My mind’s eye burns with horrors as the cicadas hum outside the open windows.
Someone asks me who I am.
I pretend not to hear them. I lift the glass instead and take a long swallow of the cold brown liquid. It scorches my chest on the way down.
It feels like home.
They ask again.
My tongue feels heavy. Men have called my kind many things over the centuries—serpent, demon, monster. As if naming something grants power over it. As if language has ever changed what we are.
“Gabriel Abraham,” I say at last.
It is not a lie. It is simply incomplete.
“And what is your purpose here, Mr. Abraham?”
Purpose.
I glance around at silk dresses and polished shoes. Hermes scarves. Chanel stitching. Tom Ford suits tailored so precisely they look grown rather than sewn. Pinkies lifted delicately around champagne flutes.
What is your purpose here?
To orbit one another in rooms like this and pretend it means something?
“I’m a distant cousin of the Queen’s uncle,” I reply smoothly.
Gasps. Smiles. Interest ignites instantly.
Status is their favorite religion.
Questions multiply. Too many. They crowd in, circling, fascinated by borrowed prestige. I hadn’t prepared for the attention. I should have known I would stand out among them—posture too rigid, expression too measured, slacks and a button-down among curated extravagance.
Their curiosity sharpens.
Do they sense something?
Do they suspect there is more beneath the surface?
Humans always believe they are perceptive.
They have no idea.
They offer condolences about the Queen’s family being uprooted from East Hugdon to Edingson years ago. Tragic times, they say. Terrible displacement.
I bow my head and fabricate sorrow.
They accept it immediately.
Emotion is so easy to counterfeit.
Before the speeches begin, I excuse myself. I wipe the last trace of feigned tears from my face and slip down the corridor toward the library.
This is where it will happen.
Halfway there, I retrieve my backpack from the hall closet where I hid it earlier. I had prepared, after all. Just not for their noise.
Inside the library, I lock the double doors behind me. The party hum dulls to a distant murmur. Books line the walls like silent witnesses.
I sit on the floor with my back against the wood and remove the box.
Small. Black. Unassuming.
My mother called it the Nightmare Box.
She carried it before me, key resting against her collarbone as naturally as a pendant. She told me it held her demons. That it kept them contained. That if I learned to seal mine away, perhaps one day I could be healed.
Demons.
We use that word for convenience. For translation.
But the truth is simpler.
They are not creatures with horns and teeth. They are accumulations.
Every cruel thought never corrected.
Every betrayal justified.
Every selfish act that hollowed something out of someone else.
They are the sediment of harm.
My mother believed confinement weakened them.
She was wrong.
They do not live in the box.
They live in us.
The box only gives them shape.
For years I tried discipline. Restraint. I tried blending in. I tried convincing myself that coexistence was noble.
But I have watched humans long enough.
They consume everything they touch. Land. Oceans. Each other. They mistake greed for ambition and cruelty for strength. They decorate their decay with gold and call it civilization.
They are fragile, yet endlessly destructive.
And no one in my world has the resolve to correct it.
So I will.
I turn the key my mother wore for decades. It fits smoothly into the lock.
The metal clicks.
Inside the box, something shifts—not physically, but perceptibly. A pressure change. Like the air before lightning strikes.
This is not about rage.
It is about correction.
If I release what festers inside me into a room full of people already rotting from within, perhaps it will not feel so foreign to them. Perhaps it will amplify what already exists.
Or perhaps it will simply consume.
Either way, balance will be restored.
Beyond the door, applause begins. A speech has started.
They laugh.
I lift the lid.
The sound that follows is not loud.
It is subtle.
Like a collective breath being drawn too sharply.
And then—
the cicadas outside fall silent.
