Alicia Atkins

When did you see the other car?

The interviews began in the hospital where I woke after three weeks in an induced coma.

They continued at the sheriff's station when I had recovered and went on for almost three months.

I could tell them nothing I hadn't on the first day.

Nothing of any use.

The only thing I could tell them was the one thing I could never say.

I had been right all along.

I was a killer.

I was a killer.

I found the hidey-hole when I was nineteen and drunk, the family on vacation without me.

I tripped over a loose board I'd never noticed before in the back hall just outside the living room.

The offset of its corner was less than a centimeter, and if I'd been sober or just picking up my feet, I'd never have fallen.

Funny, that.

The way I have literally tripped into discoveries.

First the diary, and now the skull.

It took me almost a week to find the board again, once I sobered up.

My memory was always a little temperamental, like all my memories are now.

These days I can't even dream of drinking because of the medication for my headaches, and what feels like drunkenness is just a combination of neurological damage and drug-induced brain fog.

Then I found the board not by tripping on it, but because it creaked where no creak had been before.

My fall must have shifted it just enough to let it speak.