Echo app

TW for the following: violence, sexual content, harsh language, allusions to: molestation/rape, child neglect/abuse, mental illness, self-harm and maybe some gore.


<center><i>the kids are grown up ...</i> </center>
<p>
tick....tock...tick...tock
<p>
The sound invades your mind as you sit. Zoning out the teacher's words, zoning out the classroom at large. The way that everyone else tends to do with you.
<p>
It starts with your egg donor. With the bitch that would rather buy cocaine than food. With the idiot that keeps more beer in the fridge than food and then wonders, stupidly, why you're caught scrounging in a garbage can in the back alley for the rest of a sandwich you saw some asshole ditch there moments ago.
<p>
They start the talk of something just not being ...<i>right</i>
<p>
<i>Maybe it's the fact that she never fed you. Maybe it's the fact that she never, fucking, held you. Maybe it's the fact that you were left to rot in your crib for days when you were one because she and whatever high she'd been chasing had been off of the planet and then she kind of forgot she even had a kid.</i>.
<p>
You were a missed opportunity for abortion and you and she both know it - but then the government wouldn't give her <i>shit</i> if she'd had you scraped out of her.
<p>
<b>tick</b>...tock...tick....tock
<p>
<b>"Have you ever had a wet dream?"</b> The boy next to you in class is whispering, trying to get you interested and you want to swat him like a fly. <b>"Last night I was dreaming of you and-"</b> He's cut off by a look from the teacher, and you barely blink even while he goes back to his dirty thoughts and you go back to the recesses of your brain.
<p>
You see he's got a boner under his desk.
<p>
<i>you wonder how much he'd bleed if you cut it off</i>
<p>
They definitely have it right. There is something not right in your head.
<p>
<center><i>but their lives are worn</i></center>
<p>
<b>tick</b>....<b>tock</b>...tick...tock
<p>
<b>"You know, you got a real morbid sense of aesthetic."</b> He's smoking the last of your pot, inhaling the last deepest dregs and you're already thinking of what he'd look like splattered on your wall. Some real blood to mix in with the pen and ink.
<p>
You say nothing. You don't apologize. Half of the kids in your class are dead on paper and the way you figure it, it won't take long to make it a reality. Can't have him focusing on that though....can't have him thinking the rest are right.
<p>
<b>"I think you like it."</b> You're crawling over him, your lips just a breath away from his and you can feel his heart pounding like a terrified cat's underneath your hand. You can feel his cock, hardening in his pants.
<p>
He's terrified of you and you like that.
<p>
The sex is good, but there are no repeats. He doesn't like the way you play.
<p>
<center><i>how can one little</i> <b>TOWN</b></center>
<p>
You find the gun under the bed. He's not your father, he's not even a man you know but for some reason he's taken up space in your mother's life and he's as dirty and greasy as you imagine you are on the inside.
<p>
He wakes with the barrel in his face. Pressed between his eyes, your finger paused on the trigger just so you can see the recognition dawn in his eyes. It's the first time you smile in a while.
<p>
The room stinks of garbage and human bodies. The kind of human bodies that have been fucking for days but never bothered to leave the sweat-stained sheets long enough to take a shower.
<p>
It's the third time this week that the electricity has been shut off. It's the fourth time this month that some assholes drove by the shack that you unfortunately reside in and tossed rotten eggs at the rusted out car you managed to steal from a junkyard before they trashed it.
<p>
<i>click</i>
<p>
Your finger presses on the trigger, your teeth flash white. Sharp. Glistening in the dim light of the battery operated lamp he filched to give him something to see by.
<p>
<b>"Next time it'll be loaded."</b>
<p>
The room stinks of urine, and you can feel the wetness of it against the knee pressed up against his crotch.
<P>
<b>"Do the world a favor and die before then."</b>
<p>
There's no need for this hatred but you think maybe there is.
<p>
<i>Maybe it's the way he snuck into your room and told you not to make a sound. Maybe it's the way he shoved his fingers in your mouth and told you to imagine they were his dick. Maybe it's...no, NO. You don't want to think of his dick.</i>
<p>
<b>"Don't make a sound."</b>
<p>
You leave him shivering in the dark and it's your first taste of real power.
<p>
<center><i>swallow so many lives</i></center>
<p>
<b>tick</b>...<b>tock</b>...<b>tick</b>...
<p>
You get out with your morbid sense of aesthetic in tact. You take any job, any car, any sort of life because at some point you recognize that no, you are definitely not <b>right</b>.
<p>
You're eighteen and too young to embrace it.
<p>
You work and you simmer, underneath it all. A ticking clock on a bomb just itching to go off. The gun is no longer your security blanket because the medicine some well meaning therapist  (after a romance between your arm and a razor blade) gave you expired.
<p>
You know you'll pull the trigger and it won't be pretty.
<p>
You know someone's gonna have to be scraped off a wall.
<p>
<i>You know it'll probably be you...</i>
<p>
<b>"Have you ever thought of putting any of this stuff in a gallery?"</b> She's well-meaning, peeking into your little cleaning closet like it's hers to do what she wants with and you want to shove the mop handle so far up her ass she's choking on it.
<p>
<b>"You should...here's my card."</b> She smiles. You take it. You take <i>off</i> in an explosion of violent imagery that takes the art world by storm.
<p>
<b>tick tock TICK</b>
<p>
You were never a bomb waiting to go off. You were a supernova - a star in the dark waiting to explode.

<center><b><i>THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT</i></b></center>