Sin by Shaun Allan

time
before, I'd caused a young lad to make his car more intimate with a
tree than he'd have probably wanted to was also, for now,
irrelevant. Old times and daisy-chains were the tea on the table
tonight, with a healthy helping of nostalgia for dessert.
    "You couldn't help that boy, you
know."
    Well that was a custard pie in
the face of memories.
     
    * * * *
     

Chapter Five
    "Pardon?"
    I was shocked at the abrupt
change of mood. A second ago we were laughing and now laughter had
fled screaming into the night. The forest had darkened and the
trees had closed in making me feel suddenly claustrophobic. I
almost waited for feral eyes to open like slashes in the darkness.
None did, so thankfully my dream hadn't travelled that far on the
express train into Nightmare Station.
    Joy seemed unaware of the sudden
suffocation. She wasn't looking at me, instead picking some
invisible piece of cotton or dirt from her trouser leg. Whatever
was there was stuck fast and she stayed intent on it as she
spoke.
    "The boy. He crashed and there's
a better than good chance that he wouldn't have if you hadn't been
there, but you couldn't help him. He was lost anyway."
    My heart was suddenly squeezed
by an invisible hand that had reached inside my chest and taken a
hold, long, cracked and yellowing nails digging in. I couldn't
speak.
    "He killed that poor girl. He
would have done it again. He would. More than once. It wouldn't
have stopped him and it wouldn't have slowed him down. He would
have begun to look for it. The rush. The danger. The badness of it.
He would have become addicted. He was rotting from the inside out
and you did him a favour. You did those little girls he isn't going
to mow down a favour. Hey, you did the world a favour."
    Joy's voice wavered, a ripple in
the velvet. I could only stare at her, the hand around my heart
squeezing rhythmically. What was she doing? Justifying murder?
That's what it was! Manslaughter at the very least because I
couldn't help it. But what if I could? What if there was some sick
core inside me, rotting like she said the boy was? What if I meant
for him to die?
    What if I wanted it to happen? I
knew. I knew what he had done. Eight years old. That's all she was.
But I didn't feel anger or pity for him. I felt nothing. So what if
that nothing was concealing my pleasure, or my desire? If I'd
reached out to his car with whatever twisted thought or idea
crawled beneath the nothing and made it swerve, and made it
crash...?
    What then?
    Maybe this was hell and I had
ended up in that furnace and I had been char-broiled and I was
dead. And Joy. Maybe she believed in Heaven and Hell. And maybe,
because of that, we were part of each others' damnation. She was
doomed to try and make me feel better - something that, on a
grander scale had bled her to a husk - and I was doomed to listen.
Her Purgatory was a much more focused and personal version of the
life that had led her, or pushed her, here. Mine was to relive my
own, the tales retold in my sister's vain attempts to justify and
reconcile and appease.
    And I hadn't even brought a
picnic.
    I mentally gripped the
metaphorical hand around my heart, wresting its grip and flinging
it away. What if, what if, what if. What if Willy Wonka had made
flour instead of every kind of chocolate? Charlie Bucket would
never have been the hero he was and Violet Sludgemonkey, or
whatever her name was, would probably be a redcoat at Butlins by
now. What if Man really had landed on the moon, or men in black
really did protect us from illegal Aliens and the scum of the
universe? What if, in space, someone can hear you scream?
What if curry night at the Trawl pub, Toothill, was on a Wednesday
instead of a Thursday? Would the world come crashing down around
our ears like a Paris Hilton CD?
    No. I doubted it. So why worry
about it. Or, at least, why dwell on it. Blank it out. Smother it
in Nothing. No pain, no brain. Or something like that.
    Of course that wasn't how it
worked. It didn't