Breaking the Reflection

By Danika Dierhart

Rejecting the upbringing he received from an impossibly demanding father and an inappropriately affectionate mother, Benjamin Thompson has spent his life chasing the numb silence that dancing with heroin affords him. Disgusted with himself and unable to move forward from the ways his parents hurt him, he will do anything to get the drugs that kill his thoughts.

As he falls further into the darkness that his addiction sends him to, he unexpectedly finds hope for his redemption in the form of a young girl that reflects back to him the best and worst of himself. Driven by the need to possess her and make her understand the pain he has experienced, Benjamin's actions become increasingly violent and unstable as his addictions and obsessions take him over, threatening to destroy them both and anyone that may come between them.

"Breaking the Reflection" takes the reader on a journey through the life of a young man as he goes from an inexperienced and lively child with a world of potential before him to an aged and destroyed adult with a heavy dependency problem and an ever-narrowing window of opportunity to save himself. It's a story of betrayal and love, regret and addiction, and the undying belief that no one is beyond salvation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Danika Dierhart
• Release date: Sep 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476076171

Danika Dierhart

I've been writing since I was ten years old and had the first idea for a sci-fi story involving runaway teens, vampires, ghosts, witches, twins, and every other cliche my young mind could join together. Needless to say, in retrospect it wasn't the literary masterpiece one hopes to produce. The passion for writing was kindled through it, however, and I spent the majority of my teen years falling further into a world with ever evolving characters with complex relationships all pivoting around one central character. As I aged, so did the characters and so did the maturity level of the world they lived in. Writing remained a hobby as I became an adult and a functioning member of society. Novel writing remained an idea as I turned my focus to essays, fanfiction, and short stories. The complex fantasy world of my youth became the forefront again over the last few years and release this brain child to the world.

Book preview

Breaking the Reflection

A Novel

Danika Dierhart

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 Danika Dierhart

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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DEDICATION

To my beautiful sister, Victoria. Sugar, words alone cannot express how much you have helped me and the ways you have shaped me. We’re such different people with such different ideals, but it’s those differences that make you so special to me. Without your support, I wouldn’t have the courage to do the things that make you proud of me.

PROLOGUE

Orange and red flames tinged with gray smoke dusted the pitch-black sky as I rounded the block back to where a crowd of neighbors already stood. They talked to each other in the excited prattle of mindless sheep that were watching a member of their flock being slaughtered by aggressive wolf forces.

I hunched my shoulders down and pulled my hoodie up further over my head as I tried to blend into the crowd. It was difficult, considering that they were in their nightgowns and robes, freshly stirred from their slumbers by the sounds of fire crackling in the otherwise silent night and the undeniable smell of smoke wafting through the cracks in their houses, alerting them that not all was well in their little area of suburbia.

By comparison, I knew that I stood out in my black jeans and oversized hoodie that was pulled up tightly around me. I could only hope that no one recognized me, and that no one thought to give me more notice than I deserved based off my appearance.

It had been eight long years since I had been in this neighborhood, since I had been in the house that now smoldered in the night air. Already the sounds of sirens pierced the quiet and alerted the entire suburb that not all was well in their picture perfect middle class dream world.

They should have been alerted to that long ago.

I recognized some of the people standing outside, murmuring their concerns to each other.

The Olson’s – a couple old enough to be my great grandparents. Martin Olson had Alzheimer’s – he had for years. I remembered helping neighbors find him when he wandered off, combing the alleyways and the parking lots looking for some sight of the white haired old man with the slightly hunched back. His wife, Mary, would sit at home waiting for the neighbors to give some news of his discovery. They’d always creeped me out when I was a child, and now that I was twenty, I didn’t find them any less disturbing. Honestly, I was surprised they were alive.

Sarah Jensen, once the gorgeous, busty woman that lived next door was now in her thirties, slightly wrinkled, slightly overweight, and sporting the accessory of a small girl of no more than five and the burden of a husband, the protective sort that kept his hand on the small of her back as a dominant threat to guys like myself that might leer at his woman. That woman had been the focus of many of my adolescent fantasies, the subject of many hours of self-discovery in a room that flames now engulfed.

My eyes raked over the blonde child she held as I assessed the market value for her.

I hadn’t expanded my business any since the whore. I didn’t really need to; she and the slut kept me and their clients satisfied, and I really didn’t need the hassle of another whining brat crying every time they were passed over to another man to perform their job. Two crying bitches were more than enough.

