Page 13 of Cruel Cravings

I lost consciousness and should’ve died.

It wouldn’t have mattered. The others left me for dead. They fled the scene and never uttered a word to anyone.

Days passed before I woke up. The pain hit me in waves. It felt like my entire body was broken. My bones grinded against each other with every stilted breath. My leg was twisted beneath me. My right arm bent at an odd angle.

And my face… I didn’t need a mirror to know.

I could feel the wet, open wounds and the sharp sting any gust of air brought to my raw flesh. The copper taste of blood lingered in my mouth in a way that felt permanent.

Eventually, I dragged myself through the underbrush. Every movement was a new kind of hell. The skin on my palms peeled away as I clawed at the dirt and rocks. Streaks of blood trailed in my wake.

I was a shattered wreck, my mind a storm of rage, confusion, shame. Hurst’s face swam before my eyes everywhere I looked.

For weeks, I lived like an animal. I scavenged berries and chewed on roots. I survived any way I could, broken and battered.

Nights were the worst—cold, endless, dark, the wind blowing so hard I had to take cover anywhere I could.

It was impossible to tell how long I had been missing. I wandered the woods in search of something I couldn’t even describe. But thoughts crept into my head, bitter and twisted questions about why no one came looking for me.

Was the school aware? Did my family know? Were Hurst and the others keeping it a secret?

Was it more convenient if I stayed dead?

My body was mangled and disfigured. My face unrecognizable. I was a creature. An animal just like the others living in these woods.

When a search party finally did find me months later, I was barely human. My mother fainted when she saw me. I bared my teeth and snapped at her and the others, feral and livid. They were the enemy; they were the ones who left me for dead and barely cared enough to scour the area.

But where my mother was horrified, my father was dispassionate. He was as withdrawn as ever.

“Get him to the hospital,” he said.

Surgeries were performed. The doctors did their best. They reset bones and stitched wounds. They grafted skin. But my reflection revealed the ugly truth.

My face was a grotesque map of scars, ridges of flesh twisting over what used to be smooth skin. My nose was permanently damaged. One of my eyelids more swollen than the other. My jaw was thick and wide and ached no matter how the doctors readjusted it.

Somehow, my body was worse.

Bones had healed wrong. Pain radiated through me from the simplest movement. I was going to be dealing with it for the rest of my life.

Pain was my new best friend.

My mother broke into sobs when it dawned on her there was nothing else that could be done. Always the polar opposite, my father stood at the foot of my hospital bed, his face blank but his eyes full of something I couldn’t name. Disappointment? Revulsion? Shame?

Hatred.

“I’ll make arrangements,” he said, his voice flat.

I was moved from one hospital to another. But it wasn’t a typical kind of hospital, where patients go for physical wounds or ailments. It was the Brighter Days Psychiatric Hospital run by none other than my father.

I wasn’t admitted as a patient. I wasn’t one, not on paper and in official records.

The arrangements he spoke of were in the basement. It turned out to be a cold, damp room with concrete walls and a single cot. No windows and no sound except the faint hum of the fluorescent light in the ceiling.

I wasn’t his son anymore. I was a secret.

Stashed away in a place you put things that didn’t belong. Hidden away where no one else would see me.

For years, my job was to assist the janitorial and maintenance staff. I was allowed to wander the long, echoing corridors of the hospital late at night when the janitors mopped the floors and took care of other mundane tasks they’d never get done during the day with patients awake.

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