Chapter One: Aftermath

I woke up in a bush.

Not near a bush. In one. Branches pressed into my back through my jacket, leaves in my mouth, and the first thing my brain did, before pain, before fear, before anything else, was ask why I hadn’t woken up in my bed like a normal person who’d gone for a normal walk.

The sky was doing that thing it does before six a.m., grey going soft at the edges. Not quite morning yet but done pretending to be night. The south side of the park was still dark under the trees. I could hear a car somewhere on the main road, tyres on wet tar, and a dog, and my own heartbeat, which felt wrong. Too loud. Too close, like someone had turned up the volume on the inside of my own skull.

I sat up too fast and the world tilted sideways.

Okay. Okay, Anesu. Think.

Last thing I remembered was walking. Just walking, the way I do most nights when my head’s too full to sleep. Down past the graves, along the tree line where some of the streetlights are out. I remembered the cold. I remembered thinking I should turn back before it got too late. And then nothing. A gap, clean as a cut, like someone had taken scissors and cut a piece of my own memory and spliced two nights together.

My hands were shaking. I looked down at them and there was blood on my jacket, dark, gone tacky at the edges. Way too much to be a regular nosebleed. Way too much to make any sense at all, and none of it seemed to be coming from anywhere on me that I could find. I patted myself down like I was checking a stranger’s body for the exit wound. Ribs, fine. Head, tender on one side, nothing split open. No cut deep enough to explain a stain that size.

I told myself it wasn’t mine.

I told myself that like it was supposed to make me feel better.

The light was coming up properly now, that first thin wash of it sliding under the tree canopy, and it hit the side of my face and I flinched like I’d touched a stove. Not pain exactly. Not yet. A kind of pressure behind my eyes, a tightness across my cheek, the feeling of standing too close to a fire that hadn’t caught you yet but was thinking about it. I put my hand up against it without a second thought, an old instinct, completely automatic. And under my palm, my skin felt so weird. Too warm on the surface and too cold underneath.

I need to get up, I thought. I need to get off the ground, and I need to go home and I need to do it before anyone sees me looking like this.

That last part came fastest and clearest. Faster than the fear, faster than the pain starting to build behind my face like a migraine rolling in. Hood up. Chin down. Hands where they could be seen if it came to that. I was moving before I knew it; my body language already adjusting to try to be non-threatening, a reflex that just becomes how you carry yourself. I know exactly what a Black man covered in blood in a park at dawn looks like to whoever finds him first, security guard or dog walker or cop on early shift, and it isn’t a victim.

Move. Now. Before anyone looks at you.

I got up. My legs did not want to hold me and I made them anyway, one hand on a branch, one hand pressed flat against my own sternum like I could hold myself together from the outside. The car was where I’d left it, up on the side of the road, silver, ordinary, mine, and it had never looked more like the only safe thing in the world.

I don’t remember all of the walk to it. I remember the light getting stronger and the pressure behind my face getting worse in a way that tracked with it, degree for degree, like there was a dial somewhere and the sun was turning it up. I remember tucking my chin down, doing the small invisible things you do when you need to disappear for four hundred metres.

Getting in the car was its own small war. My hands didn’t want to work properly, fingers thick and stupid around the key, and starting it felt like waking something enormous that had been sleeping under the bonnet, the engine noise huge in my ears when it caught. I sat there a second with both hands on the wheel just breathing. Lightly cursing, watching the light climb the windscreen, watching my own knuckles, pale where I was gripping too hard.

Four kilometres. I could have walked this route a hundred times without thinking about the distance. This morning it felt like the far side of the country.

I drove home like a drunk man pretending to be sober. Overcorrecting on a straight road, braking too early at a stop street that had no one else on it, my eyes doing something strange every time the light came through the windscreen at an angle. A kind of flare and drag I’d never felt before. Once, at the traffic stop by the canal, I caught my own face in the rearview and didn’t recognise the eyes looking back for a full second. Way too bright, the pupils too wide, before they were just my eyes again and I told myself I’d imagined it.

I did not believe myself. I kept driving anyway.

By the time I got the car into the driveway, I was gripping the wheel like it was the only stable object left in the world and the burn along the side of my face and my hands had gone from pressure to more of a controlled fire. Contained but present. The kind of pain that tells you it’s holding back, for now. I made it up the path. I made it to the door. My key didn’t want to find the lock, my hand wouldn’t stop shaking, and somewhere in the middle of that small, stupid, ordinary failure, key against metal, missing the slot twice, I felt something give way inside my chest. Like my body had been holding itself up by sheer will since the moment I woke up in that bush and had finally decided it was done.

I got the door open. I don’t fully remember closing it behind me.

I remember the hallway tilting. I remember thinking, distantly, almost politely, that I should probably call someone, and not being able to summon a single name to go with the thought. I remember the blood-stained jacket sliding off one shoulder as I went down, and the cool of the floor tile against my cheek, which should have felt like relief and instead felt like the last thing before nothing.

Then the gap again. Clean as a cut.

Read Chapter 2: The Turning now!