oh ye of little Faith

 By Mahado Kadir, age 15

Many people in this world feel a sense of incompleteness and are searching to be fully realised; they go backpacking, they quit their jobs, cheat on their wives and kill their husbands. Victor feels as if he is missing a limb. In fact, he thinks this lacking might be his defining trait, that he is less than whole. This terrible affliction is evident in every facet of his being; his skeletal frame, too hollow cheeks, perpetually bruised eyes. His body made up of painfully sharp angles that cut to look at and conjure questions about his home life. He never wondered what made him different, that question was answered by the very way he entered the world.

It had been a ghastly night on Friday 13th of October, in a very busy free clinic when a tragedy was born. On the witching hour funnily enough, Victor successfully committed his first murder. With his tiny, just formed, arms he’d somehow wrapped his sister's umbilical cord around her own throat, slowly sucking out every morsel of life, only minutes before being cut out of his mother. They had thought he’d be the one to die that night, already mourned the death of their first son. Months before the birth his mother had been told one of the twins was very small and might not make it through delivery and as if he had heard his condemnation; he began plotting to eliminate his sister and live a thoroughly unhappy life. Death touched every part of his living too, even his name, Victor, was a remnant of her, a lesser, warped version of Victoria. His lovely sister gone before she could even be. No, he never wonders what made him different, but he did wonder whether he was right to refuse his sister life and all the disappointments that come with it.

Death was the sole reason he had no friends, in her grief, his mother became obsessive and unintentionally vindictive, stillbirth steering her career away from healing and into corpses; she began to study the mortuary sciences. Now poor Victor cursed by the gift of life and forever plagued by the stink of death was in preschool with a mum who helped prep his peer's late grandmother for the ground. Suffice to say he was not popular. Her co-dependency hadn’t helped either, much of Victor’s childhood was spent inside away from the world, a second sentence, the first to live the second to waste life.

His mother couldn’t bare the idea of him dying, you would think the years soothing grieving families she’d settle with idea, but no. In fact, he thinks her work has made it harder for her, he couldn’t count how many nights he spent calming her down after night terrors about prepping his body for a funeral. He does love her, sometimes he worries that his bitterness means he holds her in contempt. Some wretched part of him probably does hate her, but why else would he spend so much of his youth indulging that attachment, if he didn’t love her. Or hold her in high regard at the very least.

It wasn’t like that with his father though, he might have been sunshine incarnate, Apollo reborn. He was an army man (like most in their town), served 3 full tours before his last and Victor still had every letter his father had ever sent him. They were his most prized possessions. Unlike the other militant men his peers were raised by, his father was quick to smile and had the wrinkles to prove it. A sharp square jaw and heavy-set brow hid the most gentle calloused hands and eyes that twinkled when he told a story. His dad had been full of stories, he often theorised that was where he’d gotten his love for writing and worlds away from his own. There were stories his father never told too, stories with harsh terrain and the deafening sound of gun shots, stories with unhappy endings and hopeless emptiness. He resented his mother deeply from hiding him away from the world but nothing could devastate Victor more than the fact that the man he loved most, hid himself from him too. The letters were his only glimpse into that version of his father, the one that held guns, aimed and shot. The man who was so plagued by fear or regret or something that he let himself be deafened to the world.

His words were weary and dark, often rambling about the smallest details, a crack in a wall or a leaky pipe, and yet he read them with the diligence of the most pious apostle. They were also cryptic, written like diary entries not meant to be read by anyone but himself. If his fathers cloaked years of life were glass these letters were shattered fragments, a puzzle with uneven, misshaped pieces and no guide on how it all connected. He had this terrible sense that a great wicked darkness loomed over the writer any time Victor read anything that even lightly referenced those forbidden years, the short time he spent at school before enlistment. His time at what he later learned was a prestigious school called Faith. He also rambled about his mother, how she was before Victoria, before him. Those parts were the hardest to read.

He’d be completely mortified to admit it but he wasn’t quite sure how his father could have still loved her, his mother never recovered from the loss of her little girl and made Victor pay for every moment of life he stole. He was sure his father adored her however, proof of it covered every available surface of the quaint upstairs in the funeral home, picture frames containing violently joyous smiles and eyes so bright he almost wanted to squint. Various non-sensical knick-knacks decorated shelves and tables, a concerning number of candles some thin and tall in which he used to imagine being a little Victorian child with in the dead of night, before quickly blowing them out after hearing his mothers’ feet creak against the squeaky 5th step. He’d often play acted as a child, was quite a thespian until his mother caught him play acting a funeral and decided the trait wasn’t as sweet as she’d previously thought.

Vases of various sizes all fake and cheap and brimming with life littered around, the house was practically a shrine to the dead man. The joyous feeling of every item, had left with him and the shells that occupied their house now were just haunted husks. If his father was the sun what was left was a flickering light-bulb. Victor had learnt to loath his home and the cavernous hole in the ceiling. The way it loomed over every conversation, casting its shadow over battered picture frames, the permanent crick in his neck from staring up and up and up, a far as he could go.

