Overflow

death floods our blood!

Death haunts Carey Scott's miserable excuse for a brain.

She had hoped their Sunnyvale move would give her prosperity, that her luck would turn up healthy and opportune, but stays sickly rotten and its smell haunts her as she moves along, and her mind turns to more mush on the tiled floor, more carcass-tasting blues as she drags herself along with the motions of life. Carey changes her name and she moves off to college and leaves Shadyside and Sunnyvale, Ohio, in the dust. She leaves behind her mother, her two siblings, her dead girlfriend, and her future is left to crumble under her poor decisions.

Hundreds of miles away from home—away from good word and advice from folks she knows, Barracuda Scott is hitting rock bottom. Death death death is all she hears these days. Death death death is all she feels standing in a funeral home picking out caskets with her dead girlfriend's family. Death death death. She stands at Simon Kalivoda's funeral than Kate, than Heather. She throws eggs at Nick Goode's casket with the rest of Shadyside. She tries to live but all she sees is Death death death.

She grips onto the cusp of life, holds it high above her head—she steers clear of blood and gore these days, she can't stomach horror movies, sleep past four am, or shop at grocery stores anymore, and she's starting to feel like life is slipping away from her. Except that this is the time she's truly alive. In her prime years, as her mother calls it. Death death death constant mantra in her soup brain. She can't stop thinking of it. Death death death is what defines her.

They could say Kate died a peaceful death, closed her eyes, and never woke up—smelled of mint and lavender and smiled at her one last time before bed, and they can say it all they want—but Barry knows none of it's true. They say Nick Goode shoved her head down a running bread slicer, tore her brain apart in seconds. She died kicking and fighting and screaming. Barry always knew she would. They say she didn't feel too much pain. The image bouncing around the crevices of Barry's mind, of Kate's brain splattered on the ground around her, her lifeless body lay still on bloody countertops, contradicts this claim. Kate would raise hell before she let herself die at the hands of man, Sunnyvale's finest no less. Then they say Simon went down minutes after. Josh Johnson begged for his life under the Goode's murder axe. Barry would believe that. She would, truly, if that's what happened.

Deena tells her Goode was the antichrist, and yes—she believes her—serial killer deemed antichrist, nothing unusual in the saying. She keeps going, though, and when Barry asked for the truth she didn't ask for bullshit—No devil-worshipping Goode's, no lesbian witches turned saviors, she asked what happened to her girlfriend, and she got jack shit from the ones who watched her die.

Barry tries to move on, go through the normal motions of life: College, job, house, but she sits in college working her ass off to graduate and spends her free time in a dead-end job on the shore selling fish, still mourning the losses. And she tries to move on, push Kate and Simon and Heather and every other damn person she knew that met their end at Nick Goode's hands out of her head, it never works. She gets blackout drunk and talks to her mind's apparition of Kate's mangled body, the flowers she tries to raise rot under her touch. She calls up one other person. One person, who would know—understand. She could get through college, if he would pick up the phone—and if her flowers would finally bloom.

another place where the faces are so cold
i'd drive all night just to get home.

carey barracuda scott

anya taylor joy/mia goth
&&
wyatt ford . . . undecided
joy lovegood . . . kathryn newton
penelope hendricks . . . laura harrier
eleanor scott & amelia scott . . . saoirse ronan