This little girl was about the same age as the whore when I first met her. My lips curled into a small smirk and I bowed my head to hide it from the prying eyes of any of the nosy neighbors as I remembered the first time I saw her. The first time that I realized I was going to expand my business – not because I needed to, but because I wanted her.

I wanted to crush her.

Possess her.

Mold her.

Devour her.

The blonde looked like she was a crier, too; too easy to own, too easy to manipulate, too passive. With her, it would only be business, like it was with the slut.

Taking a cigarette out of the pack I had in my hoodie pouch, I lit it and observed the burning house before me.

I’d never really thought about burning it down before.

Truthfully, I hadn’t given much thought to the place or the people in it for years. The whore would say that I repressed my traumas and it made me a time bomb of unexpressed rage and aggression. Part of me was amused by her thinking I had any uninhibited anger, judging from the number of times I had slapped, kicked and punched her, you would think that she realized that I was good at expressing my annoyance with any given situation. I was also amused that she would dare to criticize my expression of anger when she was clearly far more emotionally damaged than me.

Her mother had certainly fucked her up. Of course, I think that I might have fucked her up more.

It was her fault I was here. It was her fault that this building now burned against the night sky. It was her fault that two people were now dead. I hoped that two people had died because of her. I was here to spite her, to prove something to her…to myself about her.

Regardless, she might have been right about me and my expression of rage. Part of my anger was definitely misdirected towards the whore. She took it, though, the fire bright in her eyes as she stubbornly put her jaw out and narrowed her eyes at me, silently daring me all the time to push her further.

That fire in her wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the one that now physically raged before me, consuming the structure that once housed me. While I always enjoyed igniting the passions of my whore, nothing could compare to the sight of this house of sin and turmoil crumbling beneath the scorching flames. She would have liked to see this, from an educational standpoint.

A study on what an accelerant and a cigarette can do when met with a match.

A study on what knowledge of the sleeping habits of two people can accomplish when you put a twisted mind towards it.

Her mind was certainly twisted, too. I think that she could have come up with a much more creative demise, but I found the fire fitting. A cleansing blaze to wipe out the impurities, to free myself of a slut, so I could break free of the prison I was in with a whore.

The first of the fire trucks showed up, breaking me from my reveries of the dark haired girl.

They pushed the crowd back from the street, questioning neighbors for the location of the occupants. I ignored them as they looked at me, instead allowing Mrs. Olson to croak out that no one had seen the nice, young couple that lived there.

Young and nice were relative, I suppose; I would have said an evil, old couple lived there.

Perspective.

The neighbors were murmuring to each other about the Thompson’s, hoping that they got out okay, wondering if they had been home at the time, wondering how the fire had started in the first place.

So many questions and so far I was the only one with answers.

A sneer crossed my features as I heard Sarah Jensen state to her husband that they had a son somewhere, she hadn’t seen him in years, she thought he lived with an uncle or something.

So, that was the story. I’d wondered how they had avoided jail, how I had never been put on a milk carton. It made me contemplate what the story was for the whore, as well. I’d never seen her on a milk carton or missing poster either.

More neighbors were gathering, jostling each other in the sweltering July night as they struggled to make sense of this tragic and devastating event happening in their quiet suburb.

Their heads would reel if I let them know what else happened in that inferno that didn’t happen in their cookie-cutter world.

Troubled.

That was the word the neighbors used to describe the missing son of the owner’s of a house that was quickly becoming nothing more than a charred memory, the funhouse mirror version of a fairytale gone wrong.

I suppose troubled was a fair assessment. The cause of the trouble, though, that was the interesting bit, that was the part that would make Mr. and Mrs. Olson’s hearts race and make them clutch their chests from the shock. It would make Sarah Jensen’s husband think twice about raising his family in this neighborhood. It would make all these people that now gathered who were new to this neighborhood rethink their choice of place to live.

Fortunately, I had no intention of spilling such dirty and sordid affairs out into the universe. Those memories, those stories, would die in this fire. They would suffocate on the smoke, blacken and burn before crumbling into ash and vanishing into the night breeze like the white and black ashes that currently danced amidst the night sky.

The conversation turned as the tired, but intrigued bystanders watched the wind take the embers into the air, drifting off into the distance. The concern for the Thompsons waned as the concern for their own homes took over.

