Design
---
When you lose her, you lose her to water.
---
You thought it would be darker here. You thought it would be quieter too. But light pierces through the water, reaching the inky depths of the ocean, and skewers your vision with purples and yellows. A loud buzzing fills your ears. You screw up your eyes, but they cannot help you. Nothing can help you now. Everything hurts. There is salt in your throat and rocks at your arm and a pain that pulls you to her. She is still with you, at least. Your hand is still at the small of her back. Your fingers steeped in pools of sweat at the base of her spine, the dip that’s deeper than you expected, that swoops to meet the curve of her ass. You wonder how she sweats in water. You let it go. But not her. You hold her tight and pull her to you, pull her over, pull her under. Nobody else knows love like this. You press your head into her shoulder, angling for the twist of her fingers. She is your hook, your sink, your anchor. She holds you steady in shifting sands.
---
One of the hospital lights is broken. It gives out a hum that is loud and grating. The fluorescent bulb flickers with no clear rhythm, an erratic pulse that has lost its way. You screw up your eyelids, but they cannot help you. Light still enters, purple and piercing, a reality that you cannot escape. Your head hurts. There are tubes down your throat and a drip in your arm and a pain that pushes you up into fantasy. Even that ends. One hand clenches a metal bedrail, cold and encasing. The other tugs at bunched up sheets.
“Good morning.”
There are footsteps in the room, a voice you have come to recognize and come to despise. Jaylene. She walks around, as she always does, busying herself with clipboards and pillows that are not quite pillows, humming and tutting. She talks to you as if you are a child. There are cartoon drawings of yellow dogs on her uniform. Fun scrubs, you think, and you want to scream and smear them with blood. Jaylene smiles at you nicely. She is good at her job. She is smart and kind. You fucking hate her. “Mrs Polastri,” she says as always. “Eve,” she retries, as she takes in your scowl. And then she moves on to talk of food and shitting and showering and bodily functions you need to regain. You don’t listen. You don’t care. Your body belongs elsewhere.
It’s better than when she talked about friends.
You drowned, they say. You died, they say. You are lucky they brought you back, they say. You know the mantra. You know it by heart.
They do not mention her.
Villanelle is here, of course. You know that. You just haven’t seen her yet. She needed surgery and now she recovers in a different room in a different wing. They will let you visit her soon, when you are mobile, and maybe you will bring her something from the cafeteria, something instead of overcooked green beans and burnt sausage in the hollowed out compartments of institutional trays. Maybe you will bring her some chocolate. Maybe you will bring her barbecued ribs.
Your ribs are broken. Your ankle too. Two fractured bones in a foot and one in your jaw. Stitches in your mouth and skull. They shaved your head. You do not care. Falling is freedom, that’s what you thought. Recovery is slow, that’s what you know. You have been here for days now, maybe weeks. Time slips sideways in rooms without daylight, measured only by dimmer switches, the switching of shifts, a hacking cough that worsens at night. It does not belong to you, you think. The nurse who starts at 9pm doesn’t like you. It’s kind of nice.
Villanelle didn’t need to be hospitalized. You realize that now. She is uninjured, obviously, almost invincible. You will see her again when you’re fully awake. She always visits you while you’re sleeping. You do sleep a lot. It’s probably the drugs. It’s probably the drowning. It’s probably the absence of her.
“Where is she?” You ask it once. They tip-toe around you like shit on the pavement and then leave the room, the question unanswered. You do not ask again.
They say that you will need physical therapy. They speak of goals and health and resilience and you just want her to show up with knives and cut them to pieces and eat them alive. You would laugh out loud if it wasn’t painful. At some point, they tell you to start drinking fluids. They remove the tube from your throat and the drip in your arm and the “nil by mouth” sign at the foot of your bed. Jaylene holds a straw for you. A fucking straw.
