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pastelsandink · 5 years ago

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Sasquatch

Whenever we used to visit my grandparents’ beautiful, gargantuan house in a place called Bras Island in South Carolina, Dad and I would put leashes on our dogs and walk along most of the river that ran behind the house. Usually it would be just before twilight, right as the sun was dipping down into the horizon like a shining cookie dunked in milk. Pink, orange, purple spilled over the horizon and bathed us in its ethereal regality. I remember I used to scour the place by the river where the land and water merged and I would search for different treasures left behind or lost by the creatures in the fathoms below. I would find shark teeth, mostly, but once or twice I excitedly ran back to my father to show him a completely intact crab’s claw. He would take it from my hands and examine it closely, then he’d compliment me on my find and put it inside a little Ziploc bag we’d brought along to store my little treasures.

Looking back on that time when saltwater stung my nostrils and my hands and knees were scraped up from the jagged rocks along the river, I mostly remember the sun setting, and the way the colors blurred together into a painting that Van Gogh could never dream of emulating. I believe that standing there, bathed in the paint of the sky, with my father holding my plastic bag of treasures in one hand and my hand in the other, was the most content I have ever felt. Sometimes I still close my eyes and imagine the wind running her fingers through my hair. Sometimes I imagine being content like that again. It doesn’t last long.

---

When my father told me he and my mother were getting a divorce, I had been eight years old, curled in bed with him, my eyelids drooping with sleepiness.

“What’s a divorce?” I asked in a low voice, trying not to alert the monsters in the dark of our presence.

“It’s when two people aren’t married anymore,” Dad said. “It’s when we stop being married.”

I don’t really remember what happened the day after that, or even several days after that, or hell, even the hours before I fell asleep, but I do remember that I cried so much that the monsters in the dark surely heard me. Maybe they pitied me and quietly left me to my misery. Maybe they tore at my skin and bone and I just haven’t seen the scars yet. I only sometimes believe those things, but there is something I believe all the time: as I cried myself to sleep, I believe my father stayed awake forever as the monsters wrapped their fingers around his neck and venom dripped into his ears. I think that was the night he really became one of them.

---

As soon as my mom started searching for another place to live, my dad and I got much closer. So close, in fact, that my constant begging for another dog finally got through to him, and one day he and I hopped into our car and we headed to Petco. Within a few hours we’d adopted a senior dog named Nikki--she was small and had short legs like a corgi, but I liked her because she was eight years old, like me. We all got into the car and drove her back home, and my brother and I were immediately smitten and showered Nikki with as much affection as a ten and eight-year-old possibly could. The possibility that our father was trying to buy our affection never really crossed my mind. My mother wasn’t happy that my dad had purchased a dog on a whim, and I think that he knew that she’d be upset. He wanted us to see her upset. And as much as my mother tried, we did, and a part of us resented her for it.

I was a weird kid. I’d always been a weird kid. I talked loudly, I talked too much, I couldn’t quite process all the math problems my teacher scribbled onto the board, and above all my parents were divorced in a Catholic school setting. No one had really liked me much beforehand, but the divorce was the switch that flipped and changed everything. I was falling backwards, praying that someone would catch me, and the only one who would was the cold concrete below. The rest of my peers watched me and did nothing--just smile and spit hateful things at me. Even my teachers started to treat me differently. I remember sitting in math class, scribbling multiplication and addition all across the pages of my notebook, and when my teacher peered over my shoulder she was furious. She yelled at me in front of the entire class and everyone watched, wide-eyed, as I got chewed up and spit back out again for not properly organizing my problems in my own notebook. Kids started taking things from me, whispering behind my back, and at church their parents would look us up and down with some mixture of disdain and pity.

“Ugly,” everyone in my class said about me. “Weirdo. No one will ever marry her,” and my teachers turned a blind eye to it all.

I was tall and lanky as a little girl, and I played a lot of sports. I was on the soccer, volleyball, and softball teams in my school all throughout the third grade. I never had much problem with the way I looked until Mia, a blonde girl who didn’t go to school with me but was on our softball team, looked me up and down and gave me, with dark body hair, big feet, and long legs, the nickname “Sasquatch.” I’d tell her to stop every day, all the time, every time we spoke.

“Whatever you say, Sasquatch,” she’d sneer. She never once called me by my real name. Mia found me revolting, like a piece of gum under a table that her hand just happened to brush. The rest of the team followed suit, and soon I couldn’t even enjoy softball anymore. One day, I got so fed up with her that I did exactly what I’d been taught to do when I was getting bullied: I went to one of our coaches and I told him that Mia was calling me Sasquatch. I demanded that he tell her to stop.

Our coach didn’t even look at me or Mia--he just barely turned towards her and said, “Mia, stop calling her Sasquatch,” and walked away. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look Mia gave me when he did. She only stopped at the end of the year, when my brother came up to her after a game and threatened her that he’d make her sorry if she called me anything but my name ever again.

Somehow, at school, a girl named Macy started hanging around me. Macy was hugely overweight, which wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d just kept her insecurities to herself, but for some reason she felt the need to tear me apart to make herself feel better. When I couldn’t go to girl scout meetings because of something my mother and I had to do, Macy would say in front of our entire troop, “It’s your own fault you couldn’t come,” and the leaders would let her do it. When I talked to her about things my parents did with me, like watch some TV shows or play certain games online, she said, “That’s weird. Why do they let you do that?”

“It’s not that weird,” I said. “They let us do it all the time.”

“Well,” Macy said, shaking her head in disapproval, “then I guess you weren’t raised right.”

