Lark Anouilh // The Leech

“Hey, Lark! I’ve always wondered… how can you still keep going when you’re always so sad?”

“… I just want to make it to 18. Maybe being an adult will change things.”

The First Home

The old man lay sprawled on the couch, chest rising and falling like the bellows of a dying forge, the whiskey bottle still clutched in his hand as though it were a part of him. The television hummed with static, casting its sickly blue glow across the room, flickering like a beacon from some far-off world. The boy moved like a shadow across the floor, careful with each step on the brittle wood. The boards groaned under his weight, but the old man didn’t stir.

In the kitchen, the fridge rattled open. The cold air felt like reprieve. Inside, little more than ghosts of meals. A slice of bread, stale as the air in the house. He took it, chewing slowly, letting the crumbs dissolve on his tongue. Each bite was like eating the dust of the earth.

"Like a rat."

The voice came from behind him, low and thick, like it crawled up from the depths of a forgotten well. He turned to see the old man’s silhouette, heavy with menace. A slow step, then another, until he was upon him. The hand that shot out was faster than he’d ever been sober, and suddenly the boy’s neck was locked in that iron grip, his back hitting the floor with a crack that rattled through his bones.

"This is what you are," the old man spat, his breath hot with the stench of whiskey, his spit mingling with the sweat on the boy’s face. "A parasite. A goddamn rat."

The pressure on his throat grew, the world closing in. The boy’s nails dug into the old man’s face, a desperate, wild scratch. The old man roared in pain, and the boy scrambled to his feet, but it wasn’t long before he was dragged back down. The bottle flashed through the air, shattering against the boy’s skull with a wet, sick sound. Again, and again. Shards dug into his skin like tiny, jagged teeth, leaving his eye bloody and blind with a permanent scar.

The Second Home

When the old man wrapped his car around a tree and died with the bottle still in his lap a few years after, the boy thought maybe the world had run out of cruelty. But he was sent to another house, his uncle’s this time, where cruelty came dressed in different clothes. If his father’s fists had been brutal, his uncle’s belt was the lash of God’s own wrath. It cut the air with a sound like death, the buckle biting deep into the boy’s back, leaving welts that sang with fire.

“You killed him!” His uncle’s voice was thunder, and the belt came down again. Each strike was a storm unto itself, and by the end of it, the boy lay on the floor, limp, gasping like a fish dragged from water. He had never forgave the boy for what had happened to his brother. “If it wasn’t for you, he would still be here!”

His aunt stood in the doorway, a shadow, watching but never moving. Her silence was louder than the beatings.

"Please," she whispered after the man had stormed out, her voice a thread, barely there. She knelt beside him, her eyes empty, like looking into a void. "You’ve already ruined one home. Don’t destroy ours too. Just... go."

Her words cut deeper than any leather. He crawled from that house, a broken thing dragging itself through the dirt, leaving blood and bruises in his wake.

The Third Home

The explosion came like judgment. The house was swallowed in fire, the windows blown out in a flash of heat and light that turned everything inside to ash. The uncle and aunt were taken in an instant, their bodies burned to nothing, but the boy was outside when it happened. His skin had been seared from head to toe, a patchwork of burns and scars, the flesh puckered and torn. His body had been cast into a coma for seven days, kept alive by the machines that hummed and beeped around him in the hospital room.

He woke to the smell of antiseptic, the cold whiteness of the world around him more foreign than any place he'd ever been. His body felt like a cage, too tight, too broken. His mind was slower, but still it remembered—remembered the weight of fists and belts, the crack of glass, the sting of flame. He turned his head to the side, and there, on the table next to the bed, sat a small box wrapped in plain paper. His 18th birthday had come two days before, but it felt like a lifetime ago. He reached for the box, fingers shaking, and in that moment, the boy became something else. A man. But no one saw him that way.

The man stared down at his arm, the skin beneath the bandages a grotesque map of burns, tight and puckered like some tortured landscape. He reached out with two trembling fingers, the muscles in his hand sluggish, reluctant to obey. Slowly, carefully, he began to peel at the bandage. He could feel his flesh pulling with it, sticking to the gauze like it was trying to come away with the fabric. Pain hummed beneath the surface, deep and constant, but he kept pulling, a grim determination in his motion.

Before he could strip it further, a hand slapped his away, sharp and quick.

“Idiot!” The nurse snapped, her voice cutting through the room like a blade. “What are you, some sort of rat that can’t stay still?”

The man’s body jolted from the sudden sting of her strike, a fresh wave of pain pulsing through his arm. He didn’t react beyond the flinch. The nurse loomed over him, hands on her hips, her face a mask of exasperation, as though his suffering was an inconvenience she had grown tired of.

Outside, in the dim-lit corridors of the hospital, another figure moved silently beside the nurse manager. They walked with steady, even steps, their hands folded neatly at their sides. The nurse manager, a sharp woman with clipped movements, stopped and looked at the second nurse, her eyes narrowing as though she were weighing something in her mind.

“I’m assigning you to him,” she said, her voice flat. “He’s yours now. Seems that he was caught in a gas leak explosion. Do what you can.”

The second nurse offered no response. A nod would’ve sufficed, but even that seemed unnecessary. Instead, they turned, moving down the hallway with the same fluid, unhurried pace, disappearing into the room where the man lay.

Inside the room, the second nurse approached the bedside with the same quiet efficiency. The man watched them with half-lidded eyes, too tired, too broken to care who or what came next. They checked the IV, adjusted the bandages, each movement methodical, precise. It was as though they were merely tending to an object, a task to be completed. No words passed between them, none were needed.

The man’s breath came ragged, each inhale a battle he was losing. His body was a wreckage, a husk barely clinging to the last threads of life. He had seen eighteen come and go, and the promise it held had crumbled like ash in his mouth.

The man stared at the second nurse, his eyes dull, lifeless. When he spoke, his voice was cracked and low, barely more than a whisper, but it carried all the weight of his despair.

“Turn it off.”

The nurse then paused to listen, their hand resting on the IV pump. The machines around him hummed quietly, the rhythm of his heart echoing through the room in mechanical beeps. The man’s gaze didn’t waver.

“Shut it off.” He gestured weakly to the machines, his voice thick and his lips chapped. “All of it. The drip. The oxygen. The beeping. Give me a sedative, enough to knock me out for good. I’m eighteen now. Being an adult… doesn’t change a goddamn thing.”

And for the man, in that sterile, white-washed room, the final flicker of hope died in his chest. The end was nothing but a dull, merciful darkness now, and that’s all he wanted—to slip into it, to be done with the weight of it all.

He was just a body waiting to stop.

“Please.”