The Mansion Incident

Chapter Seventeen

Lisa’s new friend owned a loud weapon as well, but it didn’t hurt as much as the man’s weapon did. Lisa decided that she simply scared the woman, and didn’t blame her for using her weapon in self-defense the way she did. Lisa did not mean to scare her, but she was so surprised to see someone outside the big house that she could not help but yell and run to meet her. And then the woman ran away, but Lisa could run much faster. She only meant to grab the woman, but she hit her so hard that she stopped moving. That was okay too, because some of Lisa’s other friends stopped moving when she hit them and took their faces. Lisa wanted to take her new friend’s face as well, but she wanted to take her to the little hut in the forest first. Lisa’s new friend would be a guest at her home and then Lisa would take her face.

She dragged the woman through the woods to her hut and pulled her inside. She was very excited about having a woman be her friend. When she was kept in the room under the ground for so long, all her friends were men. And even since she came to the surface, she only met men. They were her friends, and she always kept their faces to remind herself of them, but she knew that they were different from her. Lisa was a woman, even though she didn’t know what that meant. And this new friend was a woman too, and Lisa was going to be friends with her.

The last woman that Lisa really remembered was the person she called her mother. But that was a very long time ago, so long that Lisa barely remembered her at all. She was gone, but now Lisa found a new woman to be her friend. Maybe that’s what a mother was, she thought. Maybe a mother was just a female friend. Maybe this new friend could be her new mother as well.

Sometimes Lisa remembered strange things. When she found the little shack in the woods and made it her new home, she remembered that the space in the wall was for fire. She didn’t know why she remembered it and why she couldn’t remember other more important things, but it didn’t matter. She found gasoline and she found matches, and she remembered that gasoline and matches made fire. It took her several tries to make fire, and when she finally succeeded, she caught her arm on fire by accident. It hurt at the time, but it was better now, even though the sleeve of her shirt was burned away. She remembered to put wood on the fire, and now her little shack was bright and warm.

Two other friends were in the shack, but they didn’t move any more. They tried to bite Lisa, so she crushed their heads. She still took their faces, though. She propped their bodies up against the wall and let them stay.

She let her new friend rest on the floor in front of the fire and looked down at her, unsure what she should do next. She knew that her new friend was different because her eyes were closed and her chest moved up and down. Her other friends’ eyes were always open and their chests didn’t move, even before she crushed their heads and took their faces. Her new friend was still alive.

Lisa sat down and tried hard to remember the woman she called her mother. Her memories were like images viewed through deep water. Everything was hazy and indistinct, and Lisa didn’t know if her memories really happened or if they were simply things she imagined over the years. Maybe she never really had a mother at all.

But in her mind, her mother’s hair was long and brown. She was also very tall, or maybe Lisa had been smaller then. Lisa, her mother, and the other man she couldn’t recall came to the big house. Lisa remembered running around in the grass and pulling flowers. She remembered giving them to her mother. She didn’t remember why.

Should she get flowers for this new friend as well? Maybe she was supposed to give flowers to her mother. Lisa didn’t know. She wanted to do the right thing, but didn’t know what the right thing was. She wanted her mother, but she didn’t know if the woman on the floor was supposed to be her mother or not. She didn’t know what to do.

She felt scared. At first, the emotion confused her because it was so unfamiliar. Being scared felt very strange. But slowly, she realized that it was not the first time she was scared. A very long time ago, she felt scared as well. The memories were like smoke, visions of being separated from her mother and taken to the rooms under the ground. She remembered her mother yelling something and water dripping down her face. She remembered the other man, the one who stayed with her mother. Her father? Was that his name? She felt scared then, very scared. And then she stayed in the rooms under the ground for so long that she forgot about being scared, forgot about her mother and father. She forgot so much.

She was confused and afraid and didn’t know what she should do. And so she walked out of the hut to look for some flowers. Maybe her new friend would like them.

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