VAL DAY-SANCHEZ

Copyright © 2016 Val Day-Sanchez

All rights reserved.

The cat watches her. He sits without judgment as she lights her final cigarette. He doesn't move as she finishes her gourmet coffee. He can't be bothered as she pulls on her shoes. It's funny how his feelings mirror her own. The severity of where she is going hasn't begun to resonate.

She looks around her apartment, the boxes area bit unsettling but she only needs to turn her back to them and then it's like nothing has changed. She watches the cat. He was there for all of it. He had been silent then as well. His stare had been unyielding, she wonders if he would be considered a witness or an accomplice?

"And what do you think of all this cat?" It was an interesting question, one she was beginning to ask herself. Before, when it all started, she had kept her feelings out of it. They were what had brought her to such a final conclusion in the first place. In contrast, she had let logic and her mind dictate her actions throughout the trial. Her lawyer said it was better to look cold and disconnected than raving mad. But now, the verdict had been read and her sentencing was determined, she reflected in what this made her.

For the rest of her life, her identifier would be the girl who killed, she was a murderer. Once she had been, the painter. She was seen as a protégé, only great things had been associated with her future. Paint had once covered her hands, but now the picture of her with blood coating her hands had infiltrated every paper and internet rag. If painter were mentioned, it was spoken of as it were in the past. Apparently the two things were mutually exclusive. Once you killed you could not be anything else, society would never allow it.

She still feels that she is more. She is a fighter. Ambition still fuels her even if it comes now in small nearly undetectable bursts rather than the life-force pumping through her veins. She still loves art, oils, water color, and pencil - it all inspires her. This same passion may have betrayed her but she will never look at a knife the way she dotes over her brushes. Paint has always been there, even when her father couldn't afford it, she would use the crayons she'd found around her school to create a home for the faces in her mind.There was only one face for a long time. The face of abuse and contempt. It didn't matter how many times she consumed her canvas with it, it refused to leave her mind. Her picture was all over the news but her abusers face was in every aspect of her life. When she closed her eyes, when she awoke, there were times when she'd look in the mirror and it was their reflection that greeted her. The thought of their return was consistently in her mind.

She had moved hundreds of miles away and she still saw their face in a crowd. What was real and what was her mind toying with her became so blurred until finally she began to engage her apparitions. It started as perfectly constructed conversations where she was finally able to speak. In the past her abusers had stolen her words but now she was an adult, on her way to being one of the world's best painters. Now she could form the words, she could say out loud what they had done to her. The conversations, although they had freed up her anxiety the public saw her as insane as she spoke to ghosts. Her agent had spun it, like agents do. She was branded as the eccentric painter. But then there was the day that her apparition replied to her and the sickness that consumed her, she knew that this time, they were in fact real. They had found her.

How do you make them go away?

When someone has hurt you since you were a child and they believe the contrary, that they were good and kind to you, how do you expel that? In her mind all of these conversations had ended with her validation and freedom, but in reality she was faced with a demon the believed her allegations to be pure fantasy.

When someone believes they are helping you, they refuse to leave.

The artist saw them regularly. At every place she had become accustomed to within her new, up and coming life, now the cause of her pain was a constant fixture. The cause of her pain, refusing to go, refusing to acknowledge their wrong doing, insisting they have a relationship. She was at a loss until one day in her small studio she found the answer.

There was a knock at her door and she abandoned her thoughts to open it.

"It's time."

Valerie Day-Sánchez enjoys reading and writing across genres, although young adult is her favorite at the moment. Threshold is her first attempt at Sci-Fi. Her other work consists of YA Fantasy Trilogy, Harlow Whittaker. She received both her B.A. and M.A. in Communication Studies from New Mexico State University. Her love of the desert Southwest keeps her close to home although she loves to travel, especially when she gets a chance to try the local cuisine. Playing with her two sons and the family’s Boston Terrier, Winston, are how she occupies her time when she’ not writing.