Becoming Anne Again

Chapter Seventy-Six

A/N So there might actually be a possibility I can get on a regular updating schedule again. I've been finding it easier to get into a regular writing schedule, so we'll see!

As always, thank you for reading! I love you all--you guys keep me writing!

Still one and a half years earlier

Anne didn't know if she believed in a good God anymore. She wanted to, but the Being of her dreams had twisted itself into a grotesque frame, the kind of Deity that demanded child sacrifices and virginal offerings, where little girls and boys were defiled on their altar.

(Maybe Anne was a little girl who was defiled on their altar).

It was not this supposed god that Anne prayed to, though, even if it was the one that had reared its head in her life. It was to the God of the church the Hammond's had dragged her to, the God she had strained to hear when she sat in colorful pools of light that fell through stained glass windows.

If you can hear me, save your sheep.

In the moment, her head clouded with absolute terror and utter confusion, she didn't know exactly why she chose that phrase, but it sounded right. In truth, it was a prayer she had heard years ago, when she was barely five years old and sitting at the bedside of a woman who the doctors gave two months to live. She told her caregiver that she could feel Jesus in the room, but her caregiver brushed, her off just as they always did.

Anne didn't know she was searching for Jesus in the room, but she knew she was searching for something.

In the end, the cold terror never stopped running through her veins.

The O'Keafe's got home just as the twilight was giving way to a darker velvet that completely blanketed the earth. As soon as they walked through the door, she began to brew a pot of coffee, her practiced hand moving fluidly despite the war going on inside of her. The O'Keafe's didn't pay any attention to her; they were too busy arguing over something that Anne couldn't quite decipher. Somehow their voices blended together into a cacophony of madness in her head, and it was all she could do to just keep brewing coffee.

"Anne, get me a beer," Mr. O'Keafe barked, and if Anne had been holding the pot, she was certain she would have dropped it. She jumped, and he laughed. Her cheeks turned bright pink, but she just nodded her head dumbly, and he went back to his heated conversation.

With the familiarity of making coffee gone, her hands were free to tremble as much as they liked. And tremble they did—no matter how she tried to stop it, the tremor never went away and her heart didn't start beating regularly.

For a moment, she thought perhaps there must be a benevolent God—the O'Keafe's never noticed her, their argument just growing more heated.

The cold of the glass was a stark contrast to her heated skin, condensation almost immediately forming around her fingertips. Her footsteps were deliberate, measured as she walked over to the bottle opener nailed to a cabinet—if she was any less intentional, she was sure she was going to trip over her own two feet.

As she popped the lid off, it occurred to her that she had heard somewhere about how drugs and alcohol were a deadly mix. She wondered if the drugs she was about to slip into their drink could kill them.

She also realized that was one thing she wasn't scared about. In fact, as she glanced back at the pair—Mr. O'Keafe, who's touch would forever be burned into Anne's skin, and Mrs. O'Keafe, who's hands Anne would always be able to feel around her own neck, she found herself craving their deaths.