Children of Monsters

Beginning of a story. I think my mother worries about what she finds in her Google search sometimes. When my laptop was out of commission, I was looking up prisons and all sorts of things a young female typically doesn't look up.

This concept comes from the idea of what would happen when the children of two famous murders meet after one moves into a small town. That's probably the worst description ever but hey. I'll figure it out eventually. Story is entitled "Children of Monsters."

Prologue

                People always ask kids like us how could we not know. It always makes me want to smack the person who asked me that. Why on earth would what my father did in his spare time have anything to do with me? That stupid question can also be reversed. Look at all the kids who became killers. They snap and shoot up a school or the stab their ex-boyfriend or girlfriend.

                How could those kids’ parents not realize how tightly they were wound and that it was only a matter of time before they snapped? And it isn’t like my father would come home covered blood. He conducted his “business” elsewhere and made sure to clean himself up. He was a charmer, a sweet-talking Southern gentleman with an appealing accent and a bright smile. It didn’t hurt that he was good-looking. He wasn’t stupid and he knew how to make everything work for him. A successful businessman with charisma, a tragic past, and good looks. It was like honey attracting ants. It made women flock to him.

                He was a large, tanned man with floppy sandy blonde hair, piercing eyes as blue as the summer sky, straight white teeth, and a crooked smile that brought out his dimples. It was the dimples that got them every time. Women loved my father’s dimples, just like boys couldn’t resist mine. I look a lot like my father, but had my mother’s petite build. My looks were really the only thing that worked in my favor, unlike my father’s brilliant charm.

                I only once ever saw what he did, when I was very little. An unfortunate fact that came out during his trial, making boys seek me out even more so than my reputation. After my mother had died, he had tried to play both mom and dad without much luck. I was never really truly scared of him, but he had a fierce and nasty temper that always kept me on my toes. I tried to never cross that line that made him angry. It was that pent up anger that made his crimes so brutal.

                The media gave my father the name that the whole world knows him by. They called him the Alabama Butcher because of the way he would cut up his victims, as if he had no regard for human life, which he didn’t. It was always bloody and vicious and violent, blood splashed on walls, throats slashed, and severed limbs arranged in gruesome patterns. His hunting grounds and kill zones spanned the country and it was suspected that he had murdered several women abroad when he would travel on business. The police and FBI had shown me crime scene photos when my dad was on the run, trying to get me to talk. Even if I had known where he was, I wouldn’t have told them anyway. Besides my inherent mistrust of the police and the fact that my dad may have been a colossal jerkwad a lot of the time, I still loved him and he was my dad after all.

                My life became a media spectacle after his picture was splashed across every major news network all over the world. All my life I had been just me.  A normal, run of the mill, Southern, sometimes daddy’s girl. Overnight, I became Mitchell “The Alabama Butcher” Anderson’s daughter. The daughter of a serial killer. Being identified as the Butcher’s daughter sucked. I would hear whispers follow me as I would walk down the hall in school, completely ostracized by ninety-nine point nine percent of the school. The other point zero one percent were my two best friends, Kimber and Mac, the weird kid in my forensics class who knew I had seen the crime scene photos, and the school freak who was obsessed with my father’s “artistry” as he called it. Which he harassed me about until he was admitted into rehab for drugs. That officially launched me firmly into my status as the school’s biggest freak. I should have just dropped out.

                I hated being the Butcher’s daughter. It wasn’t exactly flattering. And I hated living with my father’s older, chain-smoking sister who refused to believe that her baby brother was a murderer, let alone the Alabama Butcher. I never even bothered to tell her that her precious baby brother had been the one to break my arm the year before. I later found out that was the night Larissa Miller had gotten away from my dad, leaving him with no one to take his rage out on. I mistakenly had chosen that night to sneak into my house at three in the morning, a common practice that he normally didn’t care about. He was waiting for me with a backhand and a firm shove down my loft bedroom’s spiral staircase. I told everyone else and the overly curious emergency room nurses that I had tripped over my cat and fell down the stairs. It was mostly true, except that I had help falling. And we didn’t own a cat. He felt terrible after, bought me my 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS, and promised to never hurt me again, but our relationship was never the same after that line had been crossed.

                All I wanted was to be anonymous. I just wanted to start over but even if I moved, it would be impossible to hide who I was. My face had been shown all over the news when the FBI shuttled me from the tinted window SUV into the police station to be questioned. It was my blank face they showed constantly for the duration of the trial. Everyone wanted to talk to me. CNN, Fox News, Nancy Grace. My cellphone number had to be changed several times as newspaper reporters called me, wanting to know the sordid details of my life with the Butcher. I eventually got rid of my phone. My only interview had been with Anderson Cooper after the trial and I only said yes to that because I had a crush on him and I thought he was classy. He didn’t even seem to mind that I didn’t have too much to say. My aunt, on the other hand, had been appalled when I said I was happy my dad was found guilty. We never really talked to begin with, but my comments on Anderson Cooper 360 effectively killed all conversation. I also received a lot of threatening mail and phone calls from victims’ family members and a generally angry and outraged public.

I was the new school freak show thanks to good old Dad, followed by rumors about how I had helped my father kill all those women and bets were placed on when I would snap. I became very good at ignoring everyone, which gave me time to think about the other children whose parents were killers. Did they have to deal with the problems I did? Boys wanted to sleep with me because they thought I was dangerous and that turned them on. And I slept with them just so I could have some sort of connection to anyone other than my father and aunt, which also gave me the reputation of a slut. Kimber and Mac had become so wrapped up in each other that I was too much of a third wheel and stopped spending a lot of time with them. I also made sure to give the boys their dose of dangerous. I learned a lot of things about myself that I wasn’t sure I liked too much but it didn’t stop me.

And then it all changed when he moved to our town. He was as infamous as I was and for the same reasons. I recognized the darkness in him because it was the same darkness I saw in myself every time I looked in the mirror. We were the children of monsters. We were kindred spirits, broken and battered by our burdens and our pasts and the crimes of our fathers. I couldn’t believe another monster’s offspring had come here. It comforted me. And that’s what scared me the most.