Peanut Butter and Toast

As the casket was lowered, I couldn’t help but think of the last few seconds of life I had seen in Sam’s eyes as the light had fled the scene, screaming in its retreat. Interestingly enough, the tears I had expected to shed didn’t come. This piqued the interest of a few agents that stood nearby, flanking my father and I.

At the thought, I’ve failed to explain. My mum skipped out on us when I was around two or three, I can’t remember. Da doesn’t like to talk about it. But, when I was ten, they’d found her body in an underground, hiddenburnout shelter. My father had been quick to identify her, little emotion written across his face until we’d arrived home, once again, that night.

He’d told me so many things, that night, it was impossible to remember everything, but, in the same instant, impossible to forget anything. Those things he’d said, those words, hushed and secretive had stuck with me throughout the years.

That woman, the woman they had found in that burnout shelter, the one from World War II, when Hitler and his Nazi Germany had repeatedly bombed English cities and towns, had been a Czech; he could see it in the slope of her nose. Even further into detail; he’d been at gunpoint the entire night, all without a single cock of a barrel.

No, were he to have told, he’d be a dead man, right then, and I’d be a lost child.

I wouldn’t actually be an orphan, but that’s what the government would have thought, and where they would have put me. An orphanage.

For the sake of me, my father, and probably my true mother’s safety, wherever she had been, at the time, he’d lied.

And that’s what I’d been doing for the past four days, and even before then.

I’d lied.

It was late, in the asylum. Two PIs flanked my sides as we made our way through the white hallways, white doors, white handles, white ceiling, white floors. Their guns were at the ready; even at their sides, safety on, those men were deadly. They’d been trained to raise the gun, flip off the safety, and cock the gun at any given time; all one, fluid movement.

I’d been permitted a run every night, down in the gym, when none of the others were occupying the room. I had two guards on me, constantly; this was more than any of the others. They didn’t know, though. They had their suspicions, but they didn’t know.

It had been four years, now, since Sam had died. Since he’d been brutally stabbed and, when that hadn’t worked out for the killer, he’d been drowned in the Thames. How no one had witnessed the killing, or heard the blood-curdling, startling sounds that Sam had emitted from his throat was pure luck for the murderer. That specific night had been planned out for ages. It had been overcast, as it usually was, but snowing. Not many really went near the Thames in the spring, when it was snowing. Those cobblestones were too slippery. Just one small misplacement of the toe, and you could so swoosh! And that would be the end of it.

No more Sammy Caldwell.

The memory was too pleasing, to me. There was a reason I was in the asylum, this I knew. It was to keep me from talking. To keep me from relishing in my past.To keep me from plotting out the deaths of anyone else. A mere prison wouldn’t hold me; they’d tried that. Theoretically.

I smiled. It was a secret smile, a smile I’d never before shared with myself while anyone else was around. But it was a smile; a pretty, pretty smile. That smile; it meant more than an ordinary smile.

That secret smile was unsettling to the PIs; that secret smile that I kept to myself, and only allowed to show through at the best of times; sometimes the worst got the best of me and I had to allow it to appear. It kept me, in jest of the moment, sane. I had total control of it.

I’d killed Sam Caldwell, and I’d get away with murder; something my mother, a rogue Scotland Yard agent, would never be able to do.

That’s why she was gone.

John Doe, my father, was gone.

So, that leaves me.

Who am I?

Yes, yes, Caldwell. You’re right.

I am that man.

I killed your son.

And you’ll never know that it was me.

I killed Toast.