You had her in your mouth, didn’t you? You remember the taste of her, right before. You should have held her on your tongue for longer, swirled her blood around your mouth like expensive wine, savoring the oak, the smoke, the hint of berry, the not-quite-sweetness that left you wanting. You remember her scream, exhilarated, as falling forced the air from her lungs. You held her tight. You did! You did! You did not let her go.
They say they found you in different locations. They say something else but you don’t catch it, you’re carried away on a different tide. Tiredness always pulls you under and when you close your eyes you see her, skin pulled back from bones by currents. You think, perhaps, her eyes changed color. They flashed from hazel to green.
She is with you now. You are certain. She’s hiding under the bed, most likely, or maybe inside the supply cupboard, reenacting the first day you met her. You pressed your fingers into a dying woman’s neck and she was there, still in that room, bloody fingers glancing your ankle, hungry eyes upon your back. Hiding then, as she hides now, and you would have looked if wasn’t for Dom, if you weren’t tied to a hospital bed. “I’ve met her,” you said to Bill while he was living. “I’ve met her,” and you didn’t even try to stifle your smile.
---
By the time Carolyn visits, they’ve reduced your Oxycodone to every six hours and you hate them for it. You would sneer and yell but there are stitches in your cheek that hold your mouth together and you don’t want to rip them again. Not now. You will rip them in the future, of course, but you are going to save that for later. Save that for her.
Carolyn doesn’t waste time on niceties. She doesn’t know how. Once, you think you found it refreshing. Now you just find it fake. You don’t want to see her. You don’t want to hear her.
“Jaylene?”
You call for the nurse.
Villanelle is back in prison. That is why she hasn’t visited. She is an inmate. She is a killer. You turned her in. You forgot about that. It’s probably the drugs. Probably the drowning.
“Jaylene!”
You hit the button and holler again.
The one time you need her, Jaylene doesn’t come.
“She’s dead, Eve.”
Carolyn says it as if it is comforting. She knows that it’s not. You stare too long at the line of her mouth and watch the corners tamp down a smile. She breaks the news that she knows will break you and you won’t give her the satisfaction.
“It’s over, Eve. She’s finally gone.”
You don’t believe her. You don’t believe shit.
“I know,” you say. “I know.”
---
They send you to a psychiatrist. He wants to know your side of the story. You embrace an author’s freedom, wrapping yourself in the silver lining of everyone else in the tale being dead. Allegedly. Maybe. Supposedly. No.
You tell him the story of Villanelle the monster who kidnapped you while you were on a mission. You hid at the house while she fought Hélène. You shook in terror behind the woodpile. She turned it into a twisted version of hide and seek, playing games in the dark of the moon: “I’m going to find you and then I’m going to eat you.” She found you and maybe she would have consumed you but you fought back, valiant hero. She grabbed an ice pick, flipped it over, and slammed it through the side of your face. Blood in your mouth. Blood in the moonlight. You fought as she muscled you over the cliff. You had never felt so frightened.
You get lost in the memory (although it’s a fake one). You embellish the details (although they are lies). You linger over the mess of Hélène’s body, of watching a madwoman tear her apart. By the time you are done, you are shaking and crying, damp with something you will call sweat.
It’s a good story. You get the pills. You get your job back. You get to lie. You like the feeling. You like the fable. Villanelle the terrible. You think that she would like it too. You don’t count it as betrayal. She is dead. You are not. Isn’t that the story you’re telling? Besides, you have betrayed her before. Before the drugs. Before the drowning. She didn’t mind. You think she admired it. You want her to admire it now.
---
You go back home to the house where she fucked you. You wash down pills with mouthfuls of alcohol, daydream of the time she fake-poisoned you, and wait for her return. You bolt the doors so she can break them. You lock the windows so she can smash them. You start to sleep on the floor of the hallway, sitting upright, back to the wall. You mix up memories to make them more potent. She pinned you here and took your throat and sliced you open with an ice-pick. You opened your mouth to let her in and felt the stretch and pain of a wound. She left you scars but she didn’t leave you. She just drowned. No. That was you. She just teases, little dickhead. Makes you wait and bides her time. You push the loss aside like annoyance and drag your tongue over stitches. You take another pill for sleeping. Two too many and there you go.
