a place like that, it doesn’t come across as neutral. It reads as suspicious and provoking. The first time someone spoke to me, I didn’t respond, the second time, same thing. By the third, it wasn’t a question anymore.
“What, you don’t fucking speak?”
Not that I was surprised by the lack of brain cells in a place like that, but come on. They don’t like what they don’t understand, little Ghost. And when they can’t place you, when they can’t predict you, they don’t back away from it, they just push harder. It escalated slowly, in that way things do when no one stops them. Comments at first, loud enough for me to hear, not loud enough to count as anything worth intervening over. Mocking, testing.
Then closer, standing in my space just a little too long, shoulders brushing on purpose, and still, nothing from me. That madeit worse, funnier for me, but worse. Because silence isn’t submission, but they read it like it is. One of them, bigger than the rest, the kind of man who had built himself into something heavy just to make sure no one ever tried to move him, stepped in front of me one day during yard time and blocked my path like it was nothing.
“You even got a voice in there?”he asked, studying me with the kind of focus that started feeling invasive after a while.
“Or they cut it out already?”I stayed exactly where I was, giving him nothing back.“Maybe we should check.”
You can feel it, you know. That moment right before something crosses a line it can’t come back from. It hangs there, suspended, waiting for someone to push it over.
He leaned in closer.
“Open his fucking throat,”someone behind him said, half laughing.“See if he’s got anything in there.”
Violence doesn’t always come with tension, sometimes it comes with boredom. I didn’t flinch, didn’t give them anything, and that’s what kept it hovering right there, because they wanted a reaction, they needed it. Without it, there’s nothing to push against.
You see, little Ghost, people like that don’t just want to hurt you.
They want confirmation and I didn’t give it to them. Not then, not after, but it didn’t make them stop, it just changed the way they circled. A shove here, a threat there, words getting uglier, more specific, like they were trying to find the exact thing that would break through whatever they thought I was hiding behind. And all the while, I stayed exactly the same. Silent and watching.
You’d think that would make me weak in a place like that, an easy target, and maybe it did, at first at least. But there’s something about silence when it doesn’t crack, something that unsettles people more than shouting ever could. Because theycan’t read it, they can’t predict it and that makes them hesitate. Not enough to stop, but enough to keep it from turning into something final.
