The First Death She Caused

I came up out of the ground with a thirst that had no bottom and no conscience, and the first thing my new existence did, before I had any idea how to stop it, was kill a man who was trying to help me.

He was old. He found me at the edge of the light, filthy and bare and wrong, and whatever he saw in me, he did not see a danger. He saw a girl who had been thrown away, which is what I was, and he came toward me with his hands open and something gentle in his face, the first gentleness anyone had shown me without a price on it since the marigold girl, and I do not know what he meant to do, cover me, lift me, ask me my name. I never found out. The thirst found out first. The thing the embrace had put in me reached out through my hands and my mouth and it took him, all of him, fast, before the part of me that was still myself could even shape the word no. And then he was empty on the ground and I was full of him, and I understood, kneeling there, exactly what I had become.

Here is the thing I need you to understand, because it is the hinge of who I am and it is the opposite of what the road might have made of me. I did not feel power. I did not feel rage, or triumph, or even the relief of the thirst going quiet. I felt guilt. A guilt so total it nearly ended me that first night. The road had spent months trying to turn me into a thing that takes, and at the very moment I finally took, took everything, took a life, the only thing I felt was the weight of the one I had taken it from. He had tried to help me. He was the first death I caused, and he was innocent and kind, and I carried him out of that dawn the way I have carried every death since, as mine, as a name I owed, as a candle I would owe forever. Another road made another girl into rage. Mine made me into this. Not a hunter. A mourner. The difference is the whole of me.

I almost walked into the sun for him. I felt the morning coming, and I understood, the way you understand things now, without being taught, that it would end me, and I stood and faced the east and I thought, good, let it, a thing that does what I just did should not get to keep the night. I do not fully know why I stepped back into the shadow. Some of it was the animal, the new dead thing’s refusal to die. But some of it, I think, was the faith, the silent flame, the one thing the grave had not put out, saying what it had always said with no words and no evidence. Not yet. There is something still for you to do. I did not believe it. I stepped back anyway. That is what faith had become by then, doing the thing the flame asked while telling it I no longer believed it was lit.

That guilt was the first stone of everything I built after. A conscience is not given to you. Mine was founded that dawn, on a dead innocent man, a thirst I had not asked for, and a grief I chose to keep instead of set down. I could have become what they tried to make me. I had every reason now, and every ability. Instead I knelt by a man I had killed and I began the long work of being someone who counts the dead instead of making them. I was very bad at it that first night. I have gotten better. I have never once gotten it clean.