I begged my dad to do something. I begged him to call her parents and make her sorry. He just shook his head and gave me some long-winded talk that boiled down to “be the bigger person.” Every day after school I’d retreat upstairs, curl up in bed, and watch the same Star Wars movie over and over and over again as tears flowed freely down my cheeks, and all I’d get from him was “be the bigger person.”

“You just have to ignore her,” he said when I’d had a particularly bad day.

I found out, years later, that my dad had lied and told just about all of the parents at school that my mom had been unfaithful to him. To them, I was the product of a sin-ridden marriage. I was the equivalent of the antichrist to them. Maybe they thought I wasn’t even my dad’s.

---

One day, Dad and I were in the car on our way to the store when I asked him if I could have a sip of his giant foam gas station cup of Diet Coke. Usually the answer is always yes, so I didn’t wait for an answer and I leaned forward and sucked up a big gulp from the straw.

“Ah, wait--!” my dad said, but it was too late. A bitter, angry taste that wasn’t Diet Coke stung at the insides of my mouth like a swarm of bees. Acid and muddy water burned down my throat and I gagged and tried to wipe out the taste with a McDonald’s napkin with little success.

“What the heck is that?!” I asked, tears flooding my vision as the bitterness of the drink punched me in the gut.

Dad stopped at a red light, laughed at my reaction, and took the cup in his hand.

“It has rum in it,” he said. “You shouldn’t drink it.”

I didn’t know what rum was at the time and after that I didn’t care to find out. I couldn’t understand why my dad liked something that tasted so terrible. I remember how often after that I’d ask my dad if there was rum in his drink, just to see if I could have some. I remember how often he’d say “yes.” It was a lot. I stopped asking after a while.

---

Every time we visited my grandparents in their big, beautiful house, I noticed that my brother was getting treated much more nicely. My grandparents wanted us to sit at the dinner table for hours and hours after we ate to discuss politics I didn’t understand--like how socialism and communism were apparently the same thing, why immigrants were bad, or why gay marriage was disgraceful. I didn’t like being in one place for so long, let alone in a conversation where I couldn’t contribute, so I kept trying to excuse myself and go downstairs to play computer games on my grandfather’s desktop computer.

My grandma became annoyed with me and would shame me at the table--once again, in front of everyone--that I needed to spend less time on the computer and more time talking to people and being social. So for hours and hours after I’d already eaten, I sat at the outdoor dinner table, picking at my fingernails while my father and his parents talked about things I didn’t understand. When they talked about how terrible of a person my mom was, I was expected to keep my mouth shut and keep on picking at my nails. So I did.

My brother, Derek, didn’t get the same treatment. He idolized my dad’s family, and would readily join in and try to contribute to political conversations he knew nothing about, talk trash on my mom every chance he could get. They ate it up. My grandmother needle-pointed custom designs on belts for my brother--it took a lot of time and money but Derek got three of them total over the course of the next few years. When he and I both asked my dad for something called a Pillow Pet, Derek got two and I never got any because my dad was “saving money.”

One day, I confronted my dad about feeling inadequate compared to Derek. I told him I thought that he and our grandparents treated Derek better than me. I told him that it hurt my feelings when they got angry with me for playing computer games. I told him I was insecure, and the word “Sasquatch” lingered in the back of my mind as I told him and I tried to push it away. I asked him for help. I don’t remember what Dad said to me after that, but that alone is answer enough.

---

Dad started to use guilt to manipulate me a lot. He did it in little ways, most of the time. One day I forgot my portfolio at home and he had to get it and drop it off at school for me. Later that night he had to drive me to a mandatory music event at my school--he didn’t even stay the whole program, either. He left and I texted him to come get me when event was over. When I got back in the car he shook his head at me.

“I wasted a lot of gas today,” he said, as if it was my fault that he couldn’t hold down a job or that my school required me to do something. But I felt an icy ball of guilt in my stomach regardless.

In the seventh grade, I wanted to go to a middle school mixer with one of my friends. My mom had already bought us the tickets, and my sister and I had splatter-painted some white t-shirts with neon paint for the occasion. My dad didn’t say that I couldn’t go, but he shook his head in disapproval because my older sister and brother had started to go to mixers when they were in the 8th grade, and he thought I was too young to go to a middle school gym and jump around like an idiot. I’d been planning on going for at least a month in advance. Then my grandmother made a surprise visit that same weekend. I only found out a few days in advance. My dad expected me to drop my plans, throw away the money that the tickets cost, and spend the weekend with him and my grandmother. I put my foot down and, being the ungrateful grandchild I was, told him that I’d been planning this for weeks and I wasn’t going to drop everything for a visit I didn’t even know about.

“She does a lot for you,” my dad countered. “She came a long way to be with you, and you don’t even want to spend time with her.”

When we got home from school, my brother asked me what was wrong. My dad answered for me and said, “She’s mad because I won’t let her go to the mixer.” As if it were ever just about the mixer.

I didn’t say anything. I just clenched my fist and, at thirteen years old, I rearranged my whole itinerary that weekend to accommodate his whims and my own. I did end up going to the mixer, though. As the music screamed and the lights flashed, I danced like a fool, like a Sasquatch, and cursed my dad’s name so quietly that no one could hear it.

---

My dad once told me that he had a dream about me. He dreamed that I was standing on top of a tall building with a bunch of other people, and that he was standing at the bottom with another bunch of people. He was yelling up towards me, trying to get me to come down, and perhaps I was yelling back but we were so far apart, and the noise of the people around him was so loud that he couldn’t hear me.

“Do you know what I think this means?” he said to me.

“What?” I asked, not really giving much of a damn in the first place.

“We need to communicate more,” he said. “There’s something that’s stopping us from talking like we should.” He took a sip out of the gas station cup he always had with him, his belly long since swollen with its contents. I pursed my lips and continued to not give a damn.

