damien stine ➢ district three

On the outside, I am tall and gaunt, with my ghost-like pale skin and the bruise-like shadows under my eyes. Lacking in muscle and having delicate hands and delicate feet, I consider myself to look somewhat feminine - and most men, including me, do not like to appear feminine in any way. I carry my feminine, slight frame with a panther-like grace, my stance predatory, like I'm reading to slit someone's throat at any moment. My footsteps are practically silent when I move, and I make an effort to keep my movements as silent as possible. It's not that I like to scare people by sneaking up on them; I like silence.

My hair is as dark as tar and is untidy and stays untidy no matter how much I brush it down. But it is not untidy in that cute, boyish way that makes girls swoon. No, it's untidy in a grungy, wild way that looks that I don't give a shit about what I look like - and honestly, I don't - or I just rolled out of the woods. I have a restless, angular face that's alive with vexation almost all the time. This angular face of mine is thin in an unhealthy way and my cheeks are sunken. My eyebrows are usually slanted inwards towards my thin, pointed nose, like I'm contemplating a frustrating problem. My eyes are piercing and predatory and pale green, and so deep-set that my long, curly eyelashes touch my brow bone.

I am handsome in a dark way, like a shadowy prince. Not your prince charming, not all rainbows and sunshine and happiness and saving beautiful damsels in distress. I'm talking an evil prince, who would rather live and leave the damsel in distress to die. I don't catch many eyes, and I like it that way. I hate attention over all things, like narcissism, over enthusiasm, and obscure facts. I would much rather fade into the crowd. I'm considered a freak anyway, so there is no reason for anyone to want to talk to me.

On the outside, I seem completely normal, like the rest of the Stine family. But on the inside, I am not just that weird kid who hates talking to people. On the outside, my family isn't just a plain old family containing children fathered by a taxidermist. No, we are quite the unusual, cruel family who plays with puppets in a dollhouse. I don't mean little puppets made of paper of fabric, I mean human puppets. We drug them and attach their limbs to strings, and we control them in a giant dollhouse. And it's fun. I love to be in control, I love to shape someone's live, I love to take over, I love to make people do things. You could say that I'm a control freak.

On the inside, I am cruel (like my family) and malevolent and rancorous. I have a sick, absolutely sick craving to hurt people, to torture them. And I enjoy watching people suffer; I am sadistic. I am at war with myself. Half of me is ashamed of my family's hobbies and telling me to stop and become good, and the other half of me is telling me to keep on hurting my puppets and keep grinning while they try to fight the sedatives and fail. But it hurts me to hurt them and brings me joy at the same time. I have a strange relationship with my puppets. It's a one-sided relationship - my puppets probably loathe me.

I love my puppets yet I crush their hopes and dreams of escape and living a happy life. I control them, I make them do whatever the hell I want them to do, and I make them suffer. I absolutely hate to alleviate them of their suffering. I know I love them, but I shut everything out. I pretend like I love no one, love nothing, that I have no attachment to anything. I show normal family affection towards my father and my siblings - I don't want to become a puppet myself. I'm not sure I love them. I think scared is the correct term. That's right, I'm scared of my family. I'm scared that if I defy them, they'll make me a puppet, regardless of their feelings for me. My father loved me mother, didn't he? And when she disapproved of the puppets, what happened to her? She became one.

So I vowed never to defy my family.

That is my greatest fear of all, a fear that I will never be able to conquer. Am I okay with that? No, I am not. But this is something bigger than me, something that renders me, a mere sixteen-year-old boy, helpless. I feel so small around my father. I feel like I'm bite-sized and my voice goes up a few octaves and I can feel my legs trembling a little, but I try to hide it. You could say that I have . . . mixed feelings about my family. Mixed feelings isn't even the half of it. My complication cannot be put into words. Words are nothing. Nothing. Nothing like so many things - feelings, me, wealth, popularity . . . . All of these things are as useless as dust.

But before that vow, I was a different person. As a child, I was outgoing and eager to have fun. I laughed all the time and I had this rebellious, mischievous twinkle in my pale eyes and the cutest crooked smile and dimples. I didn't look like I'd just come back from the dead, and I wasn't dark and brooding like I am now. I keep asking myself, What happened to that little boy? Every time I ask myself that question, I come up with the same answer: puppets. Of all things, my own cruelty towards living people whose lives I've taken over destroyed me and turned me into this barely-human creature.

I wish things could have turned out differently, but now it's too late for me. I can't change; people can't change. My relationship with my family will never change, my personality will never change, my evil, sick ways will never change . . . . Nothing will ever change.

I'd given up on the hope that I would change long ago.

I like to look back on my childhood, where I had no troubles and no self-loathing. Nothing bad ever happened. Everything was fine, I thought my family was normal. I loved my siblings and my parents, I let my softness and my feelings show. The only thing that ever put a damper on my childhood was my mother's death, but by that time, I wasn't really a child anymore. And her death didn't effect me very much: I was never close with her, not in the way that I was close to my other family. Of course, I mourned over her death. She didn't deserve to die - she was such a sweet woman who loved my father.

No one deserves to die, not even monsters like me. Monsters have good in them; I have good in me, I just hate to show it. The first rule about being a monsters is accept that you're a monster. This has always been difficult for me, but slowly, as the years go by, as I become more monstrous, I am accepting what I am, who I am. My fate is sealed; there will be no change. My fate is being a monster, forever and ever, as long as I live. And what a monster I will be, but not in the eye of the public. A monster in my own house, behind a bolted door, where screams aren't audible to anyone outside.