Yours is a body you’re happy to lose.
---
When you dream, you dream of terror, your body on a beach in winter, naked, shivering, low-tide. You wait for waves. They never muster. You wait for her. She never comes. Regret laps at this shore relentless. Somewhere, elsewhere, thunderstorms gather, but those skies are not for you.
---
This is what it feels like to lose her. It feels like nothing. You wait for screaming. It is quiet. You wait for furniture to fly. It is still. You wait for hands to pull out your hair and dig out your eyes and sweep through space with drama and purpose. They stay in your lap, unmoving, except for the tremble that only you know.
When you lost her, you lost her in water. When you woke, you woke up dry.
---
You go back to work for Carolyn. You don’t know why. There is a new team. A new case. Something to do with Cuba and weapons, a virus perhaps. Maybe there’s a new female assassin. Maybe there’s a new trail of blood. Neither are yours, so you space out the details. You’re shit at your job. Nobody cares.
These are the ruins of your own making. You settle into a new routine. You work (kind of). Sleep (barely). Dissociate (always). Drink (for sure). She is dead. You are not. You lose yourself in a well of memories. You will yourself to drown.
---
The first time you saw her, you saw her through water.
She had killed before of course, all talent and training and under-the-radar, slipping in and out unnoticed, leaving with life tucked in her pocket, a tidy bulge. She had killed more than once. She had killed more than twenty. But this was the first time that you noticed. The first time that you dipped your toe into her waters and felt the bloated flesh beneath. The flesh belonged to Boris Ivanovich. Found in a hotel bathtub in Budapest. Death by drowning. Nothing unusual. Except for the tiny cuts on his torso, a woman’s disposable razor in hand. The cuts weren’t fatal. Maybe decorative. Somewhere a killer was getting bored. Somewhere someone was showing off.
You felt her reach for you through the water. An outstretched hand. Together you stood on the edge of boredom.
---
When loss enters, it enters all wrong. You lost a friend once. You got over it. You lost a husband. You barely blinked. Now you lose the doorkey and scream for hours. Your favorite TV show is canceled and you throw a bottle against the wall. You step barefoot through glass for days and who needs slippers when you can have injuries? (Who needs slippers when you’ll lose them too?) At some point you stop drinking wine. You lose the corkscrew and scream at yourself for losing everything, losing everyone, losing her. You let her go. You let her go! Loss, like riptide, pulls you under. You swallow water. You start on tequila. At least you didn’t lose the pills.
---
After Ivanovich, you had asked an intern to set up alerts on your computer. It was passive at first until you learned better, until you grew skilled at scouring intelligence briefings, Interpol traffic, crime scene reports. You looked in places that you weren’t supposed to. You stayed at the office late at night. The perks of being spy adjacent. You stuffed copies of killing and chaos into your handbag and carried them home.
At first, you just looked, with eyes on the detail. And then you touched, with fingers on paper. And then you touched, with fingers elsewhere. One night, home by yourself, you ran a bath, undressed, and sunk yourself in and under. Warm water - her water now? - wrapped around you, blurring the lines of inside and outside. The razor lay in its usual place. You shaved as always, cutting a little, just because. Maybe you wanted to contribute. Maybe you wanted to know how it felt. You cut and bled and slipped in deeper, tilting your head back, breathing her in. Inhaling water made you splutter. You sat up abruptly, sinuses burning, everything burning. You didn’t know her. You hadn’t met her.
Your hobby took on another dimension. You called it expertise.
She drowned, they say. She died, they say. But your knowledge comes from elsewhere. You shave and cut and bleed and swallow. You cough and your lungs are clear.
---
During a lunch break, Carolyn comes to your desk and gives you a photograph of Kenny. It’s a few years old and nicely framed. She doesn’t offer an explanation.
“What the fuck?” you yell, because you do not trust her and why is she here, by your desk, bringing up memories of things that are over?