---

That same school year, I decided to live with my mom permanently. It happened slowly at first--I told my dad that I had a lot to do in the upcoming weekend, that I was going to stay at Mom’s and work everything out. He seemed disappointed but didn’t say anything. The next weekend I gave him the same excuse. And the next, and the next, until he got the idea. Once he did, he exploded at me.

He would send me long paragraphs upon paragraphs of text messages about how badly I was hurting him not coming over, what did he do to deserve this, he deserved an explanation. I’d try to slow these texts by getting dinner with him from time to time, but every time I saw him he would act pleasantly until he had to drop me off back at my mom’s, then he’d hug me and say something about not understanding why I was doing this, he missed me, he wanted to spend more time with me, and the ball of guilt in my stomach only got bigger.

I was determined, mostly due to the guilt in my stomach, to make our relationship work. When I got to high school I told him about my favorite teachers. I told him about the plays I was in and what dates we were performing. I told him about the music I was singing, the choir concerts I was involved in, and he’d smile and nod and say that he’d try to be there.

When he wasn’t there, at any of them, he sent me a long few text messages about how I’d never told him anything, why didn’t I invite him to my concerts, why didn’t I tell him when the musical was, why haven’t I told him about any of my teachers, and how much I was hurting him by “not wanting” him involved.

One night, I took the ball of guilt in my stomach and smashed it to pieces with my Sasquatch hands and feet. The shards burrowed into my skin but I didn’t care.

---

When I graduated from high school, I knew that I didn’t want my dad to be at the ceremony. Mostly because when my brother and sister graduated from high school, he had showed up late, sat where God and everyone could see him, then left as soon as the ceremony ended, among other things that just made my siblings’ graduations a living hell. I didn’t want that.

I told my dad that I had a limited number of tickets for graduation, which wasn’t a lie, but that my baccalaureate mass was free entry and that I’d love to see him there. He, once again, sent me some long text about how I never told him anything about myself (a lie) and how I never invited him to anything (a lie), and I quietly decided that I didn’t want him at baccalaureate if that was how he wanted it. I think from wherever he was at that moment he must have cupped his ears and leaned forward and, somehow, he heard my quiet decision, because in the weeks leading up to graduation he started to harass my siblings and I about it. They both chose sides--my sister insisted that I get our father a ticket. My brother assured me that he understood and that I was under no obligation to invite him to anything. Despite his assurances, I began to doubt myself as the day came closer. I could see disaster coming over the horizon, and more than once I almost begged my teachers for extra tickets just so I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. I stayed up late into the night crying in my mother’s arms about it. But I held strong. I stopped responding to his text messages about it. He didn’t come to baccalaureate. I was relieved. My sister kept raising a stink about inviting him, but she was easy to ignore. I realized that I’d gotten what I wanted. This one time I was free. I felt my worry fall away and I enjoyed my last weeks of school, performed in my last musical, bought my cap and gown, and by the time graduation had rolled around I could have sworn I was feeling that same contentedness that I felt standing in the colors of the sunlight all those years ago.

I remember that my class and I had processed into the outdoor theater for the ceremony. I had shaved my Sasquatch legs only a few hours ago, and I walked to my seat with my head held high and a smile on my face. But when I sat down in my chair I saw him.

Dad had waited until the ceremony officially began, until the teachers had shuffled away from the doors to sneak in without a ticket. He stood off to the side, in a place where God and everyone could see him, watching me. Our eyes locked for a second before my head snapped forward and the shards of ice in my skin pulsated and screamed. I refused to look at him. I didn’t look at him when I got my diploma and he took photos of me. When the ceremony ended and we were free to mingle with our families I ran inside the school and hid from him.

I don’t know how he even found out what time graduation was. But somehow he did. He left without seeing me and I went home and cried.

---

I have always considered myself to be a good person. When friends come to me with problems, I listen. When someone asks me to do something, I do it. When I meet someone new I smile and shake their hand and say that it’s nice to meet them. I never really understood why the universe was so intent on striking me down like wild game on the run, but if I complained I did it quietly and in solitude, with only one other person at most to hear. Not this time.

The summer before I left for college, Dad blackmailed me. He sent me the longest paragraph of text yet at midnight when I was on a Skype call with a friend. He told me how terrible I was to not invite him to graduation, and did I think he was stupid? Did I think he didn’t see through my excuse that I didn’t have enough tickets? He said that he’d been talking to my grandparents about my college fund, something they’d set up for me since before I was even born, that gave me a hefty amount of money per semester, that I was really relying on to actually go to school. He told me that if I didn’t step up and fix things, if I didn’t want to “be apart of this family,” then he would dissolve the fund.

I remember reading that text, and I told my friend on the Skype call that I was going to the bathroom. I staggered through the kitchen, into the bathroom, and every part of me shattered into pieces. I was crying on the bathroom floor, head resting on the toilet seat, praying I wouldn’t vomit with anxiety, and my heart was beating so loudly and so fast I could barely hear my own sobbing over the pounding in my chest. I went into my mother’s room and cried into her chest, and she was so rotten with rage that all she could do was hold me close and tell me that nothing was going to happen, that he couldn’t legally do anything to me. When my brother found out, he called my dad and screamed at him over the phone, “You just made the biggest mistake of your fucking life.” My dad just avoided the subject and acted like he had no choice, like blackmailing me was the only thing he could do, like it was for my own good.

He still hasn’t apologized.

