TRACK TWO
"lavender blood"
fox academy
👼🏻
1987
daniel's mother always had the radio on whilst she cooked, but never the music like daniel listened to on his old walkman. miss grant, however, had a pill blue radio sat on her desk.
she always brought it with her and daniel to the bathroom, so that they could listen to the music as she ran water from the tap. but she forgot this time, because the sight of daniel's back
(looking as if satan had licked it with a blood red tongue)
seemed too much for her.
"oh god," she whispered, gentle hands hardly daring to touch the damage left by his stepfather's whip. "oh god."
thirteen year old daniel sniffed hard as he leant over the sink, slightly bloodied school shirt crumpled on the tiles of the private bathroom adjacent to miss grant's office.
it looked exactly like his bedsheets.
"why?"
miss grant was running water from the metal tap into a jug when daniel spoke, voice wavering like lavender in the cold morning air.
"why what, sweetheart?" she asked, the hint of tears in her voice as she soaked a cloth in the water and started to clean the wounds.
it surely wasn't the first time, because daniel's smother had married his stepfather when daniel was eight.
"why does he do it?" the bloodied brunet asked through gritted teeth, blood and salt tears of confused anger rather than pain on his tongue. "what did i do to deserve this?"
"oh, honey," miss lizzy grant sighed, soft hands gentle, wringing the cloth so that bloodied water ran down the porcelain sides of the sink like devil's tears. "nothing, nothing - "
"because i keep thinking, over and over, what it is i could've done that is so bad he has to do this...to..."
"absolve you?" miss grant filled in, although her voice was faint, sounding somewhat tired, worn like old cotton.
"yeah," daniel sniffed again, scrunching up his face in pain as she went back to cleaning the ten bites of the whip. "and i can't, lizzy..."
a sob choked his throat, and daniel shook his head, crying like the picture of christ on the cross his mother had nailed to the wall downstairs.
"i can't think of what i've done."
with the softest of sighs, miss grant set down the bloodied cloth, wiping her wet hands on her skirt before retrieving a towel. the clock on the wall said school didn't start for another twenty minutes.
the bleak building was silent as a graveyard in the dead of night.
"this should help," she said, once she'd dried the broken boy's back. she showed daniel a small vial. "it's got lavender oil on it."
miss grant always smelt soothing;
like lavender.
"are you a witch?" daniel teased softy, a smile worn as the lovely lady's cotton voice. miss grant laughed softly, and reached out to stroke his hair, her cool hand running down to cup his cheek.
YOU ARE READING
ANTICHRIST | phan ✔️
Fanfiction"gay and psychotic; we're enough to make god cry." in which a boy with a face like an angel and dreams like the devil meets satan in black denim who chainsmokes and hates the world completed!