It reminded me what I hated about conventional society, and what I appreciated about the own home that I built with the whore and the slut. Unconventional as it was, I knew where we stood, I knew that there was concern there; I knew that if there was a chance that I was engulfed in flame, they would rescue me. They hated me, but there was concern there, as I hated them, but if I thought that they were dying I would rescue put them out of their misery.

These people didn’t care that the Thompsons were trapped in that inferno. They didn’t care that the people who lived in this house for twenty-one years now suffocated to death on black smoke and felt the first heat of flames against their skin – they didn’t care that this was retribution, that this was a fitting and poetic demise.

I knew, though.

I knew, as I watched the firefighters begin to knock down the walls of flames, that they were too late. Indeed the residents were home; indeed they had been trapped. I knew how they had been trapped; I knew why they had been trapped.

Had the neighbors ever cared to look, they would have known, but they couldn’t be bothered to see what was so clear.

The paramedics were arriving now, waiting for the all clear to go in. The firefighters had gotten through the front door, their shouts carrying on the night air. I kept my eyes on the top window where the master bedroom was. I was waiting for them to get upstairs, waiting for them to announce their discovery.

It hadn’t been my intention, but now that it happened, I needed confirmation that it was done. I needed an ending for this chapter in my life, although I had been unaware that it hadn’t had one. I had always thought that when I had run out of the house – my nose broken, my right eye swollen shut, my lip busted open, my ribs aching from the beating they received, my face and body coated in bruises – that I had closed that portion of my life, that I had moved on and didn’t let it bother me.

The whore would smirk and call that classic denial.

I would let her, too. When she was right, she was right.

The second I stepped back into that house I realized that she was right in her opinion that I denied everything. I faced it, though.

The smirk crossed my lips once more as I took a long drag off of the cigarette in my hand, unconsciously playing with the lighter in my pocket.

It was so easy.

The shouts of the firefighters reached my ears and that of the ever-growing crowd. I diverted my attention so my elation wouldn’t show.

My attention turned to the little blonde girl that stood by Sarah Jensen in her white knee length nightgown. Her hair was straight and reached her mid-back. Long like the whore’s, but the opposite shade. I toyed with the idea of selling them as a matching set, a halo on this blonde and horns on my whore.

She was the devil.

She destroyed me.

I hated her for being on my mind, that she made it so that I couldn’t sleep at night because I wanted to reach out for her, to pull her body against mine and I couldn’t, I shouldn’t want to, she wouldn’t want me to.

The angel looked like she would give in, though. At least, she looked dull enough, sheltered enough, normal enough that she wouldn’t hold my interest beyond the money that she could bring in.

Her eyes were even dull, thoughtless, a vapid little doll incapable of holding a serious thought. The whore had a fire in her eyes, a wisdom and a hunger, an anger and a passion that outshone her age and made her captivating.

I hated her.

I wanted to possess this blonde doll just to prove to the whore that she wasn’t a necessity. She didn’t even understand what she did to me. For all of her wisdom and passion, she was a naïve child. The mind of an adult, the emotions of a crippled little girl.

God, I hated her.

It was easier with the slut. So much easier to separate business from pleasure, physical from emotional, hatred from love.

I internally growled at that word and ground my cigarette out underneath the toe of my combat boots.

I didn’t love her.

I couldn’t love her.

I couldn’t love her because a slut created me and I, in turn, created her. Cycles like that would never work. We were too destructive and too destroyed to create something that wasn’t fatal to us both.

That’s why I was here after all, to confront my creator and let go of the one that I created before she destroyed me with her passion. Before she realized the power that she held over me. Before she realized that I was her slave and not the other way around.

The whore should have been so easy to mold into another one like the slut.

Docile, passive, submissive.

The whore would do what she was told with some coaxing, but she was never passive. She couldn’t help speaking her mind. As young as the vixen was, not even ten years old, she had a lot of opinions and lacked the control to stifle them.

It might be nice to have another in my employ that just shut up and did as they were told.

I considered how I could take that little girl. Sarah Jensen seemed protective of her. It was odd to witness.

I’d never had to kidnap girls before. I was a criminal of opportunity. I had no interest in going out of my way to find girls to exploit. With the amount of children thrown out like used condoms it was no wonder that I hadn’t had to go looking for the whore and the slut. They’d fallen into my lap.

They were handed to me.

Like I had been thrown into that world.

Used and discarded by a slut.

Refocusing, I tuned out the neighbors and their speculations. Now that the threat to their own homes seemed to pass, they were once more vocalizing concerns for the owners of the now permanently destroyed domicile. Still no sign of them, still no signs of life from those that stole mine.