---

I remember this mockumentary I saw when I was a kid--it was about this woman and her encounter with a Sasquatch in the forest. The movie ended with her hearing violent noises outside of her cabin, and when she walked outside she was horrified to see that her assistant had been brutally slain by the Sasquatch. I thought of myself, and my hair arms and legs, and I thought about what it took to drive the creature to kill that man. I thought about what could push someone to the limit. I thought about what could push me to my limits.

“I could kill him,” my mom says every time the subject of my dad comes up. “Swear to God, I could just take a gun and shoot him in the head.”

I pick at my nails and think of myself and for the first time I wonder if I’m the man and my dad is the Sasquatch. For the first time in my life, the name isn’t mine anymore.

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pastelsandink · 5 years ago

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Martini With a Lemon Twist

I wasn’t in the room when Adam pulled the trigger on my ex-boyfriend. Adam had hit Ben across the face with a gun we’d gotten from some stranger in an alleyway and dragged him into another room. I was pouring bleach across the floor of the shoddy apartment Ben and I used to share when I heard the pop of Adam’s silencer, and then I heard actual silence. After a while, I wonder if everything is okay, because Adam’s been very quiet and for all I know Ben could’ve been the one to fire the shot, so even though Adam told me it was probably best if I stay away, I walk across the kitchen and open the door to the bedroom Ben and I used to sleep in. When I first walk in on Adam hacking Ben apart, plastic bags and Tupperware strewn beside him, stained red, the first thing I think how similar Ben’s organs, strewn about the walls and room, looked like Christmas garland that we used to hang for the holidays. Intestines are all across the floor in wide, stretched out W-shapes and leave traces of red in their wake until they fall into the corner in a bloody heap of gore.

I immediately feel sick (the stench is like a punch in the throat), and Adam must see how green I look because he yells at me to hold it down, June, hold it down! His voice is grating, angry, desperate, not like I have ever heard before. I keep my lips locked up tightly and throw the key into the back of my mind, and soon enough my insides slide back down my throat and vanish somewhere within the black hole of my body. Adam’s face and thick layers of clothes are all red, and so are the latex gloves around his hands that once were creamy white, and so is Ben, whose ribs are split apart like chicken bones, who has a tiny, bloody hole on his forehead, and whose face is frozen, blue eyes staring vacantly at the sky and mouth slightly agape. The inside of his mouth is filled with blood and for a moment I fear it’ll open wide into that demonic grin of his and pull me in, like a black hole sucking me further and further until I no longer exist. I remember myself, and I turn, shut the door, and continue pouring bleach across the kitchen.

After a long, long while, Adam emerges and pulls the door shut with his foot. I can hear him walk up behind me, and more than anything I just want him to hold me in his arms and let me cry and kiss the tears off my face but I know he can’t do that right now (and besides, I didn’t particularly want Ben’s gore and carnage on me; that’s why Adam was the one to actually kill him and cut him up like a science project).

“Are you okay?” Adam asks, his voice little more than a whisper. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

I turn to look at him and his face and clothes are still red. He has a huge black duffel bag at his side, filled to its capacity with our crime against God. I could barely hear Adam through the pounding hammer sound in my ears, and as I open my mouth to speak it feels like my blood has run cold. “It’s okay. We’re both on edge. Are we finished?” I say, my voice low and my hands trembling at my sides.

“We’re finished. Did you touch anything?”

“No. Do you think the neighbors heard?”

Adam squints. “I don’t think so. We made some noise, but you said the walls here were thick enough, right? ”

I feel a little dizzy for a split second. “Right. They were thick, alright.”

Adam realizes what he said and he reaches his hand out to me before remembering our job, and then he retracts it and says, “Come on. There’s still a lot we have to do.”

The two of us slide on the long, thick coats we bought in the largest size at the thrift store, button them over ourselves. I’m worried that the blood that Adam is covered in will seep through the fabric and that the security camera in the hall will see the stains, or that there will be someone out at 3:24 in the morning as we walk to our car who will see the giant duffel bag and correctly assume that there’s the cut-up remains of a dead man inside. For now, at least, the layer of red covering his body is shrouded by the dark brown coat, so I banish my fears and bite my tongue and try to calm my rapidly-beating heart. We wipe down the wooden chairs and the kitchen table where Ben would serve us dinner and I’d pick at the food like a bird for a while. I remember I’d bought the table-and-chair-set secondhand from some old lady on Craigslist--she was sweet and kind, like honey on the back of my tongue, and offered us a plate of cookies, but she kept calling me Jennifer, Janice, Jane, Juniper. When we left Ben was making fun of her and saying terrible things and I didn’t tell him to stop--it doesn’t matter, anyway, this is the last time I’ll see those chairs, and about five minutes ago was the last time I would see Ben’s eyes. We open the door, wipe down the knobs, and step out as casually as we can into the dark. I wonder as I walk closely behind Adam if Ben is still staring at the sky. I wonder what his hands must feel like now.

----

I met Ben at a seedy-looking bar farther downtown Chicago after I had just broken up with a “we-dated-all-through-college” girlfriend exactly four weeks before, on the day. I didn’t think I was ready for a relationship, but that night the bartender handed me a martini with a lemon twist and told me that the guy at the other end of the bar had ordered it for me. When I turned to look at the guy at the other end of the bar, his blond hair and blue eyes glinting slightly under the dim light of the bar, he cocked his chin back, grinned, and waved at me. I didn’t really like martinis and I especially didn’t like them with lemon twists, but I smiled back and downed the martini (I took a second to choke back a gag reflex) before going to sit with him because I thought it would be impolite to refuse it and, besides, he was pretty attractive so maybe I’d get lucky.

