Satellite Heart

I was twenty-four years old when she asked me to see someone about my madness. She didn't seem to understand that there was no cure, that the vile creature had dug itself into the deepest pits of my body and had already conquered my soul. There was no going back. She had ensured that the moment she placed the gun back in my hands and walked away, leaving me breathing and pulsing and slowly shrivelling on the inside.

I told her that I would go. I took her in my arms and pulled her against my blackened body, and as she sobbed against my chest I really believed that I would do it. But I didn't.

I went to see my dad instead.



When I was young I believed that my mother was magical. I wanted nothing more than to be her, because she had powers and abilities that I could only dream of. At night I would hear her whispering into the darkness, her arms curled around her body and her brown eyes alert as though she was seeing someone there. I asked her about it. I foolishly overlooked the pain in her eyes when she answered me with whispered words and a falsely excited smile.

"I talk to the ghosts," she whispered, as though it was a secret. My eyes had lit up like a thousand diamonds sparkling in the sunlight and I had snuggled closer to her, tugging her arms around me as I waited for her story. "They only come out at night when it's really dark. Not many people can see them, but I can."

I can remember telling her how lucky she was with a fluttering heart, and I can remember the tight smile on her face and the silence that responded to my sentence. "Are they nice to you?" I had whispered, like a child finding out that there were such things as fairies and elves when in reality I was finding out about darkness.

Her eyes had darkened slightly, and she caressed my cheek softly with her calloused fingertips before looking away. "Some of them are nice. But others…" she had trailed off, a frown etching her features that she tried to soften for me. "Others can be monsters."

I had hugged her closer, letting her know that I would protect her from anything. And in reality I would have, but my tender flesh and fragile organs were no match for a gun.

"Will I get to see them too?" If I could regret anything I'd ever said in my life it would be those words, because as they left my pink lips with a tinge of excitement and longing I was cursed by the demons of Hell.

She didn't answer. A tear dribbled down her cheek.

When I was sixteen I saw the ghosts for the first time. I saw the fairies, the monsters and heard the voices of shadows. It wasn't a fairy tale like I had first thought, and it wasn't a dream or a blessing. It was a nightmare. I now understood why my mother was dead.

I longed to be a little boy again. I longed for my mother, and more than that, I longed to believe that she was something other than the maddened, bloody carcass that seemed to be carved into my mind.



My dad was an ugly man. I didn't know whether it was just the demonic aura that surrounded him or whether the years in jail had worn him down, but to me he was disgusting. When I looked at him I could see the blood on his hands and the craze in his eyes, and I could smell nothing but the stench of drying blood and the odour of gunpowder.

I came to him with the hope that he could fix me. He had taken minutes to examine me, his beady, bloodshot eyes trailing over my body which was twitching with anxiety. For a minute I pretended that I could see inside of him, through the concrete walls that surrounded him and through his ash-stained skin. And inside his heart was as black as an eclipse, and bubbles of charcoal smoke was being pumped out instead of blood. Everything warm had been sucked into the parasite, and with a hungry, manic glee I clung to the fact that he was darker than me. That the fire of insanity had burnt him for longer than it had damaged me, and that he was rotting in Hell, surrounded by demons when I had my very own piece of Heaven.

I wondered for a moment whether I could shoot him if I had a gun in my hands. He looked more monstrous than my mother ever had, and with his tilted lips and dark smile his blood was waiting to burst all over the concrete ground. Did normality exist, or was it a mirage? Whatever it was I had been blinded by its light and my hands had been scratched and bloodied trying to reach for it. But as I looked at my father standing in the confines of his cell, I came to the conclusion that if he was normal then I was hopelessly glad to be insane.

He looked at me like he was staring into a mirror, and it made my stomach curl and my eyes twitch as I forced myself to stay beside him. I was terrified that the blackness of his soul would stretch out through his pores and wrap its dirty fingers around my heart, and damage it until I was an ash-ridden monster like the man in front of me. His mouth was breathing poison and it was dragging me under, and I could feel my consciousness tugging away from me as I struggled to stay afloat.

“Tyler.” He spoke my name through curled lips, and the single word danced around my mind like an emotionless mantra. Flames erupted in my stomach, flickering at a scorching temperature and eating the words from my mouth. My tongue was burnt and I couldn’t speak, so I simply stared in maddened silence. “You’re looking well.”

He was insane because he couldn’t see the beast inside of me and he was a light because his words sent hope spiraling through my stomach. My dad was a walking contradiction and the influence he had on me was no different. I loved him because we were the same and I hated him because he had poisoned me, and though I longed to see his blood on the ground I longed to see it pump through him more.

I nodded my head, clearing my throat. He was wondering why I was here, and admittedly the question was running rancid through my mind too. It had been over a decade since I had seen him last –in my mind his blood was mixed with my mother’s and his soul lay in Hell alongside hers. He had lost it the moment he pulled the trigger, and he had lost his place in my heart the moment it became splattered with her blood. I was a walking mess but my soul was still buried inside of me, albeit tainted by the gunpowder and the hands that stretched to steal it from me.

His eyes were forlorn and aged as he watched me, his breathing staggered as he pushed his greasy hair away from his face. “Tyler, I-“

I turned and I ran. I ran with his insanity reaching at my back and my own pushing me towards it. I longed for my angel and my sanctuary, because I had taken a glimpse at Hell and it was everything I feared.

I wish I didn’t. I wish I’d stayed.

I would have heard his words, and it would have changed my life.

My Dad was dying. And he was dying without his son and with a plaguing memory tearing at his back.

In reality, it wouldn’t have meant a thing to me. I had already lost him.