Sociopath

Sociopath by Ariel Clark
She walked to the window where the sunlight streamed through. Her name was Annie Jesters, but if you asked her she wouldn’t know it. She’s forgotten. Her hair is long brown and hangs to her shoulders. She wears only white dresses. They cut her nails; so she won’t hurt herself.
A bird jumped onto the window sill, and Annie looked at it for a moment. The bird seemed to freeze under her gaze, and she could see its little heart beating against its rib cage. She lashed out with her hand and caught the bird. Annie rubbed the bird’s neck with her thumb, feeling the softness of the feathers. Then she snapped the bird’s neck with a quick flick of her thumb.
It went limp, and Annie dropped it back out the window. Annie did this a lot, just to see if she could still feel. She no longer felt fear, happiness, or anger. The only emotion she had left was sadness. It was when she didn’t feel anything when she killed the bird that Annie realized that she had finally crossed that thin line between humanity and monsterdom. She was on monsterdom’s side.
Annie looked at the sun through the window. She could now kill without feeling anything. She didn’t feel anything even when she didn’t kill. Annie stared with those dead blue eyes of hers at the birds flying through the air just beyond her window.
Her eyes were the only thing about her that kept her from looking like a normal girl. They looked hollow, dead. So when you looked at her you almost thought that nobody was home. Sometimes there wasn’t.
Believe it or not, Annie hadn’t always been like this. She had once loved to read, had loved the moon and stars at night, loved having her mother read books to her late at night, and she had once loved her father.
But now books gave her no pleasure, she no longer loved the moon or stars, she no longer loved having her mother read to her, and she no longer loved her father.
All the things she had once been were a distant memory. If only her father hadn’t come home drunk that night, if only he hadn’t fought with her mother, if only he hadn’t killed her. He had, and Annie had killed him for it. She would never forgive him that. That was when she first learned that she could kill without feeling.
So she started killing animals for food. She was on the streets, run away after that night. With every kill, she felt less and less. Then they found her. The doctors had said Annie was a sociopath, lacking moral conscience. They had locked her up in a psychiatric hospital, even though she had known she wasn’t a total sociopath, only partly. She still had some of her humanity left.
Now, though, Annie felt nothing. She knew that now she was a complete sociopath. It had been lately that killing had given her only small amounts of emotion and the thought of her mother’s death had made her feel nothing. Since she didn’t feel anything anymore, she truly was a monster.
Annie looked out the window to the ground below. They had foolishly let her have an open window. She started to climb through the sill. Since she no longer had anything left to live for, no humanity to make her whole, why live?
Annie dropped from her perch, and fell the seven stories from her hospital room to the ground below. She would be as free as the birds.
The line that Annie crossed truly is a thin one, and once you reach it, go back, because once you cross it, you won’t have another chance to.