We introduced ourselves and made small talk. Pretty soon we were smiling and giggling and he told some joke that made me laugh loudly and heartily and my laughter resounded through the cigarette smoke and soft 80s music of our little meeting place. He kept pulling on his sweatshirt strings, adjusting them absentmindedly, trying to straighten them out, and I thought it was cute. Twenty minutes later Ben had me pushed up against my car door and we were making out, and his fingers trickled down my back and onto my ass and thighs.

“You got a boyfriend?” he said in between hot, angry kisses.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

When I said that he grinned and kissed me again, kissed me harder, kissed me hotter, kissed me faster, and when I went back home that night, his contact in my phone, and woke up in the morning, I pulled my pants down and saw that his fingers had left dark bruises over my cinnamon-colored skin. Soon they got bigger and turned angrily purple, but after a while they got smaller and soon disappeared without a second thought, as if they were never there to begin with. But they were.

----

Adam and I had already bought a place in New York. We’d been saving for months, and as soon as both of us were approved for jobs up there we started to cover our tracks. A week ago I had a friend in New York pick up our keys for us and tell our landlord we’d be coming in “tomorrow.” She left the door unlocked and the lights on, thinking we’d be there like we told her. The electricity bill will be a bitch to pay but we’ll work it out. Adam and I both left our jobs officially two weeks ago, saying we’d be leaving within “the next few days.” We’ve been sleeping in our car for several days now (it might be too risky to stay in a hotel too long), but as far as our friends and family are concerned we’re settling into a new home in New York City, not planning and executing a murder.

Adam and I get into the car and I hear him fiddle with the keys, but other than that I can’t really focus too well. All I can look at are the gloves on my hands, and even though I can’t see the blood on them with my eyes I can picture it clearly in my mind. I shut my eyes and lean against the window. I thought of killing Ben so many times before; I once thought of tearing him open and holding his oodles of organs in my hands and devouring them, or cutting one of his veins with a knife and drinking the life from him like I drank the martini he bought me, only this time I wanted it. I wanted to drain any evidence that he was ever alive from his body and lock it away inside myself forever, so that no one could ever find it again, and maybe in his honor I’d add a fucking lemon twist--but right now I’m not sure what I want. Now that it’s over and Adam and I are finally free I feel numb in my head and I feel pins and needles everywhere else, and more than anything I can still taste a martini faintly in the back of my mouth and see him waving at me across the bar.

Then I blink my eyes open and I don’t see the city anymore. I just see wide open plains and a couple of farmhouses quickly getting smaller and smaller behind us. The sun is starting to rise, and orange light spills through the dark. When I look at the car clock it’s just past six-thirty. A few minutes later we get out of the car, step into the dim light outside, strip naked, and burn our clothes inside a cluster of trees, careful so that it doesn’t spread and draw attention. Then, when the flames are high enough, Adam takes the duffel bag, full of what remains of Ben, and tosses it into the fire. I watch the flames cackle, lap, and kiss at the air, and I don’t speak, I don’t move, until I can’t see the red in Adam’s clothes anymore, until the duffel bag is ash and the scent of burning flesh just tastes like regular air. But when he pulls me back into the car and we change into different clothes, I look down and I can still see the red on my hands.

----

When Ben first found out I was an artist at a small comic book studio, he initially seemed to think it was pretty cool.

“It’s awesome you’re doing what you love,” he said, hand on my arm, thumbing the freckles scattered across my skin like spilled coffee beans. “It’s really cool.”

His response was much different from that of my parents and my abuela when I first told them what I wanted to do, so I smiled and thanked him and I fell even more in love with him. That’s what he did--in the first few weeks of our relationship he kept building me up and up like a house of cards, like the tallest house of cards in the world, and his hands on my body felt like they were supposed to be there, like he was home. So when he started texting me every day asking me where I was and who I was with, I didn’t think much of it. I thought he might have just been worried, overprotective. When he started texting and calling me when I was at work, on the way home, when I was with friends, when I was anywhere without him, I started to get a little annoyed but I bit my tongue and shut up about it. My friends were getting worried, though.

“He doesn’t need to call you that much,” they said. “Doesn’t he trust you? Put your foot down and tell him to stop.”

For a while I didn’t really listen. It was just something that bothered me about him versus all the rest of the things that I loved about him.

“Where are you?” his gray bubbles on my phone screen said. “Who are you with? Call me soon. I miss you.”

At first they seemed like he was genuinely worried, and for a long time when I read those messages I thought he was like a little lost puppy, or a neighborhood cat rubbing against my legs and begging to be fed. Sure, it was irritating, but because I was falling hard into love with him I fed him with where I was, that I would call him when I got off work, that I was with Stacey and Henry and Ashley and that I’d be home soon. After a while, though, Ben started to get more aggressive.

“Tell me where you are,” he said if I didn’t respond within an hour. “I’m worried. You better not be doing anything stupid.”

I started to get a little angry that he would talk to me that way. I kept telling him that I was busy, that I couldn’t respond all the time, that he needed to cool it and stop freaking out so much. He would apologize, but then he’d keep doing it. I was starting to think my friends were right.

One day, I’d been in a meeting with the writers at the studio. To be fair it was technically my day off, but I’d gone in to work out the details with the other artists in a specific comic we were making. I put my phone on silent. When I took it out a couple of hours later, I’d had exactly one hundred and three text messages and six missed calls from Ben.

“Where are you?” his texts had started, a little heart emoji lovingly placed at the end. “I swung by ur apartment but u werent there. Call me when u can.” They went on like that, but when thirty minutes went by without a response, his words became a bit pushier. After two hours, “pushy” couldn’t even begin to describe it.

“WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU??? ANSWER ME! IF YOU’RE WITH SOMEONE ELSE RIGHT NOW I SWEAR TO GOD!”

My blood ran cold.

