Wilson, Carter - The New Neighbor by Wilson Carter

Author:Wilson, Carter [Wilson, Carter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Forty-Five

Twenty Years Ago

August 1998

Dublin, Ireland

Right before Christopher lunges at me, the breeze shifts and I catch the scent of the Tolka. The damp reeds of the riverbank, the peaty soil, moist and soft under my feet.

He pushes off of his back foot, and I have an impossible amount of thoughts bolting through my mind. I think about how close I’m standing to the water, only feet away. How Christopher doesn’t even look like himself, his face twisted in fear and rage, a broken boy sloppily glued together, such a terrible face for someone only fourteen. How lonely this spot truly is, this haphazard fort, which has become a place of death and bones. And how my brother has an X-Acto blade in his bloody right hand, and he might just kill me in the next few seconds.

He lunges, screams as he does. I’m faster, finding time to sidestep, and Christopher stumbles past, nearly losing balance. But he’s quick to recover, spinning and slinging the blade hand all at once. I feel the slightest pressure on my shoulder as I scramble away. When I look down, I see the surgical tear in the sleeve of my T-shirt, a concert shirt from the Pogues.

Blood trickles down the skin of my arm. Not a lot, not a little.

“You cut me!”

His eyes, both focused and distant, tell me he’s heard no words of mine. He pants like a jackal fighting over food scraps.

“Calm down, okay?” I say, hoping I can talk him down. Maybe he’s still in there somewhere. “This is crazy.”

“You don’t understand me,” he says. “You don’t understand who I am.”

I put my hand over the wound, feel the wetness. This is the wound I would pay tribute to for the next four years, cutting my arms with an X-Acto blade on this same day. “Then let me understand.”

A cloud passes over the sun, washing us in gray. Christopher doesn’t answer. Instead, he comes at me again, faster this time.

In these seconds, I experience the first instance of my life when I consider death a true and likely possibility. Never really thought about it before, not for myself anyway, and not like this. This feels like I’m driving off a cliff, rocks far below, and nothing to do about it.

Details bleed away as he attacks this second time; I just see bits and pieces, freeze-frames from a horror film. At one point he’s on top of me, hair glazed in sweat, blade still in his hand, my fingers clutching his wrist. In another moment we’ve switched positions, and I punch his stomach while trying to wrestle the knife free.

Entangled, spinning, falling, snarling. And somewhere in there, past the adrenaline, past the fear, there’s my own rage, having woken up hard and fast. It wraps me up and holds me tight, a comforting blanket of blinding anger. One that tells me everything’s going to be okay, and I simply have to do what I have to do. Protect myself at all costs. Kill or be killed.

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