The crowd’s whispers wounded the wind as the woman galloped across the fields and dirty alleys of the town.
“You don’t see that often!” One mumbled.
“What a sight!” Another exclaimed in a heavy accent.
The people turned to see who had broken the tone of silent whispers.

The woman had pale skin that wrinkled like it was pounded upon a large drum and fit to a body much larger than her own. Her white hair was a Great Egret, its feathers curling slightly under her helmet, but missing the aigrettes it longed to have. It dripped with salty water, hanging just low enough to dye her scrawny shoulders with dampness of a darker shade. Her shivering hands grasped the angered horse's mane and the people realized that she was frightened.
  She was not an enemy.

Someone stepped forward. The man with the heavy accent. Her horse had come to a stop and the woman, whose red circles under her eyes showed how unhealthy she was, glanced up and caught the eyes of the man. His eyes shifted back and forth looking into both of them while her eyes stayed fixed on his face. Her delicate figure was a disguise, but the eyes of the woman told her story.
Time passed. She was invited to stay in the small village and she lived a little ways into town, in a small white house all by herself. Alone. She had tried to run away from her unhappiness, just to find herself more and more depressed with thoughts weighing her down. The town whispered her name...Charlotte...Bring her cookies...Just ignore it...She looks so lonely…
She becomes comfortable in her new home but realizes that she is just waiting around to die. She needs to do something big. She needs change. Not a change like joining a class or something, but she wants her life to change dramatically in a way that she will learn from it. Not inventing a potion that makes her live forever. She doesn't want immortality. She wants to be different. Changing her personality might affect the way she lives. She is already the sweetest woman ever, so why not change to something crazy. Something unimaginable. Insane. The opposite of what she is now. She can’t turn back. It’s such a risk changing to evil. What is the most evil, insane thing she could do? Kill people? Smash works of art? She would be put in jail. She aimed for more of a subtle evilness. She wanted her life to be a fairy tale and she was the witch. The source of evil that made the story what it was. There would be no story without the evil, the antagonist, the problem. She didn’t want to be a fly landing on a shoulder. No. She wanted to kill. She wanted to devour. Murder. Hurt. Be her real self. She wanted to get everything she wants. And she will.
Her mind flicked back to when she was 51 and she didn’t get her menstrual cycle. She knew it was over. She was officially old. Where had her life gone? Where had it led her? She knew the time was passing by. She knew she wanted to accomplish something. Make a change. But she just hadn’t had time. Well she had. She remembered all the time she had wasted thinking, playing cards laughing, having fun. But wasn’t that her goal? To have fun? Why did it feel wasted? She hadn’t had enough time? She wanted to accomplish something. Something big. Something helpful. Something. She felt the time, but hadn’t really felt it. Almost like she watched it go by but she wasn’t in her own body. She wasn’t herself. She was the master of the puppets that showed an audience the world. None of the world was real. Only she was real. She was being tricked. Been experimented on. Why should she believe that people were real? But why, if everyone is so imperfect, were they machines? Illusions? Why would someone make a world of machines with so many obvious faults? Every fault is there for a reason, she knew, but why couldn’t they make the world some other way? There must be millions of combinations that could make her life exactly the same as it is now. Why not use another one? Maybe they just chose randomly and it happened to be this life, with these people, with these faults, with these world problems, with these bodies of humans and traits of humans.

She remembered when she was a teenager having the urge for sex. To make out with that boy whose name she could not recall. That was her love. She layed in bed every night for weeks just imagining her pillow to be one of the three boys she longed to hold. She would even risk being a bad girl, going against the wishes of her parents, for one night of pure love. But she knew he didn’t love her back. Not in the way she wanted. Maybe she only wanted to be cuddled. To be loved. She wouldn’t tell her mother anything.
Her mother died when Charlotte was forty-eight after battling cancer for two years. It was a pretty normal death she assumed. But she didn’t really understand cancer. It was a disease- a plague. Why did it take her mother? Why not someone else? After crying for a couple hours, alone in her room, she realized that she wasn’t that sad. She was guilty. Her mother didn’t know her. Nobody knew her. Not really. They may have recognized her face; part of her personality, but nobody would have ever recognized her thoughts. They were never worth sharing. If everyone had a sack, each slightly different, of thoughts, she knew that no one would recognize which ones were hers. They must have thought she was a flat wall. Something with no pores or expression. That is, if anybody had ever looked that closely at her.
She wanted to design her own character. She had never acted, but she knew that was what they were professional at. Creating and being. She was going to create and be. It couldn’t be that hard, but she wanted people to notice her. Not to accept her the way she is, but the way she wanted to be. She didn’t want to be the way she is. She decided that she would sketch a character, come up with ideas, situations of this person. She knew if she was going to take the time to do this that she needed to make it a huge change from who she was, or who she thought she was. She had not yet figured exactly out who she was herself, but she was going to try to create an exact opposite.