“It’s been a year, Eve.”
Time flies and time stumbles.
You do not want Villanelle like this, stuck in a frame on your bedside table, gathering dust until you can’t stand it, shoving her face down into a drawer. And yet you want memories that are not mugshots, photographs not taken by teachers. If she must stay frozen in time, let that time be yours.
You had some times together, didn’t you?
---
You watched her for months before you first saw her kill a woman: Susa Maron in the ladies toilet of Osaka airport, hanging from her belt in a stall. You daydreamed that this one was special. You daydreamed that she killed her for you, as if she knew that she had an audience, leaving hints for her number one fan. A clue that she moved through space as a woman. You wanted a woman in your space too.
You found yours in a different toilet, picking her up at a club in Brixton. She caught your eye in the mirror and you followed her back to her drink at the bar. She was your age, maybe, and moved through crowds with some kind of confidence, with tattooed forearms and calloused hands. You do not recall her name. She bought you a drink and rolled you a cigarette and when she laughed you noticed the point of her teeth. She took you home and it was okay. She wasn’t as rough as you wanted. It wasn’t as good as you hoped. When you pushed her, she didn’t push back, just said “take it easy, love,” and you should have left then. But you reached into memories of crime scenes, deft hands and bloody fingers, tightened leather around a neck. It helped a little. It got you over. You left while the woman who fucked you slept.
---
One day, you march into Carolyn’s office. “Where is she buried? I want to go there.” You speak as if you have the right and she looks at you quizzically, maybe in warning. “To spit on her grave, whatever,” you amend.
“There is no grave, Eve. There was no body. You know that. The ocean took her.” She opens her desk. She takes out a sandwich wrapped in clingfilm. It smells of tuna. “Nourishment, Eve. Now hurry along.”
---
You only looked away once. She had chainsawed a man’s head open, entered above the eyebrows and pulled out his brain. It gave you chills, just for a moment. Unexpected. It gave you ideas. You wanted to get into her head too, probe around with dirty fingers, take her apart and see how she worked. You did it too. Different techniques, but the same kind of violence. She didn’t like it. You didn’t ask.
---
There was one more woman before you met her. Hers was found in a bed in Athens, fully clothed, a deep cut through the brachial artery, one hand folded over her heart, the other raised as if waving goodbye. You thought of how she maneuvered that body, sculpting it into the shape that she wanted. You thought of it often. Your woman was in a different bed with far less clothing. Your woman wasn’t allowed to touch. You took control. You sculpted her into shapes that you wanted and fantasized that someone was watching, admiring, directing. Good enough for now.
“I’m thinking,” you had said to Elena weeks later, in a government car on a country lane. Villanelle had walked towards you, gun raised, and you were thinking of how to tell her that you knew her, even before you knew her name. In the end, it was easy. You used your hands. She recognized your recognition. She understood your submission of interest, your interest in a reenactment, your reenactment of her deathbed scene. She stumbled slightly. Who could blame her? She swallowed hard. Wouldn’t you? You can have me, you said in your head, and somehow she heard it and somehow you knew. She mouthed the gun and shot you kisses. You can have me too.
“Come with me, just you and me.” You were the first to say it out loud.
---
It’s days later when it hits you. You see an advert on TV for antibacterial bathroom cleanser and you remember the smell of disinfectant and hospital sheets. You remember Jaylene. She talked a lot and you barely listened and maybe that was the drugs or the drowning, or maybe you are just a dickhead. She said they found you in different locations.
Carolyn said that there wasn’t a body.
---
After that, you go a bit crazy.
You watch horror shows on Netflix and fantasize that you are girlfriends in the ‘80s, when you were pre-pubescent and she had not been born. You long for impossible pasts and hopeless futures and her body here and now. If she’s dead, why won’t she haunt you? If she’s dead, fucking stay dead! If she’s alive, where the hell is she? She must be alive. Right? Right! She must be alive.
