THE PART BEFORE The voice didn’t speak then, but my mind was unquiet. You get that word in old gothic novels, don’t you? Unquiet ghosts and so on. That was my mind that night. My thoughts just raced around, like ghosts in a haunted house, unstoppable. What if your dad dies because of you? How selfish are you? You really want to kill another parent? Sometimes they were words, like that, and sometimes they were images. Scenes, flashing in and out of my consciousness. Tiles. Blood. The house was mostly wood and I could hear it expanding or contracting or whatever houses do at night when they cool down. Outside, there was a strong wind coming from the ocean. I could smell it through the cracks of my windows, salty and holding the promise of distance and forgetting—a promise I wished it would make good on. I wished that wind would sweep into my head and rinse it clean, whistle through the cavities of my skull until there was nothing there but emptiness, and silence. But the wind didn’t do that, and the voice was still in my head.
