NOCTURNE

NOCTURNE

By Russ Curran


Do you see me?
I see you. Did you start this fire inside my head?
Eons ago.
Can’t you put it out?
We’ve gone well beyond that point.
You did before.
The fire is too intense now. There is no going back, I’m afraid.
I don’t want to go back, I want it to stop. I want you to go away and leave me alone.
Your aloneness, your inner solitude, was what brought us together in the first place.
I was fine when I was a girl; you weren’t around bothering me back then.
You hadn’t suffered enough yet when you were very little, but your suffering grew as you grew, until it finally called to me.
I never called you. Why would anyone want you in their head?
It isn’t a matter of wanting me in their head…but for some people that is where I end up—sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever.
You. What the hell are you anyway? Another me? The other side of me?
I’m not sure you’re ready to know what I am, though the time is very close now. It is a big day, after all.
Big day?

The fall of Anneliese Howell. In just a few hours we will be united.
I’m going to die!
Not die, no. We will…go on a very long trip. The long journey home.
Why now? Is something going to happen? Has it already happened?
What do you think?
I don’t remember anything happening, at least not something that would trigger a final…fall, as you put it.
You were expecting thunder and lightning, or a flash of madness that burned your retina’s out? It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid. Think of it as a more of an accumulative thing—after years of suffering death and family madness and the slaughterhouses that dominated your childhood on the hog farm, your mind is hanging on to reality by a thread. All it will take is a sound, the creak of old wood settling, glancing at a dark sky, a song on the radio, a memory…
But I’ve dealt with my childhood. It’s over, I’ve accepted the fact that I can’t go back and fix it, that I can’t make it better.
Thinking about it and accepting the cruel fact of something being utterly out of reach are two different things. Those hogs, the ones you saw dead beneath the floorboards of the barn, left to rot by your father—you’ll never be able to bring them back and help them. And the child that so desperately wanted to help them, wanted to avenge them by murdering your father…she too is gone, and beyond helping.
My father…
And his father, and his father before that, and on and on back to the beginning of time. They were all killers, Anneliese; every one of them raised all of those animals that you loved so much just so they could slaughter them. They were meat to them, nothing more.
I’m not one of them. I’m…different than my family.
But you worked on the Howell hog farm yourself for over thirty years! You have just as much innocent blood on your hands as anyone else in your family.
NO! I never treated them like father did! I wasn’t responsible for killing all of those hogs…
Then who was responsible, if not that little girl you confess to be haunted by? Aren’t you responsible for your own actions? Your father didn’t drag you to the barn; you went on your own. You knew what was going to happen to those animals even as you fed them so they would grow nice and fat.
No. You don’t understand. I never had a choice, no one in our family had a choice. If your last name was Howell you raised hogs for slaughter, it was simply…expected.
So you weren’t in charge of your own fate? You were just some family puppet, created to raise hogs and nothing else? Not capable of making your own decisions, living your own life by your own standards?
I…I…
You moved away from the farm when you were twenty-five-years-old. Obviously, then, you were capable of leaving. Right?
What I could do as a twenty-five-year-old woman has nothing to do with what I could and could not do as a child living in the midst of all that blood and darkness. On the days that my father and brothers took the hogs to the slaughterhouse…I could hear the animals bellowing and screaming as they left the barn. They knew where they were going. They knew they were being raised to die—no, not die, to be slaughtered. Hacked to bits, sometimes even before conscious awareness had completely left them. My entire family was savages, every last one of them.
Even the children?
Of course not. What children? What are you talking about?
The children that worked on the farm, your nieces and nephews, your cousins, and even your brothers; they were all children at one time or another, weren’t they?
When I left there weren’t any children there.
There weren’t?
No. How could a child be a savage, anyway? It’s impossible. They’d have to be taught.
How do you teach a child to be a savage?
By…by example. My father and brothers taught them how to treat the animals, how to abuse them and mistreat them, to treat them as unconscious things instead of intelligent beings. They were taught, just like I was…
You were a savage?
I had no choice, did I? Like I was trying to explain to you earlier.
So the kids on the farm when you left, they didn’t have a choice either?
No.
So there were children on the farm when you left.
You’re confusing me. I’m not sure anymore.
When you left, there were children there, but they were savages just like the rest of your family—but they had no choice simply because they were a Howell.
Yes. I guess so. It’s hard to remember now, that was almost two decades ago now.
What happened the day you left?
I told you, I can’t remember.
Can’t, or won’t?
Why all of these fucking questions! I’m not on trial here.
Who said anything about a trial?
What trial?
The trial couldn’t take place. Remember?
No, I don’t remember.
The day you left?
I left the day the animals were to be taken to the slaughterhouse. I was in my room, in the corner. They wouldn’t stop bellowing, and laughing.
The hogs were laughing?
No, my father and brothers. They always laughed as they herded the hogs onto the truck.
What did you do?
I left.
Is that all? You just got up and left the farm?
Yes. No, no, there was more. I did something else, I think.
You…
I…I sat in my room listening to the bellowing, and the laughter of the savages—and I wondered what the savages would do if they were being led to the slaughterhouse.
Yes. You wondered.
Yes, I wondered. Would they be laughing then? Or would they bellow in terror like the hogs?
What did you decide?
I couldn’t decide.
So what did you do? You had to do something.
I got up and went to the den where father kept all of his shotguns.
Why did you do that?
I wanted to find out.
You had to know what they would do if it was them being led to the slaughter?
yes.
How did you manage to find out?
i slaughtered all the savages.
All of them?
all of them
Even the children?
yes, even the children. they had to know.
Know what?
that they were just like the hogs they butchered and abused.
Did they bellow and scream in terror?
the children did. they weren’t quite full-blooded savages yet, i guess.
But your father and brothers, your cousins and all the rest, they didn’t bellow or scream?
they only stared. i think my mother made the sign of the cross, but she was a savage too, down deep. the crossing herself was a con.
She didn’t want to be slaughtered.
that’s right—but it didn’t fool me. she was slaughtered with the rest of them. it’s getting dark. why is it getting so dark?
You murdered your entire family.
Yes. I think I’m falling.
And it’s very dark.
Yes, I’m falling...into dark...ness...
Welcome home, Anneliese.