Rainfall

She's an obedient girl.

Kills whoever he says to, looks at nothing he says not to.

It's not for him, though. It's for the book. She's looking for her last page.

He doesn't know why him, doesn't concern himself with it either. She's an obedient girl, who does everything he asks and more.

Pretty. Shame she's still a child. Shame she doesn't know how to smile.

He knows a pretty smile when he sees it. He knows a good smiler when they walk.

He likes to imagine she does too, when she looks at the corpses by her feet. When she looks at the holes she's made into their chests and the rain falling on her handiwork. He likes to imagine she knows things, even though she's with him precisely because she can't know things on her own, can't do them without a command.

Pretty dolly.

So he lets her go play house out in the streets, and sometimes she comes back with a page for her book or a fat wallet that keeps them fed for days. She doesn't grow but her clothes fall off anyway from use and he carries her around in his jacket until he finds something new in some dead man's house.

She makes him think of his daughter, the little one in the apartment he left behind.

Her confusion always makes him think of her, until she looks at the gun in his pocket.

She's always looking at it, that girl. She's always watching it with a wary sort of pleasure, if she is capable of feeling that sort of thing. If she's capable of thinking about much, it's always his little gun, the handgun that she sometimes caresses into her hand. It is never fired because she doesn't know how to kill herself. She knows how to kill anything else, just a touch seems to do the trick, but not herself.

She needs him to kill her and he won't.

He's already a monster anyway. Accidentally of course, but accidental is a word people also say about sexual assault and domestic violence so nobody takes it all that seriously anymore.

He thinks of his daughter's face, crestfallen at the window, every time he tries to kill her like she wants, and the gun lowers.

Maybe he just doesn't want that little girl ashamed of him.

But she's not here, and that kid is only his by semen transfer. So he shouldn't care.

But he does.

Another corpse drops, this with the thunk of flesh meeting dumpster. He wants to ask her if this is the last one, even as her eyes travel to the gun like they do after every fight. Are you me? He wants to ask her this every day. Is that why you want to die?

He never asks her, and instead takes her back to dry off because her killings always happen in the rain.

He doesn't understand why she stays, why she waits for him to do the deed, why she doesn't go find a criminal or something. A real criminal, not something like him. She never says a word, and never does a thing, even if he is thinking of choking her or leaving her in the apartment to waste away. She just holds her book and waits.

One night he simply leaves her there, leaves her there and wanders the streets she's been staining with blood for the past few months. He wanders through the cemetery he hasn't touched, has avoided the whole time, and then finds himself having to stop because the girl is right before his eyes. She is looking at a grave, and her book is resting on it, like it is sleeping there. He has never looked at the book cover once.

He doesn't want to, nor does he want to look at the girl. She never disobeys him. She is an obedient girl.

She also never speaks.

“Daddy,” she says then, and her voice is too high, too splintered.

“Daddy,” she says again, and his gun is suddenly in his hand. “You have the last page of my book.”

His hand doesn't shake.

“Daddy,” she says for a third time, and smiles the pretty smile he knew she had. “You killed me.”

He pulls the trigger, and kills her again.

The police find him lying there, soaked in rain, her bloody book in hand.

For my daughter, with love.

blah

Narrator: A known trait of humans is to travel in these... pack-like groups. They are a social race, the female set in particular. Sometimes there is a very specific screech from one group to another.

However, there is another trait of humans... this exclusion of one or more of their race.

(The screen flashes to a high school lunch table, where one one side is a great crowd, while on the other, a child sits alone.)

Narrator: Of course, some humans are adept at naturally breaking from the pack. Yet, in a manner most strange for such a social species, they encourage such separation. Admittedly, some appear to do it more roughly than others. For example, the screech that is typically a sign of acknowledgment from one group to another, sends a negative message towards the lone extra. Also, hoots and jeers are taken as common sport, and any attempts by higher-ranked members of the species are met with no adjustment whatsoever or even anything resembling remorse.

Scientists find this contradictory communication sequence illogical.

There have been many attempts to explain it, both by the creatures themselves and our own scientists. Yet, just like the circles the groups of humans tend to linger in, they keep coming to a very nonsensical answer.

It is just human nature, it seems.

Click

Click-Click

Rush by, rush by. Chilled by a ticking second hand. The minutes are a fast sort of sluggish. Tap goes the pencils clicking the lead, over and over.

It's them or its you. Fifty minutes, six, seven times. Each time is relaxed by a five minute lie-in and there's a thirty second (minute) break in between. And it rushes by with the voices of the friend and the foe and the smell of bad food.

Four more days after one passes. And then the weekends, hours upon hours of work that you may not need because you already know.

Sometimes it's a big project, one with many pages and hours and not enough sleep. Sometimes it's a theory.

All year, it's a test.

A test of your brains and your endurance and how well you can cope with these people and their inability to let you think. It's the test and you panic and you worry and it hurts very, very bad.

It should end when you get to walk on that line. Walk on it rain or shine to shake the hands of old men you don't even remember ever meeting. Old men and women who decided how your life was supposed to be tested before you even existed. Who were these people and why did you care? Everything was over.

It was supposed to be over.

Maybe for a couple people it was.

But if you were smart or scared, it never ended.

More time in a building, spaced out, the second hand ticking longer, later. Homework piles even higher, never sure you were doing it right, never sure this was what the teacher wanted. That was what you were taught to look for.

It wasn't necessary to think. Everyone says it is but you and I know it's not.

By the time you get that pretty little job, the thinking's gone, the rote is back. And everyone gets mad because people don't know how to think and expect to not have to teach them, but if there was no place to ever learn then what do you expect?

What do you expect from a zombie you asked to make?