You decide to cook. You’re shit at cooking but you’ll do it for her. You wield a knife and you’re flooded with memories. You’re way too high and swamped with loss. You chop off the tip of your middle finger at the first knuckle. You save it for later, to feed it to her. Wherever she is, you know she is hungry. Wherever you are, you are hungry too. You pass out but it’s not from the blood loss, it’s just from the sadness. When you wake, the details are blurry, the finger still bleeding. You go to the doctor. It’s too late for stitches or reattachment. That’s okay. Attachment clearly isn’t your style. It will still heal, uneven and jagged. That sounds about right.
Some nights, when you get high, you leave your body, leave your room, and rise up through the evening sky. You stare down at the world below you, all of the countries and oceans and people. You look for her. There! You see her. A tiny dot that won’t stay still. You want to hold her but you’re worried. What if you squash her with clumsy fingers? What if you reach her and she’s not real? What if you’re wrong, fucked up, delusional? Terror makes you lose your focus. You lose her once again.
You can call her to you, can’t you? You are soulmates and isn’t this what soulmates do? You need a mark on your body to bind you. Shouldn’t you carry her mark on you? Not your shoulder. Never your shoulder. That scar signals scalpels and stitches, a surgeon’s skill over her shitty aim. You want something to showcase her beauty. You want something to serve as a beacon, a siren to call her onto your rocks. You have your knife, if not your senses. You cut a V and wait.
---
She doesn’t come. You knew that she wouldn’t. You know that she can’t. You stood on a cliff. A fucking cliff. You led. She followed. You could have killed her. You did. You didn’t. You need to know. You need to take that leap again.
This is what you know for sure.
She is dead, but she is yours. She is dead, but you are stubborn. She is dead, but you have feelings, gnawing, nagging, greedy feelings that crawl beneath your skin like tape worms, telling you that she is alive. It might be the drugs. It might be the drowning. It’s definitely the absence of her. You’ve lost yourself in your isolation. You’ve found yourself in the drought and rot. Now you need to find her.
First you need to find Faith.
Faith is the girlfriend of Jamie’s ex-husband’s daughter. She works in tech and says she will help you. She comes to your house and smokes weed and does things to enhance your computer. You pretend to pay attention. Reports, photos, classified briefings. Europe and Asia and South America. It’s not the world, but it’s a start. When she leaves, you have full access, undetected, unredacted. Your time takes on a different tone.
For days, you see nothing. For weeks, you see nothing. But you will. She is there. In the fine print of the dossier. In the shadows of the code. You just need to look.
You remember the postcard she sent you from Amsterdam – unreceived – and you picture others, stuck in limbo. She is snapping backs in Hamburg you think, and slitting throats in Buenos Aires, and burning down villages in Istanbul, riding a moped through Battambang tracking down the next to poison. She is building a home for you amidst the crime scenes, writing you love notes on parchment in blood. Nobody sees her. Nobody’s watching. Except you. Finally, you. You run your fingers over the monitor.
Soon, Villanelle, soon.
---
When you find her, you find her in water. A drowning victim. A half-eaten ear. A hand on a heart. Unmistakable. All for you.
And once you see her, you see her all over. She’s been active for months.
You see her in the pose of a woman on a bed, suffocated by a pillow, shirt ripped open from armpit to neck. An unusual tearing, but one you remember. She had torn your shirt apart like an animal, face in bedding till you couldn’t breathe. You had smelled her on that shirt for days.
You see her in the corpse in a kitchen, a knife still sticking out from a stomach, a funeral veil draped over a face.
You see her in the man in the lipstick, lips cut open, covered in petals
the couple shot on Tower bridge
the birthday cake laced with arsenic and decorated with candied apples
the Oyster card stuffed down the throat of a woman with her guts ripped out.
She is out there. She is killing. Clues that only you could find. This is reason. This is madness. This is her design.
(And if she is killing, then she is living. And if she is living, then she’s not dead. And if she’s not dead, then someone is lying).
