Gem

The fluorescent lights above me hummed a lullaby, too bright, too white, as if trying to bleach the room of its sins. Their harsh glow amplified the thud of my heartbeat, which echoed not in my chest but somewhere deeper. Behind my ribs, in the spaces where secrets lived. My hands, even though I could see them, felt tacky.. warm, like they’d been submerged in something gummy. I looked down, slowly, like I already knew what I would find. A smile began to unfurl on my lips, not giddy, not kind, but slow and creeping. Curious, almost proud. My shirt. My pants. Stained. No, saturated. A deep, elegant crimson that clung to me like it was mine. There was no mess. No chaos. No regret. A faint dizziness swelled behind my eyes, the corners of the room beginning to blur as if I were underwater, and for a moment, I swayed on the edge of something. Fear, maybe. Or euphoria. A unusual pride settled over me, subtly, curling low in my stomach like the afterglow of something I wasn’t supposed to enjoy. It had all gone… smoothly. That word echoed in my mind like its own mantra. Erased, like they were never here at all. Just… gone. Beyond the closed door, voices stirred like wind behind a curtain. Muffled but enough to slice through the stillness. “Th-the scene… it’s bad,” said a young male, his voice unsteady. He was trying to hold it together, but his tone betrayed him. “Worse than I’ve ever seen. We’ve secured the perimeter but… I mean, what is this?” Another voice responded, this time, and older female. A detective, by the tone of authority tucked beneath the fear. “She’s calm,” she said. “Too calm. There’s no shock, no emotion. No hysteria. Just… nothing.” “Nothing?” The young male spoke, almost scoffing, but it came out like a prayer. “She looked at me. Not through me. Not past me. At me. And it was like…” he paused, voice dropping to a hush, “like I was a picture on the wall. Background noise. This isn’t some messed-up runaway. She’s something else. And the victims being who they were…” “We need to call in Captain Hayes,” the detective cut in, voice crisp now, laced with barely restrained panic. “This is beyond us. Beyond protocol, beyond training. The method, the scale, God, the precision. It’s not random.” “The lack of empathy,” the male whispered, like saying it out loud might curse him. “It’s chilling. What she did to them. And then to just… sit there. Silent. Like none of it touched her.” They think I feel nothing? No. That wasn’t right. They were wrong about me. I felt everything. It just didn’t look the way they expected. The way they would’ve preferred. There was a feeli.. No, a current, electric and sweet, threading through my limbs. It wasn’t just in my head; it was in my body. Real. Tangible. A tingling spread along my spine, through my fingertips, down to my toes. My skin came alive, hypersensitive, and beneath it all, a strange clarity sharpened. A sense of—what was the word? Freedom. It was the feeling of release. The undoing of a cage. A burden shed. It was the kind of feeling that made you remember what power tastes like, like copper and light, bitter and intense. I felt my breath catch. My heart pounded. Not with fear, but with certainty. There was no tremble in my bones. No guilt. No shame. Only a swelling sense of rightness. It was the feeling of something ending… and something else waking up in its place. And then I was ripped from it. The dream shattered. Like glass beneath me, it cracked and collapsed in on itself, and I bolted upright in bed, breath tearing from my throat. My eyes flew open to darkness. My chest heaved. The world around me was silent, still, but inside my body, everything buzzed. My heartbeat was erratic. My skin wet. My mouth dry, yet I swore I could taste something metallic on my tongue. Like blood. Like memory. The feeling, that raw, electric rush of completion, lingered for just a second longer. It clung to me the way perfume does, long after someone has left the room. And then, just as quickly as it had come, it began to dissolve. Evaporating into the night. Leaving behind only echoes. The dream unraveled at the edges, almost bleeding away. Its vivid images turning into mist, the voices slipping into silence. I tried to hold onto them, to grasp the threads and hold myself in what I’d seen. But they slid from my fingers like water. Like something I was never meant to keep. I sank back into the mattress, sheets damp and tangled, breath slowing into shallow, uneven exhales. My mind swirled with broken pieces, with questions that had no answers. What just happened to me? It was just a dream. A dream. But it felt like more than that. There had been real emotion. The kind that sticks in your muscles and doesn’t wash out. The kind that lingers, even when you want it gone. The kind that makes you question whether you’re dreaming at all… or remembering something you’ve buried. Was it memory? A glimpse? A warning? Or was it something darker? Something that lives inside me, not as a ghost from the past, but as part of who I am? I closed my eyes again, hoping the fragments return, to solidify into something I could understand. But they had already faded. I was left with a feeling I couldn’t name. Something cold. Something quiet. Something that buzzed low in my bones, waiting. Watching. A part of me wanted to believe it meant nothing. But another part, the part I didn’t want to admit existed, felt a flicker of something else entirely. Satisfaction. What. The. Fuck.