“FUCKIN ANSWER ME JUNE I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

I wasn’t shocked--I was shaken to my core. And they just kept coming--it seemed like every few seconds came the next hundredth-something message and I barely had time to piece together a coherent puzzle of a response. I decided right then that I wouldn’t be spoken to like that--if he thought he had the right to threaten me, to curse at me, then I wasn’t going to take it.

When I texted him, “I was in a meeting, at work. We need to talk,” his messages abruptly stopped. Then, when I got to my apartment, he was waiting, pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor and wringing his hands. He scrambled up to me when I swung open the door, and I pulled it closed with the back of my foot and regarded him with the most furious look I could muster.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice pleading and quiet. “I’m sorry, I was just so worried…”

“Worried that I was with someone other than you?!” I snapped, slamming the door behind me. I decided I wasn’t going to just lay down and forgive him--I decided I had more self-respect than that. “You can’t talk to me like that--I’m just as much a person as you are, you know.”

“But you’re my person!”

“I’m not anyone’s person but my own! If you’re going to freak out every time I don’t speak to you for two hours, then maybe this isn’t going to work out.”

His eyes widened and his voice became hushed and breathless. “What are you saying, June?”

I folded my arms across my chest. “I’m saying what you think I’m saying. Maybe we should break up--”

As my lips molded the words “break up,” he grabbed the lamp by the door, where it stood right next to me, and he smashed it hard against the wall. Glass flew everywhere and the light bulb made an ugly, monstrous sound as it shattered and burned out. I made a short scream and fell back against the door, shutting my eyes and covering my face with my arms.

“We’re not breaking up!” Ben screamed, bringing his an inch or two from mine, so close I could feel particles of spit shoot onto my skin. “We’re not breaking up! You fuckin’ hear me, June?! I won’t let you! Fucking look at me!”

I didn’t say anything--I couldn’t do anything except for tremble while he screamed in my face, until finally he roughly moved me away from the door and left, slamming it behind him. I stayed still as a statue for what felt like hours--I didn’t move, I barely breathed, I couldn’t even cry. All I did for the rest of the day was sweep up the glass, climb into bed, and stare at the wall until the sun fell and then rose again. Ben and I didn’t talk for the rest of the day. We didn’t talk for the rest of the next morning. Then, he texted me as I was at my desk at work, while I was sketching out a page in a comic about a female superhero, still feeling like my stomach had been submerged in ice cold water.

“You should move in with me,” he said in his text message. “It would be easier so I could know where u are.”

The sane side of me beat against my skull and told me to run, to tell him it was over, to block his number and to find another person and forget Ben ever existed while I still had the chance. But the part of me who cowered against the door while he smashed my lamp to pieces and screamed in my face texted back, “ok,” and my fate was forever woven into his.

----

“Pull over,” I say to Adam as soon as I feel my stomach begin to gnarl and twist.

“What?” he says, turning down the music a little. “What did you say?”

“I said pull over!” My voice suddenly spikes in volume because it feels like there is a wild beast inside my stomach, clawing and ripping away at me and I need to get it out.

Adam clicks on the hazard lights and swings to the side of the road. He has scarcely parked before I throw the door open, tumble down the grassy hill at the side of the road, and free the beast inside me through my gaping mouth. Adam yells after me to come back, but I can’t even hear him anymore. Out comes the fast food we’d gotten the night before we killed Ben, out comes the water I’d been sipping on in the car, out comes everything except for my shame, except for Ben’s eyes--they stay glued to the backs of my eyelids no matter how much I retch and heave.

I feel Adam’s hand start to rub figure-eights into my back (I’d know his hands anywhere) and soon when I can’t throw up anymore I just cry, I cry and cry and Adam guides my head into his lap and even as I hear his heart beating comfortingly through the veins in his thighs I’m still crying because all I can picture was Ben’s ribs split apart like some fucked up viking sacrifice and his Christmas garland intestines and his gaping mouth and his eyes, sweet Jesus, his eyes--!

“I’m sorry,” I sob, my shoulders violently wracking up and down. “I’m so sorry, I just--! God, Adam, I can’t stop thinking about him!”

“I know,” Adam says, his fingers running through my hair. “Me too, June. Me too.” He purses his lips together and says, his voice breaking, “God, June, but what choice did we have? We couldn’t just leave his body there. They’d know it was us.”

“We shouldn’t have done it,” I say. “We should have just moved.” Adam and I both know I don’t mean what I say. We didn’t have a choice--it was Ben or us, and it must always be us.

Adam doesn’t say so, though. Instead he just keeps stroking my hair, and his heart keeps beating through his thighs.

“Ba-dum,” Adam’s heart says. I wonder if my heart still beats the same way after what we did. I imagine Ben’s heart in my hands, still beating, and I wonder if it beat the same after all the things he did, too. “Ba-dum… Ba-dum…”

----

As soon as the last of my boxes were unpacked into Ben’s apartment, it was like I was living in some secret tenth circle of Hell. The change was so hard and fast, I didn’t know what could have triggered it, but Ben was different. He made me throw away all of my clothes--he was worried they were “too slutty,” and since I thought that women and men were both beautiful in every way I was sure to cheat on him if he didn’t hold me back somehow. I tried to fight him on it--I told him I can wear whatever the hell I want--but he argued right back.

“Who wants to see you in that anyway?” he said to me one night, beer on his breath and a hideous grin on his face. “You look like a beached whale in it. You look like a fucking bear with all that hair on you, a sasquatch.”

