belladonna ruze {district one}

"Belladonna, look at me." Her face is weathered, collapsing in on itself like burnt leather. There are spots climbing up and down her cheeks, ones that crawl onto the back of her hands and border the bright blue veins popping from her insides like the book she used to read to me. The one with cardboard pictures that sprung to life with the turn of a page. "Baby girl, they're coming for me. You know what to do."

She's trained me for this, trained me most of my life for the maybes and the what ifs. Nana's world was filled with monsters that hid in her closet, that sneaked through the shadows and itched to sink their claws into her back.

I just didn't know that the monsters were real.

It wasn't as easy as I thought it'd be. I was used to the motions, the placing of a pill between yellowed teeth and watching as it turned into something like sand beneath her stones. We'd practiced it a thousand times over. I had to get it just right, she said. There is nothing wrong with perfection, Bella.

But there is something to be said about ridding yourself of a final attachment, of a strong woman who has taught you to be just that, to be something impenetrable. The both of us were made of marble, of something stronger, and that day I took a hammer to her granite and I was showered in rubble as my world combusted with her. It wasn't so much a murder as a suicide, but the knowledge didn't change anything. It didn't change the pain.

Since before I could walk, she had taught me. Forced swollen fingers around a pestle and crushed small red berries into a congealed mess (and then add flour to thicken.) Nature was a weapon, every stem hidden behind green glass a bullet waiting to be placed within a chamber.

Nana taught me how to stop a man's heart with one single bite.

Some act fast, race through the bloodstream and plump every cell to the point of bursting. And then it stops. Everything stops. Fat red cells are clogging your arteries, turning your blood into cement. And your brain has already starved to death by the time your glass dares to shatter upon the floor.

Some do not take affect until I am half a district away.

This is the knowledge my grandmother died to protect.

I don't stick around to watch her die, I could count down the seconds in my head to when her body would begin to seize. And after that her brain would die. I've seen it in the cats and dogs she made me kill, the ones she brought into the house and threw at my feet. The ones who screamed and writhed until they simply didn't.

They say psychopaths cannot be made but I say Nana did a damn fine job. Death is nothing, not anymore. Not after I have seen it time after time. Death is a side effect of my creations, printed clearly upon the side of a label no one will ever see. An order is to be obeyed, to the very letter. Variation is risk and risk is death.

So when she told me to kill her, that is what I did.

And when she told me to run and to run and to never look back, it is all I do.