The Sorrowful Beast

“What have you done?!” The painful scream was lost to the pellets of uncaring rain and the loud CRACKLE-BOOOM of the angry bright sky.

Mother Nature was trying her hardest to show the uninvited beast how much she detested its existence upon her precious earth.

Cackling, high-pitched laughter shrilled gleefully through the night as the hellish beast moved silently in a mass of darkness.

	The laughter broke only to say, “He is free! He is FREE at last!” And the resounding BANG of a gun forever silenced that laughing, soulless witch, now condemned to torment in the fires of hell below. Her last words were a curse, a curse upon the woman and her family for generations to come, and those words were, “You have killed me, Tanoth, but that creature will not be killed by you, nor your kin, for how could you kill your own blood?!” A gurgled laugh of blood spit out and then she was gone.

The shadowy figure of a drenched woman moved to the side of the clearing and disappeared. I followed.

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I’m invisible; I’ve always been like this. When I was born, the only one who could see me was my little sister. At least… that was what my childish mind first believed.

	My little sister, meaning half-hour younger than me, wasn’t able to convince our parents that I existed with her baby talk and wailing, and thus I was left, puzzling the doctors as to why my mother had such long contractions. I tried to get their attention with all of my might, crying and moving as best as I could, to no avail. I was apparently not only invisible to the eyes, but also to machines and my voice was inaudible to most. A man with a black trench coat ran in and scooped me up; he cleaned me and took care of me. He became my father.

	Roland, the man I have grown to call dad is invisible like I am, but he has learned to control it, becoming invisible at will. According to him, one day at the lab where he worked, he cut himself with some glass that shattered from an experimental fluid he was working with and he woke up the next day, unable to see himself in the mirror. He was only 36 or so at that time and finally mastered it a year later.

	According to him, he found me only because he heard a single baby crying incessantly and saw no one reacting. He had been visiting the hospital to see an old friend that had recently had a heart attack and survived. When he found me and carried me out, apparently no one reacted then either, thus he took me home and has cared for me ever since.
By the age of two I had learned how to make my body visible to the naked eye, and then I was able to see my face in the mirror at last. At three years old I was talking and running around like a normal kid, getting into trouble and testing Roland’s patience. I grew up with a fairly normal life until high school, when puberty kicked in and I started to lose control of my emotions and my ability. In sophomore year, at fifteen, on the day I had decided to finally ask out that girl I had a crush on since forever; Kate, I turned invisible on accident and she freaked out and ran away.

	Needless to say, we had to move. I spent my last two years of high school as an antisocial geek with my nose stuck in my books, trying to keep from standing out. Thankfully, there weren’t any other ‘incidents’ and I was able to graduate with a 9.7 GPA average, of which Roland was very proud.

	After my graduation, we decided it was time to move again, seeing as we both loved the outdoors and didn’t care too much for interacting with others and the town life was not for us. We ended up in a cottage out on a forested mountain, the nearest house two miles away. According to Roland, he was able to do his job from his computer so it wasn’t a problem regarding making money and paying the bills.

	We had all we needed, a bathroom with a simple shower stall, a kitchen, a living room with two couches and a middle table, a stone fireplace, electricity, hot water, air conditioning for the summer, wooden floors, walls, and ceilings. Also we had a throw rug in front of the fire for the cold winter nights, a refrigerator and a large box freezer in the cellar for the food we stored for winter when it was near-impossible to drive to town due to snow, and we learned how to hunt and both got licenses for hunting so we could have deer meat now an then. It never occurred to me that such a simple life as ours could ever be so completely torn apart by one event.

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	November 20th, my twentieth birthday, I was awoken by terrible pain, like someone slicing my skin and pulling me apart, finger by finger, and bone by bone. It tingled, itched, burned and cut me like no injury I’ve ever experienced. I screamed and lashed out around me. I looked about my covers between squinted eyes of pain, no red, no blood, I wasn’t cut anywhere. “Zachariah!” Roland came bursting into my room looking more worried than I had ever seen him. I whimpered and tried opening my mouth to speak but a harsh croaking sound came out, followed by a gasp of pain. He rushed over to me, reached out and touched my forehead. I screamed, his touch felt so cold that it burned. He hissed and pulled away. “You’re burning up!”

	I had muscle spasms up and down my body and curled to my side, clutching the sheets that I had flung off of me earlier, sweat pouring down my face and body. I grit my teeth, praying for the pain to go away. Roland had run out of the room yelling he was going to grab something, I couldn’t really understand what he was saying with my mind all foggy from the pain. Then I noticed a color on the sheets that conflicted with the blue-white that they were naturally; blood red.

	I quickly pulled my hands from the sheets and examined them; the nails were falling off, and in their place, claw-like thick nails were replacing them. My back suddenly had the feeling of release and a squelching sound came from behind me. Blood splattered everywhere and I panicked, reaching my back with my hands, coming in contact with something sticking out of my back.

