I don’t know if I have any real kindness inside of me.
But Mara believes that I do. She believed I wouldn’t hurt her, when I had every intention of killing her. Now she believes that I have the capacity to love.
What is loving someone?
From all outward appearances, I’m very much a man in love. I shower her with gifts, praise, attention.
But I’m all-too-aware that everything I do for Mara benefits me. I feed off her joy like a vampire. The hot cocoa tastes sweeter when I lick it off her lips. The lights are more beautiful reflected in her eyes. The air in my lungs is fresh and sweet when we fly across the ice together, hand in hand.
For now, all our interests align. What’s good for Mara is good for me.
It requires no real sacrifice. I’m only doing what I want.
But perhaps, I am changing in the smallest of ways.
Because for the first time, I wonder if she deserves more than this.
Mara thinks she sees who I am and loves me anyway.
Only I know how cold I truly am at heart.
I told myself I was always honest with her. While letting her believe what she wants to believe: that I always had good reason … that I might be justified.
It’s time to tell her the truth. To show her, the only way I know how.
I take Mara down to the lowest level of the house. To the locked door she’s never seen beyond.
I see her mounting dread as we descend the stairs. Mara is a curious kitten … but she has an instinctive understanding of potential danger. She skirts away without ever acknowledging the boundary.
Now I fit the key in the lock. And I throw open the door.
Mara flinches, as if expecting a slap.
Instead, her eyes widen with wonder. She steps inside the cavernous space.
“What on earth …” she breathes, her bare feet sinking into a thick carpet of moss.
How Villains Are Made – Madalen Duke
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The air is rich with oxygen, the cave-like space stuffed with greenery. Ferns cling to the dripping rocks. It’s an underground garden, a riot of life and color, locked away in the heart of the earth.
“It was my mother’s,” I tell her. “She was trying to create a true terrarium—self-sustaining, self-perpetuating. It runs with very little maintenance.”
Mara is speechless, stepping into the surprisingly vast space. She had no idea what was hidden away under the house. No one knows but me.
“My god,” she whispers. “It’s so beautiful …”
“She spent all her time down here. Especially at the end.”
Mara turns slowly, a shadow falling over her eyes.
She understands that I brought her down here for a reason. Not just to show her the garden.
“This is where I found her,” I tell Mara. “Hanging from that tree.”
I nod my head toward a holly tree, its gnarled bough tough enough to bear my mother’s weight when she kicked the stool out from under her feet. I ran to her and clung to her cold feet. Not even close to strong enough to lift her down.
Mara’s eyes are already welling with tears, but I need to explain this to her, before she gets the wrong idea again. Before she builds the narrative she wants to believe.
“I was four years old,” I tell her. “She already knew something was wrong with me. She’d been fooled by my father when they met, but since then she had learned to know him. To see the blankness on his face. His casual cruelty. His lack of normal human warmth. And of course, in his brother Ruben, she saw the fullest iteration of what we are. The family curse.”
I give a hollow laugh.
Mara shakes her head, wanting to object, but I speak too quickly, determined to tell her everything before she can interrupt.
“She hoped I wasn’t like them. She hoped I was kind, like her. But I was already cold and arrogant, and too young to know better than to tell the truth. I told her how little worth I saw in the people who scrubbed our toilets, cleaned our house. I told her how our gardener disgusted me because he was stupid and could barely read, while I was already finishing entire novels. I could see that I was smarter than other people, richer, better looking. At four years old, I was already a little monster.”
“You were a child,” Mara says.
“That’s what she thought, too. She bought me a rabbit. A large gray one. She named him Shadow, because I didn’t care to give him a name. I hated that rabbit. I hadn’t learned how to use my hands and my voice yet. I was clumsy with it, and it bit and scratched me. I couldn’t soothe it like my mother did, and I didn’t want to. I hated the time I had to spend feeding it and cleaning out its disgusting hutch.”