The Feast of Revelation

The air in the cabin had grown thick, not just with the scent of pine and damp earth, but with something else, something metallic and cloying. It clung to the back of my throat, a phantom taste that had been there since I woke up in this godforsaken place. Taji. My father. The word felt foreign, a label applied to a stranger who wore his face. He’d brought me here, away from everything I thought I knew, away from Liann, my mother. He said she was a demon, a sex demon, who had signed away her rights, her everything. I didn’t understand. Not then.

The journals. They were hidden beneath a loose floorboard, tucked away like shameful secrets. My father’s handwriting, erratic and wild, filled their pages. He wrote of voices, of shadows that whispered, of a hunger that gnawed at him from the inside. Meth. The word appeared, scrawled with frantic urgency, alongside accounts of violence, of a rage that consumed him. Bipolar. The diagnosis, clinical and stark, was there too, a label that couldn’t possibly encompass the storm raging within him, or, I was beginning to suspect, within me. He saw Liann as a betrayal, a stain on his twisted reality. And now, he wanted me to see it too. To witness her end.

Fear was a cold knot in my stomach, a constant thrum beneath my skin. But beneath the fear, something else was stirring. A curiosity, a morbid fascination with the darkness that was unfolding around me. Taji was preparing, his movements jerky and purposeful. He cleaned a knife, its steel glinting in the dim light. He spoke of justice, of cleansing, of a reckoning that was long overdue. I watched him, my gaze detached, as if observing a character in a play. And then, a new thought, sharp and clear, cut through the fog in my mind. If he was going mad, if his reality was fractured, then maybe… maybe mine could be too. Maybe I could use it. For survival. For satisfaction.