I Found A Leather-Bound Case In A Tree And I Really Wish I Had Never Found It

In the morning I woke in a cold sweat. I checked the time, it was just after 7 am, which was a very early time for me to be awake on a sunday morning. I had a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I got up and paced around my room, trying to shake the feeling off, when I noticed something. That old leather pencil case, carelessly left out on my desk, was open. My jaw dropped open. I tried to scream but all that came out was a whimper. I counted the pencils. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. I counted again. Only nine. One was missing. Suddenly my phone buzzed on my desk and I looked down. I had several missed calls and text messages all from Sarah. I opened the most recent text and then dropped my phone in horror.

The text read:

“oh god shes dead shes dead oh god”

Hannah, I learned later, had hung herself in the night with a belt from a bar in her closet. The only clues to her death was a broken number 2 pencil clutched in her hand and a note at her feet that read: “Tell them I’m sorry.”

Sarah and I broke up in that way that isn’t really a breakup, but is just a silent drifting apart. Her whole world came apart with her sister’s death and I was too scared to say or do much of anything about it. A few weeks later when my parents sat me down and explained, gently, that he had gotten a new job and we needed to move again, I only feigned sadness.

Now, you may hate me for what I’m about to write, and I won’t blame you. I hate myself for it too. Because when the time to move came, I almost threw the pencils out with the countless other items of trash that came out of my room, but I didn’t. I kept them. Mostly, I kept them out of fear of what might happen if I got rid of them, but if that was the only reason then I would have left them in a box and forgotten about them. Instead, when we arrived at our new house, I put them in my desk like I always did, and before we had been there a week I began to draw with them again. I drew ravenously. I was a wild animal and the paper was my prey. I drew until my hands blistered. The things I drew then were dark things. Images of death, destruction, pain, torture, gore, mayhem, these were the only things my hand could create.