It was such a small thing he did.
He had picked up the sketch and tore it in two. It wasn’t the first time he had done it. Jay had ripped dozens of my sketches. Torn my sketchbooks apart. Spit on them. Mocked me for being a sissy art homo.
The slow, painful tear snaked across the page and across my mind. The tearing sound of the paper was the sound of my mind being rent in two. As the rip crossed Amy’s face, I felt it slash through my brain, a blinding, searing white pain pulling back curtains of thought, revealing the empty blackness behind.
I felt my my mind tear apart. As the last the few fibers holding the two halves of the paper together released their grip, I felt the edges of my thoughts release from each other. Feelings and thoughts spilled into the empty blackness, streaming off the ragged edges of my broken mind.
Jay laughed and tossed the remains of the sketch aside. As they fluttered to the floor I felt as if I were falling, spinning into that black emptiness behind my thoughts. I felt the remnants of my mind as they lost themselves in nothingness.
I heard her in my broken mind. As I watched Jay walk away laughing, I heard Amy whisper. I had a vision of that cardinal, laying on the road. It’s glazed eye stared into me and I heard Amy whisper.
It’s almost too late, Adrian.
Were my life a Hollywood film or a book, it would have been different. I would have flown at him, hit him and finally regained my life and soul from his cruelty. The protagonist, pushed to the brink, would spin round and vanquish the antagonist.
My life wasn’t a film, or a book, but it was the last time Jay would ever hurt me.