He said it so often, so angrily, that every morning I looked in the mirror and all I could see were the dark hairs that stuck up from my arms like shoots of grass, and my full eyebrows and hair in places it wouldn’t be on the pretty white girls on television, so I shaved it all so thoroughly that I was late to work that morning. The sane part of me watched me do it, and she beat her fists against my skull again and again and told me to kill him, and I wanted to, I wanted to so badly, but I didn’t. I stopped arguing with him after a while.

Ben wouldn’t let me hang around with any of my guy-friends, but as time went on he didn’t want me hanging out with women either. Almost a year into dating I was only allowed to hang out with his friends, and even though my work friends and my college friends stretched out their hands to me, no matter how much I wanted to stretch my hands back I had to keep walking forward as Ben dragged me further into the abyss. By the time Ben and I had been dating for a year my friends had stopped calling.

Ben was the son of a family of cops, so he knew he could just about do whatever kind of crime there was and get away with it. He’d go to parties with me clinging to his arm and he’d tell me that he got us ecstasy, or coke, or a xanny to take before we went inside. I’d tell him I didn’t want it, and he’d tell me how ungrateful I was being because he’d got it for me as a present (even though I never asked for it). So I’d take whatever he gave me and I’d go into a party with a red solo cup in one hand and a plaster smile on my face while I met Ben’s druggy friends. All I wanted to do was take the back of Ben’s head and pull back, and fill his mouth with xannies and beer until he couldn’t take it anymore, and I wanted to watch him seize on the ground and I wanted to watch the life seep out of him slowly until he was empty, until the only thing inside him was death. Then I wanted to reach my hands inside him and spoon his sin and his hatefulness out for all his shitty friends to see, and maybe I’d spoon everything out of them, too. But I didn’t do any of that. I just imagined myself killing him, and then I drifted away as Ben sloppily kissed my neck and the sound from a band I don’t know blared through the speakers. By our two year anniversary, the real June, shackled and chained in the back of my mind, stopped pounding at my head and only wailed occasionally.

“You laugh and talk too loudly,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. Your art shit is never going to get you anywhere. How do you think I feel having to provide for you all the time? Get a real job.”

I thought of scientists breaking open geodes to see the colors and crystals inside. I thought that maybe Ben was treating me like a geode to see what was inside me, only I knew there wasn’t crystals hidden within me. I thought there might be rotten fruit and dead crows and crows picking at the dead crows. He had strategically broken me down to my core. All I wore were turtlenecks and jeans. Ben made me quit my job, and soon my pen and sketchbook were shoved into the back of a closet, and every other night I’d go limp on our bed while he did what he wanted with me, grabbing my thighs and leaving bruises that would disappear eventually like they were never even there. I’d scream sometimes, hoping the neighbors would hear, but the walls were so thick, how could anyone hear me unless they were right on top of me? All my despair would cluster in my head and chest like swarms of black bees and it felt like my skull was full of water, like my brain would start melting out of my ears at any moment, and I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t take the buzzing in my head getting louder and louder and I couldn’t take the real June wailing in my mind but I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop--!

Then, on our three year anniversary, when Ben’s fist lashed out and struck my cheekbone, when his hands closed around my neck and tried to squeeze everything out of me, the real June finally broke her shackles and took me over, and I kicked him hard in as many places as I could, turned and walked out of his apartment. He called after me, tried to chase me, but he was doubled over in agony and soon I got in my car and drove to a friend’s house. I only looked back once.

----

Adam and I were tired of sleeping in the car, so when we were several states away we get a room at a place called the “CuppaTea Hotel,” which Adam and I think sounds dumb as hell but it gave us both a little bit of a chuckle amidst everything else. Adam opens the door and flips on the light--the room looks quaint and has a lingering tobacco smell that’s almost comforting. I shower for the first time in about a week; Adam lets me go first but for a while I don’t shampoo my hair or wash the sweat and bleach smells off of me. For a long time I look at the white tiles on the wall, and I watch the water droplets ricochet off of my hair and onto the tiles, slowly rolling down until they’re consumed by other droplets and they all fall down into the tub. A clump of hair has come out and stuck to the shower wall, and I swirl it around with my fingers into some kind of art piece. It doesn’t really look like much of anything when I finish, but maybe if I squinted I’d see Ben’s eyes again. Maybe there’s his ribs, hooped and cracked and twisted apart. Maybe there’s his bones popping amidst the flames. Maybe there’s a martini glass with a lemon twist. Or maybe there’s nothing there at all.

----

I met Adam at another bar in Nashville when I went on a roadtrip with some of my friends. He was in town for a bachelor party, and he’d come to the bar to step away from the festivities for a little bit. I liked him because he asked if he could buy me a drink before he actually bought me one. When we got to talking for a while he told me he was an accountant, but that he really wanted to be an actor.

“Are you going to go to New York?” I asked, my finger stirring my glass of whiskey. “Be a Broadway star?”

He laughed a little. “Yeah, I’d really like that. My family wouldn’t like it much, but maybe when I save enough, if I can get a stable job there for a while, then…”

“I wasn’t meaning to make fun of you,” I said. “I’m an artist. I’m freelancing right now, but I’m reapplying at this studio where I used to work. My parents didn’t like that much either.”

He laughed again. “We’ve something in common, huh?”

I was hesitant to live with a significant other again, but after about a year of dating Adam, when he asked me to get a place with him I couldn’t help but say yes. My friends loved him, my parents loved him--I loved him. Adam didn’t really like parties, and he didn’t do drugs, and he didn’t say that I was ungrateful when I didn’t want to sleep with him (which I didn’t do for a long time), and beyond all of that he was the only person I could talk to about Ben. At night I’d shoot awake in bed, wracked with nightmares of Ben’s hand on my sides, his smile against my ear. When I was living alone, I’d call Adam at the crack of dawn and before leaving for work he’d knock on my door and I’d let him in and he’d hold me. When we were living together he’d wake up with me. When I was doing some menial chore and sank to the ground, a sobbing, pathetic heap of flesh and woe, he’d sit beside me and just listen. For the first time in a long time I felt at home. I felt like I was a ship captain after a long, stormy voyage, and after years of being grinded under Ben’s heel, I was finally seeing the sun come out.

