9. Girls Who Kiss the Dead #3
My fingers twitch, pulling invisible strings.
Manipulating and arranging a puppet I don’t have possession of.
It's muscle memory at this point. A tick I’ve noticed growing over the years.
The more I take, the longer I work with them, the harder it becomes to break the habit.
My shadow looms over the man on the porch swing, snoring loudly, his arm draped over his eyes as his chest rises and falls with each heavy breath.
He doesn’t budge as I adjust my glasses, leaning over his bulky frame.
Being sure not to interfere with the gentle swaying of the swing.
His lips are dry and rough as I prod at them, picturing how they felt against hers.
Three times tonight, he kissed her, shoved his dry, rough lips against ones that don’t belong to him. Lips I claimed years ago.
My jaw clenches, my pulse ticking in my neck as I place my hand over his mouth, fingers gripping his nose.
He doesn’t struggle at first, too drunk to realize he’s not taking in oxygen.
The swing rattles with the first sign of life.
His arm jerking down to slap at the obstruction.
His panic is sudden and violent. He’s much larger than I am in girth.
Height, not so much. Where his bulky, corded muscles overpower, there’s no calculation in his struggle.
My forearm strains with the effort to keep his mouth covered.
He jostles the swing again, his legs kicking wildly as I glance up at the hooks in the roof, debating the sturdiness of the rusted brackets.
Not wanting to damage my puppet’s family home, I decide to test it slowly, placing my knee underneath his sternum, adding enough pressure to control, but not to bruise.
Not a tremendous concern either way. If he’s found, I’ll be the one who gets him.
“Gideon, you can’t do these things without thinking! They’ll take you and lock you away somewhere like you’re some goddamn animal.” My father’s warnings echo in my mind, snapping me from my daydream as I remove my hand.
He coughs, adjusting his bulk on the swing, barely registering I’d touched him at all.
Far from the pleasantly violent thrashing he’d done in my mind.
My breath stills in my lungs, the buzzing in my head the only sound between us as I wait.
Will he wake up? Will he make this choice easy?
If he woke up and was enraged… he couldn’t be trusted.
What if he hurt me, hurt her? I’d have no choice then.
Technically, I wouldn’t be going back on my father’s teachings at all.
It’d be too late, a matter of self-defense.
It was too late the moment I left her. From the second the wheels of that moving truck turned onto the highway, I was just taking the long way home.
The buzzing in my head silences as the rapid beat of my heart doubles, that familiar sick excitement coursing through my veins.
Anticipation. My muscles tense, ready, but he settles, spittle dripping from his gaping mouth in a loud snore.
Audrey, I’d thought better of you. Getting involved with a man who gets so fucked up he doesn’t even come to enough to realize he’s being suffocated.
My eyes dart to the dark, open window a few down from me, where I know my girl is passed out.
Careful of any signs of movement. They’ve been drinking all night.
If the baggy of white pills poking out from his jean pocket is any indication, he at least has been mixing poisons. Something to note for later.
“Pills and alcohol,” I tsk quietly at the soon-to-be corpse. “Accidental overdoses kill upwards of sixteen thousand people a year.” Dragging my eyes from the dark windows of the living room, I play out in my head how I would’ve disposed of his body had I gone that route.
I don’t drink myself, not more than a few sips here and there.
I’ve cut open enough career alcoholics, and the thought of liquor seems less appealing.
The force of my actions hit me all at once, and like usual, there’s little to show for it.
No breakdown, no panting or sobbing, screaming, not even a hole in the wall or something more dramatic like a fist through a mirror.
There's no regret, no remorse, not enough to matter anyway. My father, everything he fought so hard to prevent, all unfolding in a matter of days. And here I stand on her porch, the girl I haven’t seen in ten years.
The girl who has unknowingly been the cause of death for so many others. Seventeen, to be exact.
The man snoring on the porch represents the first step toward my undoing.
An unraveling that’s been years in the making.
The first thread was cut and frayed the day I left Audrey.
All roads, no matter how much distance my dad put between us, were always going to lead me back here.
Back to her. I’ll drown her with me almost as surely as I’ll eventually have to answer for my crimes.
I’ll have to leave her again, and the thought sours my gut.
Killing off any pleasure I got from imagining this man’s death.
My steps thud quietly on the porch as I round the corner, the familiar creaking lighting a fire within my bones as I reach through the window, dragging my finger over the dusty windowsill, peering in at her sprawled on her bed before I head back home.
Each step further from her is taken on rusted nails and jagged glass.