Victor didn’t kill his father but he probably nudged him along. The loss of Victoria had hit them both hard, after travelling the world together, collecting pieces of it to take back home with them. His parents were ready to settle down. The first complications was age, his mother was well past her child bearing years when she’d had him and she never let him forget it. Fortunately, that wasn’t something set in stone and eventually his mother was expecting. The second complication was him, too frail for life, literally built to die. The third, his insistence on living or maybe just the uncaring reality of the universe that allowed for such an abomination that was his existence. Either way, the fault was mainly his.

Victor’s life up to now had been a dreary affair, besides the briefest blink of joy when his father and him occupied the world simultaneously, it had been spectacular in its doom and gloom. However now after winning a scholarship to a too-good school with a short-story about a boy who’d lost his father to the second great war (only semi-autobiographical since the boy was a red head and he was not). And gaining a step dad that was unbearably easy to love, but much hated anyways (though he was genuinely perfect) the world seemed to have flipped. Ever the realist however (or pessimist as his cheery step father liked to joke) he was still guarded, ready for a slap in the face and the sting of shattered expectations. Even now on the way to his potential happiness he could not relax his jaw, teeth grinding, the sensation familiar and almost comfortable. Almost.

His leg bounced annoyingly though he knew he could not stop, his eyes glued to the window after making agonizing eye contact with a girl sitting two rows ahead of him. He knew the blush that had crept onto his cheeks was blotchy and unattractive against his freakishly pale skin. The jacket he wore was denim and too-tight around his shoulders and too thick for this town's suburban sunshine, so a layer of intolerable sweat tormented him. The trousers fabric unknown but suddenly itchy, he writhed but halted quickly, fearing people would look over at the creep wiggling around at the back of bus. Victor Morea would be attending one of the most elite university, home to the richest of rich white people to learn and explore the most renowned of authors works and attempt to dissect their god given talent and mimic it. The same Victor Morea who was currently dying of pure unadulterated anxiety because some random person glanced at him on a bus.

Everything was going to be fine.

He unzipped his bag extracting one of his letters, the first he’d ever received, and as he stroked the aged, yellowed paper and admired his fathers scrawl his anxiety deflated like a dying balloon on a scorching summers day. Minutes passed like seconds as he focused in on the letter and one by one all the bus occupants filed out until it was just him. His admission had been late, some issue with postal, leaving him as the last student to arrive on campus. With a deep breath hardening his nerves and strengthening his resolve, he rose shakily and as the bus halted, took the steps that would change everything. The bus stop was not situated near the school but on the border of its private land, a thick wood. To busy brooding, Victor hadn’t even realised that they’d left the suburban sweet streets and had entered into the deep wilderness west of the quaint town. Here in the thick of it, with nothing but distant chirps and rustling leaves, alone, Victor closed his eyes. The wild had always centred him, he abhorred concrete and pavement and worshipped the weeds and undergrowth. Weeds didn’t need water nor attention only the might of their will and the opportunity to strike.

The stop was about a mile out from the mysterious new school he’d be attending. Very little was known about the inner workings of Faith University. Despite its name it wasn’t a religious school though he wouldn’t be surprised if it had roots within the Roman Catholic Church. The university was loaded with money and connections, every graduate was great; a great artist, a great scientist, a great killer. His father had attended for 4 years during his youth, a detail that had surprised Victor after his death due to the apparent prestige of the school. Unlike most occupants of Faith he did not leave with money and means but rather had enlisted into the army and married his small town girl before dying in obscurity. His father had been charismatic and not lacking in anyway, the opposite of Victor, he had no reason not to turn out like the rest of Faiths alumni.

It was only after lots of research that Victor began to untangle the web of intrigue and to his great surprise (and delight) begun to reveal some sort of conspiracy. 16 student had gone into Faith with exemplary talents, and left with nothing to show for it. 8 had died soon after graduation, 4 had fled the country, 2 had enlisted (including his father). The last two disappeared, missing report cases that got lost in the pile, he guessed. 1 single thing connected all of these people, a 6:00 am class, a theatre class. Victor couldn’t claim his eagerness to attend Faith was purely out of academic drive. Victor wanted answers, he wanted to know his father better, he wanted a story to tell. In another world Victor Morea might of had many stories to give the world, but now, there was just one.

Victor pondered his future and the odd feeling of finality as he hiked his way to the gates of Faith, the letters safely tucked into his satchel. Unknowing and unafraid of what lay ahead, excitement in his veins like an opioid powering his burning legs as he lumbered up the steep hill. The reminder he was getting closer to the place his father spent those secret years was exhilarating, and the high had shot him out of his usual anxious state and into a sort of delirium. Oh His breath came faster and his heart beat out of his rib cage leaving his bones splintered and jagged, puncturing his lungs. They deflated and blood pooled internally rising from his throat, spluttering now on salt and sin, his vision blurred and brightened.

Victor began to run.