Stillness. Long had it been her greatest enemy, and even longer had it been her best friend. Equal parts respite from the tide of the world and a barrier from ever even entering it. With a miserable growl, the coyote looked down at the lighter in her palms, rolled its shiny red surface across her hands, and listened to the fluid within nip at the sides of its container as it sliced through the cold silence of the dark hotel room.

Hah. This whole stunt was a waste of money. An even greater waste of time. There was no escaping this city, not the confines of its invisible cage. Much like her, the only thing it could be was itself, and what it was was a prison.

She thought back to why she’d left home in the first place; her shit tolerance was remarkably high — or at least her ability to mask her low shit tolerance was. Despite this, it was atypical of her to leave overnight even at the worst of times; the most daring thing she usually went for was spending her days away, maybe into early mornings, but certainly not entire nights. The short life she’d been kept on her entire life still threatened to pull back if she got out of hand.

Things, she supposed, had gotten especially bad lately, as they did every few years; her internalized rage over her general social incompetence had once more decided to fraternize with her everyday life, and catalyzed with yet another explosive argument that meant it was high time to start spelling ‘BREAKDOWN’ in big, bold letters across her active brainwaves. Twenty-four seven.

Her last conversation with her father had, like many others, been fraught with scathing pessimistic rage, a profound and practiced bitterness that had tainted his life and then hers in turn. At this point, it felt so rehearsed as to be funny in its insanity; as much as her parents were never shy to bemoan Roadkill’s own wallowing in “self pity shit”, they themselves loved indulging it as if it were, well, a lover. More bullshit about ‘providing for this family’, about weakness and cruelty; about what a thankless job being a father is, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and of course, for good measure one would do well not to forget the tandem rant about how horrible and terrible and evil the world is. Honestly, it would be a lot funnier to listen to if it hadn’t already coloured her entire worldview with a miserable shade of black since the days she was but a mewling little pup.

Roadkill sighed, leaning her head back against the cool wall behind her as she sat, knees pulled up to her chest. And alone. As usual.

And sure, people liked Roadkill, and Roadkill liked plenty of people; but nobody she cared about was exactly close to her, not physically. And plenty of people Roadkill liked she wasn’t even sure liked her, and she wasn’t exactly knowledgeable in the business of getting to know people — in fact, even more than that, forming new connections had proven immensely difficult, even more-so than it had in her difficult youth. When you’re stuck in the school system, at least people are forced to interact with you, miserable as it may be — and when you’re used to living on scraps like that — feasting your mind on the bare minimum — having them taken out from under you is nothing short of some form of death. To be completely fair, it was typical of naïve grown-children not to realize how much easier everything was when they were young: but she, who never did fancy herself a naïve child by any stretch of the imagination when she compared herself to most of her peers, felt even more like a fish out of water. And perhaps it was this belief in which she set herself apart from the pack that was the same one that had looped around and doomed her from the start.

Of course, that wasn’t even the half of it, but dwelling on that did nobody any good.

“Maybe dad was right,” she mumbled to herself. “The world really is evil.”

She bit back a ferocious, angry bark of laughter, which stung like hot venom on her teeth. It didn’t matter one bit how hard she tried not to be like her old man; the truth was, bred from the same stock by sheer virtue of the genetic lottery, it was a biological inevitability. All of these runaround games she tried to play did nothing but further cement this narrow and inescapable truth.

It was nothing if not a bitter and unsatisfying revelation, though. Hollow tears nipped at the corners of her eyes, but as much as she dared them to fall, hell, almost begged them to — they did not, cowed by the predatory threat of her very existence, as so many things were.

She scoffed at that thought, almost amused, looking off towards the window across the room. The air conditioner was silent, its dull hum vacant and leaving her wholly alone with her thoughts with nothing much to pull her back.

It was so very interesting though, wasn’t it? How done with the whole business of life she felt even now, at the — supposedly, as many claimed — tender age of 24. Tender age her ass; she’d done a lot, she thought, and for little reward. A degree to her name meant nothing, at the very least not in a field of apparent ill repute that it felt like even her family didn’t respect. English? Literature? What a joke. Nobody fucking reads anymore, get with the times. She’d dropped out of law school not a year into the program, to the incredible chagrin of her parents, who had wanted their daughter to be someone, apparently unlike her sibling. As if it wasn’t their fault her sibling had turned out the way they had in the first place.

Sorry. Not everyone gets to be someone.

And speaking of her sibling — for all the misery they had put her through over the years, for all the horrible things they’d done, the things that had been usurped from her in their favour — she had to admit, she admired them in some way. Roadkill had always been upheld to an unattainable standard and, seeing no recourse, had dedicated her entire life to trying to fit into the mould that had been carved for her since even before her birth and which had only in turn left her chasing her own tail forever. But her sibling… well, her sibling rejected any standard set for her, any expectation pushed her way. They, much unlike her, weren’t so afraid, were certainly not such a lowly coward, even if they were a massive tool.

That, and at least they knew how to make friends, hah. Man, this was ever the stupid thing to keep coming back to, but it was ultimately at the root of Roadkill’s insecurities; something about her was so broken, so fundamentally out of place and unlikable in her eyes, that she had this nagging tendency to push people away from her, or just generally never to let them in in the first place. At some point it wasn’t fair of her to ask people to try and put up with trying to get through the obstacles she’d put up to ostensibly keep herself safe, and she felt far too broken to ever try and take them down herself, leaving her in a hellish sort of eternal stalemate.

Perhaps it had more than a little bit to do with how they were raised when compared to her, not least in terms of apparent ‘mollycoddling’. When Roadkill did something bad, it was her onus to bear, and hers alone — when her troubled younger sibling did, instead, it was her condition speaking, acting through them, not the person. Roadkill never got the luxury of having problems. Funny. Really, everything about her life was funny.

Very funny, indeed.