She was positioned on her front porch, not sitting in the chair, but rather on the thick railing with her back against the post. She was thinking, her eyes closed. She didn’t seem to care about what she looked like, or if she made noise when people walked past her on the sidewalk. A man walked by with two leashed dogs. Her eyes were closed and she was humming softly. The man made a noise. Her head jolted up as a reaction but she realized he was wearing earbuds and listening to music. He couldn’t hear her. Why was she surprised? Ashamed? Why did she care if someone heard her humming? Why wasn’t she able to let go? Sing like nobody was listening, dance like nobody was watching? Her grandmother had had that kind of an open mind. She didn’t care what people thought of her. She and her mother had always laughed at her after she left for the day because we thought she was so weird.
Why was it, whenever she tried to write something, that every character had a huge fault of disease? Was it because she didn’t have one of her own or was it that she wanted to get away from hers. There would be no story if nobody had any imperfections.
Why- she had lived her whole life in a shell, under a rock. Why did she never think of these things? Imagine these things? Maybe her brain didn’t want to feel it. The pain. I was too hard.
Her life was flavorless tea- it was water. All she needed to do was grow the leaves from seeds she had stored away years ago, harvest and dry the leaves, boil the water, and brew the tea. It would give her a minty flavor. A healing touch. A warmth deep in its soul.
She had always hated grapefruit. Everything about it. She took one with a wrinkled hand and mindlessly lifted the knife out of the back of her dress. She sliced it in half and stared at its pored drops of pink bitterness. You are what you eat. Her hand was shaking the slightest bit, and with some hesitation she lifted half of the fruit up to her mouth. She bit into the pink from a straight angle, and got almost a quarter of the fruit into her mouth. She chewed ferociously, eating like a huge beast with no apparent manner at all. She liked it. She liked the grapefruit. The bitterness.
“No, that is not me.¨ She thought. ¨So it’s perfect.”
Next she ate a lemon. Without cringing once at the flavor. She devoured the skin after, and even the little green nib that connected it to a stem that was no longer attached. It felt good to be powerful enough to overcome not her fears, but her nature. Her fears were some things left behind from a reaction to an event, while her nature is the way she was build. She was changing- officially.

She took out her notebook.
Her black pen was already in her hand. It had small silver vines climbing up its trunk and a face that was hidden on the tip of the odd pen. Charlotte had been frightened of it ever since a tall man with a huge smile had handed it to her on the streets of Berlin. She had wrapped cream coloured tape around the face because she didn’t want to look at it. This was the first time she had summoned up the courage to use it. She flipped to the first page in her notebook-- empty. She counted thirteen pages and started on the page on the right, titling it ¨ME.¨ She wrote a small description under the title in handwriting that was illegible to anyone but herself. She had no idea what she was to write. A new person. A new character in her story. A new piece in her game.

It was years later. A child comes to the foot of a hospital bed. His family is dead. They were all murdered. By whom? Well, let us see who is lying on this cringing bed. The child takes the hand of the woman, a frail, grey hand, seemingly covered with dust. Eyes shoot open, those knowing eyes, then a smile. The skin on her cheeks pooled around circular cheekbones and dragged the narrow eyes narrower. There was a moment of silence, and the child seemed to have given this visit much thought. In a soft voice, he told the old woman that she had hurt him. He had no where to go. He was very sad. Yet, somehow, he needed to forgive instead of hold revenge for his lost family. The endless murders, he believed, by this woman, were just because of the way she was treated before, and he knew that she really did have a good heart. He knew that she would regret all the things she had done, and he wanted to tell her that she would still be loved and forgiven, by him. After he uttered the last three words, I forgive you, he kissed her on the forehead and turned to go out. Thoughts raced through her mind as she smiled, thinking of that grapefruit, the pen, the lemon, all the daggers, forgiveness, love, evil, and her gun under her pillow. She reached for it and gave two shots, one to the boy, and one into her own heart, killing her frail dying body.