Peanut Butter and Toast

“Today, it appears that things ended very badly for a young man whom police believed to have been MIA until 17h19. Forensics found the body of Samuel Caldwell, aged sixteen, mutilated and drowned in the Thames this afternoon, a homemade silver dinner knife pressed through his chest, wiped clean of the murder’s prints, thus erasing trace of any chance at finding the killer. Suspects have been taken into custody and police are questioning them for further information regarding the case. However, without witnesses, a real crime, or even a definite location of crime, the Forensics and Scotland Yard are befuddled by the lack of evidence. With such little evidence to work with, the Metropolitan Police Department has turned to the Doe and Caldwell families to further investigate the case.

“We are here at the British museum with John Pater Brady Doe, best friend to the deceased victim of a crime no one knows anything further about.

“John, do you have any idea who could have done this to your friend?”

The seventeen-year-old on the screen was a foreign body, as we no longer bore any resemblance to one another, remotely or relatively so.

Not at all. He had tears in his eyes that refused to spill over. It took him am moment to gather his voice and regain his composure. However, when he spoke, leaning over the newscaster’s mike, his voice was crisp and cutting, a hard edge written in both the glare of an expression he cast the intruding man and in his begrudging tone.

“No, sir. I do not. The bottles have already debriefed my father and me. No further questions, please.”

I could still feel my father, his hand on my shoulder as he stood behind me and to the left some, his grip tightening visibly, his own eyes bearing tears.

Of regret, devotion, hurt, or what, I know not.

“Well, we hope they find out who killed you friend, mate,” the man had responded, swiping his tongue across his lips like a snake. It made me think of that line in Spirit, where Matt Damon’s voice narrates the stallion’s thoughts:

[blockquote]“I remember the first time I saw a rattler curled up in my path,” he’d said. “This one didn't look like a rattler, but I was still thinkin' 'snake.’"[/blockquote]

The creep I had never liked watching on Channel 17 News—thus the reason I never watched the news on that channel, or really any other channel, for that matter, merely because, since I was a child, it had scared me—stood before the lad in the telly, the one I didn’t know. He wasn’t the kind of person I trusted with anything, or ever would.

Even his pity.

“The Forensics have gathered as much evidence as they could manage, but still fail to find the location of department of life from the body of Samuel Caldwell.” The man is a little…redundant, per say. “If you are just joining us, and have any information regarding the case, please contact the station at—”

Adrian Marks’ voice, newscaster for Channel 17, stationed in Essex, England, was brought up short as the tape finished, cutting to the sound of static, snow littering the screen, encased by darkness, a boy sitting before it, enshrouded by light.

Me.

Perched upon my bed, I, John “Peanut Butter” Doe (Junior, if you want to go by technicalities, although my father has no middle name), broke and cried. This was for the first time since my mother had passed, several years previous. I’d even had Toast, back then.

Now, I had no one but the walls that would otherwise be white, were it not so dark.

Just me and the walls.

Oh, the tales these walls would tell, could they speak.

The tapes, once again, rewound and began to play back the news report, casted on the eleventh of May, in the year of 2013. It involved the murder of my best friend, and marked the day that my world began to fall apart; when I began to fall apart.

It involved my best friend’s murder that I, alone, had witnessed.

I turned back the tape, and hit play.