You don’t have a plan, exactly. You do have brains and guts and a gun. An address that you committed to memory after a dinner party last Christmas. It’s good enough for now.
---
You get a taxi to a north London suburb. The gate creaks. You pass beneath trees with thin bare branches. You think of Kenny. You think of autumn and carefree childhoods and dead leaves crunching underfoot.
Carolyn lets you in. As if she expects you. Perhaps she thinks you have come to kill her.
She and Geraldine are eating dinner. You sit at their table. You look at their soup. The mood is awkward. The mood precedes you. It has been awkward here for years.
You tell her what you already know and the words sound weaker when they are spoken. She looks at you with pity, or maybe disdain, as if you are a dog with fleas who scratches the surface and misses the larvae. You pull out the gun. She sighs heavily. She moves to the sofa.
“Get on with it then. Do your save-the-day thing, Eve.”
You threaten to kill her daughter; she shrugs. You threaten to kill her dog; she caves. You shoot regardless, because it is small and called Martin Martens and once you start it’s hard to stop. You miss the dog and tell yourself that’s what you intended.
Carolyn reaches for pen and paper. She scribbles a number and hands it over.
“Fine, Eve, but she won’t want to see you. She’s moved on.”
“Give me your phone.” She passes it to you. “Password?”
It only takes seconds. Seconds are nothing. Seconds are long. You did a lot of damage in seconds. You jumped off a cliff and fucked it all up.
You lost your bearings. You lost your reason.
You find them now.
When she answers the phone, her voice is thinner and reedier than you remembered. She’s tired, perhaps, but still attitudinal.
“Again? I said I took care of it. You do not trust me, hmm?”
“Hi,” you say, and what else is there? You hear her breathing and nothing else matters. You hear her swallow and you fall apart. There’s a lump in your throat and a chill at your arm and a pain that pulls you to her. You thought she was dead. You thought you were crazy. You thought you would never hear her again. And so what if you can’t find words? You can sit with her in silence forever, with oceans between you, nations apart. You can sit with her in chaos or violence or movement or calm. And if you see her everyday for the rest of your life, you will always –
“Have they hurt you?” She breaks in. “She said they would hurt you. Or send you to prison.”
“No. You?”
“No. Yes.”
You didn’t expect her to be honest. You didn’t expect her to be alive.
“I’m coming, okay. Tell me where.”
“Have you killed her?”
You look at Carolyn. She looks back with meager interest, mostly boredom. Maybe she’s trying to stifle a yawn.
“No. Should I?”
“It’s up to you. She’s not that important. She’s playing both sides but she’s not the boss.”
She’s dead, Eve. Not that important. She’s dead, Eve. It’s up to you. Dead, Eve. She fucking destroyed you. Dead dead
“Eve?” Villanelle’s voice cuts in. “What are you doing?” Her voice has brightened. Playful. Lethal. You picture her sitting upright, biting her lip, curiosity straightening her spine. She could be asking you what you are wearing, what you are eating. She could be playing with a switchblade. Open. Close.
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Tell me, hmm? I want to hear you.”
It would be easy, with her in your ear. It would be easy, without her too. To crook your finger and pull the trigger. To stare down at the slumping body, the screaming daughter, the barking dog. To feel something or feel nothing.
“Carolyn is on the sofa.”
“Where are you?”
“By the table. I’m moving closer.”
“What else?”
“I’m pointing the gun and – ”
“You have a gun?” She interrupts you. Instincts heightened. Senses sharp. You think of her hunger, appetite whetted. The cut of her teeth. “Okay, Eve. Carry on. Where are you pointing it?”
“At her head.”
“Hmm, gunshots are not very intimate. We know that. Unless – “
“I could make her get on her knees.“
“Unless you push it into her mouth.”
You speak at the same time, words overlapping, Your voices tangle on top of each other, rolling around. Vying for dominance? Forming a team? Coming together?
Villanelle laughs, low and dirty.
“What was that, Eve? Who do you want to get on their knees?”
“What was that, Villanelle? What do you want to push in a mouth?”
