I’d never suffered from such acute insomnia. The clatter of thunder and upturned trash cans and unhinged shutters disturbed every waking moment of my unsuccessful sleeping; they sounded like shackles being flung against the bars of a prison cell. Feeling like a prisoner myself, I was huddled beneath layers of threadbare comforters, my face buried into a pillow. There was no reason that I should feel secure in this room, when it seemed like nowhere in this district seemed safe anymore. But I’d turned the territory of my mattress into a sanctioned environment for captivity, purely for recovering my nerves. After the last occurrence, the trauma of the past fifteen days had come at me with a finalized, spine-quaking vigor that had me totally bed-ridden. And the only solution I had to fix my mental state seemed to be occupying my bed for as many hours as physically possible.

From Tuesday to Friday, I had skipped school; I refused to look at my phone, knowing I would have missed texts from my concerned friends and missed calls from informed parents and aggravated employers. The only instances I rose from the sea of self-preserving fabric was to go to the bathroom, get food from the kitchen, or collect more reading material for my extra hours between lengthy and frequent naps. At dusk, I would eat and go to sleep, aroused at least a dozen times by nightmares before becoming fully conscious near six o-clock. Exhaustion only fueled my motivation to remain stagnant for the remainder of the school year, until I could crawl back to the states with a failed dream, greeted with chides of “I told you, this is the only place you’ll ever belong”. Because that was the problem all along, that I couldn’t feel comfortable in this new setting. It wasn’t far from the truth. There were things all around me that prevented me from being at ease enough to be productive – bad living conditions, poverty, sleep-deprivation, kidnappers and a particularly beautiful...

Even during those long hours of contemplation, I still couldn’t make myself comfortable with the term ‘monster’. Junhong was odd, bafflingly unusual even, but I couldn’t label him as some mindless beast with a convoy of bodies drifting in a wake of bloodshed. How many times had he saved me yet? Despite the deaths I’d seen him amass already, his intentions weren’t sinister. There was, in retrospect, something almost innocent about the way that he regarded his differences from me.

I’d been especially puzzled by this when I awoke on Saturday morning, having dreamt of a Junhong with blood-splattered wings of ivory, the image of the avenging angel he had become in my subconscious. By evening, I’d recovered some sense of reality and decided I needed to go out to buy more grocerie