My mind raced and my vision darkened as I felt colder, sleepy; with my last blink before passing out, I saw Roland racing in with a pot of what looked like ice water and a cloth. “Zach?!”

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	I awoke to the twittering of the birds that had yet to migrate and the chatter and chirping of bugs that had not yet died off or gone into hibernation from the cold. The sun was beginning to set, as I could tell from the off-orange glow that came through the blinds on my window. I felt warm tucked under the layers of blanket but sticky with sweat. The wet cloth on my forehead felt wonderful. Looking to my right, I saw the window and the last sliver of golden sun as it settled below the horizon.

	“Hey, you’re awake.” I heard the quiet mutter to my left. I turned to Roland and gave him a weak smile, “yeah, I can’t say I feel too great though.” “Cold?” He asked me looking worried. I flopped my head side to side and said, “nah, but I would kill for a hot shower about now.” My voice was strained and a little rough but it didn’t hurt too much to speak, so that was a good sign. “If you think you can stand, I’ll go get it started,” he said gently. “I don’t know, let me try,” I responded, lifting the sheets off and pulling my legs over the side of the bed. I lifted myself with my arms and sat, hunched over, my head reeling from the blood rushing from my head. I swayed a little. Roland bent down and grabbed my shoulders, steadying me.

	“I think I need a little help,” I looked up at him meekly. He grimaced and squatted under me, putting my arm around his shoulder and helping me up. We walked/stumbled out of the door and down the hallway to the bathroom. He brought me into the shower stall and sat me down gently. I shivered at the loss of body heat and the sensation of the things on my back touching the wall behind me. He turned on the water on low so it wouldn’t hit me until he had adjusted it while I pulled off my boxers, which took more effort than I thought it would.

	As he set the temperature he looked down at me, “do you want help washing up?” I looked up at him with a frown saying “I think I’ll be alright, dad, I just need to scrub off this sweaty feeling.” “Yes, but what about those new… appendages?” He pointed to my back. I reached back instinctively, touching the shapes tenderly, “um… well, what do you think they are anyways?” By this point, he had obviously decided to strip down and help me wash off because he turned the water on full and closed the curtain behind him, wearing nothing but his boxers. Leaning over me and looking at my back he replied, “They appear to be the start of wings, they aren’t fully formed and there are tiny feather-like hairs all over them,” he spoke as he touched them gently. I flinched at the contact but it didn’t hurt, thankfully.

	The hot water felt so wonderful, I just sighed and smiled. “Hey, dad, can you grab the soap and my washcloth please?” I asked, reaching up a hand. He got up from his crouch and grabbed the requested items before handing them to me. He then grabbed my shampoo and poured some onto his hand. “I’m going to use shampoo on your wings, can you move forward a little so I can reach back there?” I nodded and moved forward as I continued to soap up my washcloth and rub it all over my chest and arms, scrubbing away feeling of sweat and massaging my sore muscles.

	“Ouch! Hey, that hurt!” I growled at him as I paused washing my legs to turn and glare at him. “Sorry, are you okay? I was just trying to get in between the folds where the joint is.” He looked at me in concern. I clenched my teeth but grumbled out, “Nothing like that, just super sensitive I guess.” “Hah, you baby,” he replied as he continued washing my new 'wings'. I finished scrubbing my body clean and was feeling much better, but the steam was making my head swim. Roland finished with my appendages and scrubbed some soap into my hair and I moved it into the shower’s spray to rinse it out. “Alright, all done, I’ll go grab you a towel,” Roland spoke as he turned off the water and opened the curtains. The cool air from the room hit me and made me shiver.

	A towel hit me in the face while I tried to keep myself warm via rubbing my arms with my hands. “You should probably dry off, that’ll help more than some arm rubs,” Roland said with a chuckle, wiping himself down with another towel. “Thanks dad,” I replied, rolling my eyes a little as I wiped myself off from my position on the floor of the shower stall. After a failed attempt at getting up, Roland helped me get out of the shower to finish drying off. We hobbled out to the living room with towels around our waists and he sat me on a chair while he went to go get blankets and some fresh clothes.

	“We’re going to have to wash your blankets and such; they got some blood stains on them.” Roland said as he entered the room with a set of clothes and a few clean blankets. I was examining my nails which I hadn’t thought much of, barely noticing the change in them. They were thicker, a little longer and ended at a point, looking not too dissimilar from the shape of a wide arrowhead. “I must’ve been really out of it to not notice these.” I said mostly to myself. Clothing being plopped on my lap broke me out of my inspection.

[No, this one's not done yet either. Send any comments to @Kircala on Twitter! Thanks for reading! - Calli L/Kircala]