This is new. To call up your history and put it in words and sit together in the memory. You notice how it feels to share it, to understand what the other is thinking, to think it too. Silence again, except for the breathing, but now it is thick with substance and meaning, dripping with a meatier charge. You know yourself better when you are with her. She knows herself better when she is with you.
“Do you think about it much?”
“Every time life gets boring, Eve, I think of you. I think of you.”
“What are you thinking about me now?”
She laughs again. She will see you soon, you imagine, with your hacked off hair and chopped off finger and fucked-up-on-pain-pills strung out ass. She’ll laugh more and it won’t be cruel. She sees you and she doesn’t mind it. She sees your hunger. You see her hope. You see the way that they slot together, missing pieces of a fucked up puzzle.
“I think that you’re ready to let yourself go.”
---
You almost forgot about Carolyn. You might have released her. But then she coughs to get your attention. She has bait of her own to dangle. A snare to place around her own neck.
“Yes?” you say and, fuck, you hate her. Her indignation. Her manipulation. Even now with a gun at her head, she thinks she’s in charge.
“I know things, Eve. I work for them. The rogue faction that challenged Hélène. You and Villanelle were very helpful. You did exactly as I hoped. Now we’ve moved to the next level. I can explain it. The masterplan behind the chaos. The man – or woman – behind the curtain. You’ll know more than you’ve ever imagined. I can bring you in, Eve.”
She’s not that important.
“Why did you say that Villanelle was dead?”
Carolyn looks at you like you are stupid.
“You slow her down, Eve. You know that.”
Smug. Haughty. Condescending. People have died for lesser crimes. Fuck knowledge. You want violence. You steady the barrel against her forehead. You steady the phone against your ear.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” you tell Villanelle.
Villanelle hums thoughtfully. “Or you could wait and we do it together?” She could be talking about watching a movie or masturbating or getting lunch.
You could. You can. You don’t.
---
Villanelle was right of course. Gunshots are anti-climactic. They still feel good.
“Fuck,” she hisses. “I’m missing out. What did you do, Eve? You shot her twice?”
Always impatient. The child who wants ice cream. The beast who wants blood. She doesn’t try to hide her excitement. “Eve! Tell me. Eve!” It’s your turn to play with her neediness. “Beg, baby,” you try to say, but you can’t stop laughing.
You hang up briefly and send her a photo. Mother and daughter. A family portrait of bullets and blood. It makes you pause. What happened to you? What happened to her? Messaging photos, sharing secrets, communicating through inside jokes? And then you remember all of the bodies that brought you together. All of your endings are in those beginnings. You used to think that nothing was fated. And now?
You reconnect to the sound of laughter.
“The shoulder, Eve? You aimed for the shoulder?!”
“I shot her for me. I saved her for us.” You haven’t felt this good in forever. This silly. This light. You delight in your wickedness and call it freedom.
“Just make sure you leave her unconscious.” Someone to watch you, admire you, direct you. “Geraldine too.”
“You know Geraldine?”
“Long story.”
Whatever. You don’t really care. “How long until you get here?”
“I’m in Battambang. I fly out tonight.”
“Ha, do you have a motorbike?”
“What? You are so weird, Eve. Get your passport. Meet me where I played with razors. Same room. I know you know it. I want to do the next one together.”
It’s the closest you’ve ever come to a date.
“What about Carolyn?”
“She can wait. Trust me, Eve. She won’t do anything.”
“Hang on a minute.”
You put down the phone. Carolyn clings to the edge of consciousness. Not for long.
“Recovery’s a bitch,” you say, as you slam the gun into her temple. You hear the crack. Her skin splits open. It should sound sickening but it doesn’t. It’s just a sound. She slides to the floor. Her leg twists under the coffee table.
Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You can’t stop smiling. You kick the dog and head to the door.
“Hey.”
Outside, the temperature has dropped. You zip up your jacket and pull on your hood. You close Carolyn’s door behind you. You walk and you don’t look back.
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