Hold my bloody fingertips close to my nose and sniff. Oranges, apricots, plums, passionfruit – smell everything the color reminds me of, but not the substance itself. Plunge the fingers into the bathtub and watch the red spread. Curling, curlicuing into shapes more beautiful than anything I could paint in a swirl of color on my canvas.

Perhaps that’s why it’s been blank for so long.

The bathwater is warm, now bloody, so climb in. Sink, let hair down. See naked skin flush with the heat. Feel lungs constricting in the steam. Turn on the cold water, watch it rinse the drying blood from under my fingernails. The evidence is still on my face, deep scratches not yet welting shut, dripping fresh droplets into the hot, now cooling, water.

What makes a person eviscerate a face? Eviscerate a self? Let’s see. Maybe the wounds of defection, watching friends leave and lover spurn when they find out. Maybe it’s having the past dragged up and needing to face it yet again. As if the past time and the time before that and the one before weren’t enough. As if it is always necessary to be reminded of crimes committed when too young to think clearly, let alone decide.

So. There was a crime. There was foster care. There was counseling. Seven year olds don’t get sent to jail. Maybe they should. Maybe I should have been. Records sealed, name never in the papers, only a description of what I looked like and what I’d done.

No use pretending. I killed them. I did. I killed them with cold blood and no malice. I was curious. And I wanted to make it stop. What they were doing to me. Aunt and uncle. Uncle more than aunt. Aunt enough, though. Wanted it to stop. There’s no malice in stopping the pendulum of a clock with your finger. There was none in my actions either. I just wanted them to stop moving. And I’d watched enough TV to know guns could make that happen.

Eons gone by, forgiven, forgotten, but not yet. Not every time they find out. And so – boxes. Empty canvas needs to be packed up. Suitcase needs to be pulled out of the closet. Clothes need to be folded up and placed inside. A new apartment to be secured, new friends to be made, new lovers to be met. I’ve lived in more states than I was ever interested in, yet it keeps coming back up.

So. Blood in the bathtub. Face scarred worse than ever they scarred me – they left no marks. Newness to be introduced to everything again. Running looks like this.

Returning looks like this too. Resolve this time to return. To go back to where it all started. To where they know my face. My scars, visible and not. My crimes, never forgotten, still probably the most scandalous thing in a town of five thousand. Maybe someone will believe me after all these years.

Lie in my blood and plan.