Cycles like that would work.

Residents were asking the police if there was any news, asking for details about this disaster that shook them from their slumbers and destroyed the peaceful calm of their lives. Some, the more sensitive, were bawling at this simply tragic occurrence. Whether it was tragic for the thought that the Thompsons likely died or because they realized that they might die someday, I didn’t know. People were so selfish.

The little blonde girl rubbed her eyes as she clung to Sarah Jensen’s leg. She was tired. Her parents did her a great disservice keeping her up at this late hour to stand in the cold night with predators like myself standing so close by. I wasn’t positive they’d be able to sleep anyway, but it was rude for all of these people to gawk at the destruction of these strangers; they had to be strangers, the positive way that they described the Thompsons showed me that they never knew them.

I refused to believe that they were kinder to strangers than they were to their estranged son.

Their troubled son.

Such a kind turn of phrase.

I’m not a bastard, I’m troubled.

I’m not evil, I’m troubled.

Less troubled now, I had to admit, as I returned my attention to the drama unfolding before me. Knowing that died definitely did wonders for my mental health. It would only be troubling if they lived.

My suspicions were confirmed as I watched the first of the firefighters emerge from the building and approach the paramedic, shaking his head slightly as he did.

They looked upset.

I suppose because their jobs were to rescue people.

It wasn’t their fault. They had to have died before the first truck got there.

Sarah Jensen saw the reaction and quickly gathered the little girl into her arms and went back into her house, her husband pulling her into a protective and supportive embrace as they walked. The affection disgusted me, the way that my pre-teen fantasy seemed happy being a disgusting echo of her former self. I had half a mind to torch that house, as well; salvaging only the angel that would lead me to emotionless salvation from the devil that enraptured me.

The police went in instead of the paramedics, further evidence that my impromptu arson had achieved the desired result of the death of my creators.

All we needed now was the coroner.

The Olsons looked ill-stricken. He pat her hand that rested on his forearm as she muttered to herself that things like this shouldn’t happen to nice young people.

A middle-aged woman in a green bathrobe and slippers came up to the Olsons and gently steered them back to their home. I vaguely recognized her as one of the people that had lived on the block with me in my childhood. I’d been an early teenager when I left and I held a lot of memories, but I couldn’t remember everyone that had waved to me.

Other neighbors began to drift off as well, making me lose part of my crowd anonymity. Truthfully, I was ready to run from that house as I had eight years before, nothing but a ghost of a memory in the hazy minds of those left behind. I couldn’t, though. I had to risk drawing the attention of these authority figures that I taught my girls to avoid.

The last thing I wanted was for them to be picked up as prostitutes. It would really be inconvenient for me to be arrested as a child pimp. Not to mention, they would take the whore from me. She would sell me out, too, no doubt. Me and everyone else that had paid to fuck her.

Mentally, I berated myself for again allowing my mind to drift to her. She was nothing more than a whore, a body you pay to fuck! She should not plague my thoughts.

That fact didn’t stop my minds continuous obsession over her.

It took another two hours of leaning against the police barricade to get the confirmation I needed. The news crews had long since arrived and gotten their stories. I toyed with the idea of giving them an interview. It would be too risky, though, for the small amusement it would have provided.

It had been declared an arson.

I found that out only by watching the television reporter give her account of this story. The whole time I watched her I thought about how I would like to put my hands around her neck and teach her about her mortality. She was so fake, so falsely concerned about the deaths of this couple. She flipped emotion on and off.

She was a liar.

I hated fake sluts.

I hated women that pretended to be sweet when they were manipulative, when they only said what you wanted to hear.

The whore rarely did. She didn’t have that ability.

Damn it.

I needed a hit of heroin. I needed reality to go away.

Finally, as the first light of morning crept over the eastern horizon, the first stretcher came out of the charred remains of the two-story house. The sheet draped over the prone form stood out stark against the lightening backdrop, but I could see the strands of dark, almost black, hair trailing down off the stretcher, letting me know which of my victims was wheeled out first.

The slut that started it all.

My creator, dead at my hands.

I had to wonder if I, too, would die at the hands of my own creation; and if so, which one?

Grinding out the cigarette that I was currently smoked under my toe and adding it to the collection of butts that had gathered, I observed the police officers at work. They hadn’t paid much attention to me, they hadn’t really thought about the fact that I hadn’t moved from this spot since before they arrived.

Some