At least, that’s what I thought. Then I got a knock at the door on a weekend in April, and when I opened it there was Ben.

Ben’s eyes were wild, like a wolf closing in on a rabbit, and before I could slam the door shut he stuck his foot in and shoved his way into the apartment.

“I found you,” Ben said, his voice dripping with venom. “I finally fuckin’ found you, June!”

Adam was sitting on the couch, but when he saw Ben he lurched forward and shoved me behind him. Adam told me later that I was as white as a sheet, trying to piece together words and sounds into a sentence but I just couldn’t do it. Ben’s eyes and grin, the same eyes and grin that haunted me day and night, awake and asleep, bore down into me.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Adam said as calmly as he could, “or I’m going to call the police.”

“Oh, please do,” Ben snarled. “June, whenever you want to come back home, let me know. I’ll be around.” His blue eyes, the most innocent and evil eyes I’ve ever seen, seemed to glint as he looked at me, a predator’s piece of meat. “I’ll be around.”

----

When Adam and I are both clean, we climb naked into the creaky hotel bed together, and turn the TV onto a crime documentary. Adam starts kissing my neck and then he rolls on top of me and starts kissing down my collarbone, between my breasts, on my stomach. I moan a little as his fingers and lips explore me, and I wrap my arms around his shoulders and I press my body against him.

He stops for a moment, and I look towards him with concern.

“We had no choice, June,” he says, maybe more to both of us than just to me. “We had no choice but to do it.” He clenches his jaw. “I had to cut him up like that. We had to get rid of the evidence, you know?”

“I know,” I say. I run my fingers through Adam’s hair. “I know.”

“The police wouldn’t help…”

“I know. I knew they wouldn’t.”

“He was gonna kill us.” Adam wraps his arms around my waist and presses his forehead into my stomach. “He was gonna hurt you.”

I don’t say anything because what is there to say? We were stalked, we were threatened--I couldn’t even go to work without one of my neighbors walking me to my car--and Adam’s line at his job was blowing up with calls from Ben. He knew where we lived, where we worked; we just weren’t safe. And no matter how many times Adam called the police, no matter how many times I ran into the station, a deluge of tears streaming down my face, they never did anything. Ben was given a firm slap on the wrist by his daddy at best and they told me to just ignore him.

Adam and I knew we had to take action into our own hands when Ben broke into the house--he’d left before we came home, but he’d shattered our window along with several portraits of Adam and me. That’s when we knew that it was too dangerous--we had to leave. What could we do? Go live with our parents and put them at risk too, or leave some other poor girl at a seedy bar downtown to her wretched fate? No. Not again. Not to anyone again.

Adam grinds his hips into mine, and soon he enters me and I sit up on his lap and lean back and let him take me, praying it takes his mind off of things, but for me there is no hope. I thought that the last time I saw Ben would be when he was dead, but the truth is Ben blasted apart and his shrapnel embedded into my flesh forever, and though I can pull some of it out, the rest have burrowed into my skin and into my organs and there they shall remain forever. And the swarm of black bees and water in my head never truly left, they were always there, even after I left Ben and only looked back once, and now the buzzing of my sin and my grief fills my head with such vicious ferocity. I’m sweating and moaning, and I feel my stomach start to twist. Suddenly, all at once, I picture the Bible that’s surely in the bedside drawer next to us, and I remember the story of Jacob in the Bible and how he pictured his stairway to heaven. Suddenly and all at once I feel just like a Jacob’s ladder toy, like I’m hanging onto the remaining pieces of myself with strings of the person I used to be, and if I lean my head forward too much I will collapse, again and again, over and on top of myself, dangling over the tenth circle of hell I thought I’d escaped.

As we collapse into bed, breathing hard and sweating harder, as Adam starts to kiss my neck again, I can taste a martini with a lemon twist in the back of my throat.

----

I sleep soundly for only a few hours, and when I wake I can see the sun just beginning to peek over the roads and buildings in the tiny village around us, turning everything in its path a soft baby blue. When I turn my head to look at Adam, he’s still sleeping soundly. He’s breathing through his mouth, and his breaths are quiet, hushed, troubled. I decide not to wake him. I sit up in bed, pulling the sheets over my chest and rubbing my eyes, and my gaze drifts over to look outside the window. It’s just after six in the morning--I can see cars driving to work on the roads outside, I can see street lights turn off and house lights turn on. I can see that baby blue tint the sun is giving everything on earth, and even though my stomach doesn’t feel ice cold anymore, I feel like my mouth is full of sand and my brain is a flat-line on a heart monitor. I just don’t feel anything.

Ben didn’t really have many people come over often, so I wasn’t worried about someone immediately finding the body. I had estimated that we had at least a few days before someone went and checked on him, and by then we would be long gone. I wasn’t really worried about being found, either, which by all accounts should worry me because I had taken just about every step I deemed necessary to prevent anyone from knowing Adam and I were involved. When I see the flash of police sirens on a road far from the hotel, however, I start to worry a little bit. It doesn’t last long, though. They can’t find us. Not now. Maybe eventually, but not now.

All I can do is continue sitting in a bed next to the person I love, watching the flash of police sirens in the far, far distance, wondering if I should wake Adam up but deciding ultimately to just watch the red and blue flash on and off for a while. It is pretty, in a weird sort of way.

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