He sits and watches as the policemen rush around the room, looking and touching and taking pictures of things. No one looks at him, though. It’s like he’s sitting behind a piece of glass, one he can see out of but no one can see in. One-way mirrors, they’re called. He remembers the one at the science museum.
They’re all big and loud, with their heavy, thudding footsteps and hurried shouting- “-no fingerprints? -over here!- where’s forensics?!” After a while, the people wearing white-paramedics- haul his parents onto rolling stretchers and cover them with white sheets. The blood stains through them quickly. He always wondered why they used white if the blood was going to show anyway.
The blood isn’t just on the bodies, either. It’s all over the carpet, and the wall, and his clothes too. In fact, everything looks red, even things that he knows aren’t really red. The people, the sofa, the lights, the bookcase, the TV… Maybe the glass he’s looking through is smalto, stained glass, like the windows at the church they visited. But those were made of different colors, not just one.
He knows that he should be crying and screaming, but he’s not. He can’t, because the glass is in his head too. Everything is too far away and too close at the same time, and all of his thoughts are jumbled up- so much blood mixed in with I didn’t finish my homework, -help me-they’re going to have to repaint that wall- I want to throw up- what’s going to happen now- the man with the knife smiled at me -the light is so bright –dark, dark eyes like ink- I didn’t know that blood was so warm-
A lady walks up to him slowly and kneels in front of him. Can she see me? he wonders. “Hey,” she says softly. “Are you all right?” She reaches out and touches his shoulder. “Cain?”
The glass shatters.