Epilogue

There's not much to say about the end of this. Sheena's friends buried her. I was not invited. By then, I had already been shipped off to a sister of my mother's I had never met, three states away. They wouldn't turn on the news, so everything I knew was garbled, filtered through miles and miles of gossip, rumor, and innuendo. When a girl in the new middle school's cafeteria solemnly informed me that my father was a Satanist who had been sacrificing his wives and his patients to the devil, I tuned it all out. I didn't talk about it.

I took my familiar place on the outskirts with my camera. I didn't show anyone the videos that I had taken already. What was the point? We were all gone. There was nothing left to do or say. I kept my distance from everyone. It's easier to see the world through a lens.

That's what I did with my life. I went to film school. I bounce around from crew to crew, making documentaries and reality shows, anything to pay the bills. I'm nobody you would know or recognize. I've never been to a red carpet or in a tabloid. I spend most of my free time alone. I don't really have what you would call "friends." Mostly, I just know people from work. No one who asks me about who I really am, or where I'm from. I prefer it that way.

I don't think much about what happened. It's too much to pick at these wounds that have no real hope of healing. I work around them. It's not really a part of who I am now.

Except.

Yesterday, I was going over the dailies for my latest job, some little throwaway project about a true crime obsessed grandmother who builds dollhouses based on unsolved crimes. It's a sloppy venture, and sometimes, we end up in the frame. It's more of an irritation to our editors than anything. It makes us hard to cut around. This time, I was partially visible in the ornate gold mirror hanging behind the dotty old woman we were interviewing. I rolled my eyes and ran the footage back, already trying to envision a way to make this work without my face. I paused the old woman half a second into her rambling about the Torso Murders.

Maybe it was the bad lighting, but I could have sworn that my eyes were black and hollow. I watched the clip over and over, trying to be sure of anything. Even after ten viewings, I couldn't be sure.

I couldn't be sure of anything.

I said I don't think of this much.

I lied.

There's a part of this I think about every day--

Be still, I am with you.

Who are you?

shoutout to my parents and stepparents, who have been tremendously supportive of me throughout my life and have not, to my knowledge, ever committed murder or been possessed by vengefully protective beings.