IN A PLACE WHERE NAMES DETERMINE DESTINY, I'VE REALIZED MINE

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Submitted Date 11/08/2018
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(Story originally posted on an old Reddit account of mine)

I was the only one she trusted, the only one who never experienced her wrath. Perhaps she thought I was useful, perhaps my lack of luck in being named made her pity me in her own strange way, or perhaps she just looked up to me. I am her older sister after all.

Her name, Malice, had been fitting from birth, my mother told me. She swore she saw a cold glint in the infant's eyes as soon as the midwife handed her over, after announcing her ill-fated name, of course. As an infant, she cried for hours. Colic, doctors had said; however, my parents suspected otherwise. With tears in his eyes my father told me they thought she cried for days on end because somehow, she knew it hurt them. I thought that was ridiculous, but the crying persisted. Her cries are the backdrop to my toddlerhood, and they never bothered me like they did my parents. Through her terrible two’s she continued to wail when the slightest thing wouldn’t go her way. She seemed to cry harder at the sight of my parents’ tear-stained and exhausted faces. As she grew older, however, cries were replaced by cutting remarks she developed a surprisingly extensive vocabulary. That was likely my doing. While other children were being read The Little Engine that Could or Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I read my sister Faust and Richard III. She loves her Shakespeare villains, my little Malice.

My mother had her first suicide attempt when Malice was three. My mischievous little sprite had just begun to trade her screaming tantrums for carefully selected insults, and this particular taunt must have pushed my mother over the edge. They had been in the kitchen, Malice strapped in her high chair while my mother baked cupcakes for a bake sale my middle school was having to prove her worth as a parent. My poor mother tried so hard to put on a brave face for the outside world. At some point, Malice must have looked at my mother with her large black eyes (like obsidian mirrors, I always thought to myself—it was like your soul was laid bare before them). She must have wrinkled her nose, in that oddly cute way, before insulting my mother’s parenting. What she said exactly, to this day I don’t know. She would never tell me, but instead she would smile and say she was only telling the truth. We found my mother that night, barely breathing surrounded by pills. My father rushed her to the hospital, while I was put in charge of watching Malice.

As she grew older, my parents put her in and pulled her out of school no less than five times. “Sharp as a tack,” her teachers would call her before the first incident, when poor little Benevolence Nye was found sobbing in a corner muttering about his dead father. When asked what set him off, he could only glance fearfully at my dear sister. Young Thomas was pulled out of school by his mother the next day, having suffered a breakdown. Teachers were much warier when my sister was concerned after that.

Nothing could stop her, though. She was much too smart for that. Despite their suspicions, teachers could never prove it was she who had driven Generosity Kirk to beating the ever-so-quiet Prosperous Thompson nearly to death when all three were in the fifth grade. Neither could they place her near the chemistry lab after the explosion that maimed three other students when she was in the 9th grade. Even her senior year of high school, when five students OD’d after snorting what they had thought was cocaine bought from another student, no one could link her with the drugs.

No one who knew her batted an eye when she was accepted on a full scholarship to a top university. No one was surprised when an esteemed molecular biologist took her under his wing. No one who knew her was shocked when they realized just why she might have been so interested in germs and disease. I always knew she had that desire deep down to hurt as many people as possible, but I was the only one who knew how far she would go. And, as my sister quietly continues to work on the virus that will bring about the greatest amount of suffering and mass casualties the world has ever seen, I silently smile to myself and wait for the day my fate is realized. For, after years of fostering my sister’s talents, I truly am the Traitor to mankind.


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  • Tanya Marion 5 years, 4 months ago

    Neat concept! This would make a great book! Did you ever write more?

    • Bre 5 years, 4 months ago

      No, I didn't, but I've been returning to old stories I've written to decide if there are any I'd like to expand. This one is on my short list.

  • Miranda Fotia 4 years, 10 months ago

    I love the prompt and where you let it take you. Great piece!