2. Knox #2
After a while, Milo huffs out a bitter breath.
“You know, when I saw kitten on the ground, I thought—” He swallows hard enough to hurt just listening to it.
“No, actually, that’s a lie. I didn’t think anything.
My brain sort of blue-screened. Which is not ideal in a crisis, for the record.
Very embarrassing for me professionally. Ten out of ten do not recommend.”
I stare at the opposite wall.
He scrubs both hands down his face. “I keep replaying it, like maybe there’s a frame I missed where this turns into a stupid misunderstanding and she sits up and tells us we’re all dramatic assholes.” His laugh is a dry, dead thing. “But every version ends the same.”
Yeah.
“I can’t make it funny,” he says, quieter now. “I keep trying and there isn’t a joke in it. There isn’t even a bad one.”
I look at him then.
Milo’s eyes are red-rimmed. He doesn’t cry either, but he’s close enough that the strain shows in the set of his mouth.
I lean my forearms on my knees and look at the stairwell door.
“Nothing funny in it,” I agree.
He nods like the confirmation hurts.
I clap him on the back and keep moving.
The lobby is bright. Too bright. I keep my head down and walk past the front desk and out through the sliding doors. The sun is already high over the buildings, traffic on the avenue. A woman jogs past me with earbuds in like the world hasn’t just ended.
The world didn’t end.
She’s holding on.
My truck is in the garage on basement three, and when I slide in behind the wheel, I sit there with the keys in my hand for a long time. The leather is cold.
My hands are shaking. I notice that. Clench my fist to stop it.
It doesn’t work.
I start the engine and drive on autopilot—back to my apartment instead of Holden’s. I stand in the doorway and stare.
I’m not sure what I expected, but my apartment is exactly the way I left it a couple of weeks ago, when the noose was only a threat. I packed a duffel bag then, and I’ve lived out of it ever since.
Still, it feels like it should be different. An explosion has rocked my world. How did my apartment—so sparse and devoid of personality—get spared?
I go into the bathroom and turn the shower on hot. While it’s heating, I strip. The clothes I’ve been wearing since Saturday night go in the hamper. My shirt smells like the hospital and dried sweat.
The mirror over the sink is fogging from the shower steam. I don’t recognize the man in the glass.
His eyes are sunk back into his skull. His stubbled jaw is locked at an angle that looks wrong. His shoulders are set the way they used to be set in the field, before. He looks like a man who has been at war.
Haven’t we?
I turn away from the mirror before it fogs over completely.
I shower and I don’t think about anything. The water hits my hip where the names are. The ink has been there for nine years. Most weren’t any older than I am now when they died. They’ll always be younger. I’ll keep getting older while they stay the same age.
I get out of the shower and shave. Then I’m standing in the bedroom in a towel. I look at the dresser. It’s only half full. The rest of my things are at Holden’s. Where we were all staying with Fury. To keep her safe . . .
I pull out a clean shirt, identical to the outfit I just dropped in the hamper. Black T-shirts. Jeans. The same uniform I’ve worn for years because clothes are a thing other people care about and I’ve never had the energy to.
I dress.
I take my keys off the kitchen counter.
I leave.
Margery’s studio is in a converted barbershop on the south end of the strip.
There’s no sign. No website. The front window has the old cut-and-shave lettering still ghosted into the glass.
The door has a faded card in it that says CLOSED if you read it one way and OPEN if you read it the other.
It’s been turned to OPEN since Margery moved in eleven years ago.
She’s at the counter when I come in. She’s in her sixties with gray hair that today is pulled in a braid down her back. Her half-glasses sit on a chain around her neck. She looks up but doesn’t smile. I’ve never once seen her smile in all the years I’ve come here.
“Knox,” she greets, arching an eyebrow.
“Margery.”
“Walk-in?”
“Can you fit me?”
She gestures at the chair in the back room. As always, she doesn’t ask questions. Just readies herself to put ink in skin.
I sit.
She sets up without speaking. The light in the back room is yellow and steady. The walls are bare except for a calendar from a tackle shop and a framed photograph of a dog that died peacefully long ago.
“Where?” she says.
I pull my shirt off. “Chest. Over the heart.”
She looks at me but doesn’t comment. Pulls the chair stool around so she’s at my left side and picks up a sketch pad.
“What do you want?”
“Sage.”
“The plant?”
“Yeah. And five bees.”
Her hand pauses for a fraction of a second. She nods slowly. “In flight?”
I think about it. “You decide.”
She nods again and begins drawing. Under her hand a sprig of sage with small purple flowers springs to life. She adjusts, adding five bees around it. Two midair, wings angled. Three on the leaves or flowers. The composition is good. She turns the sketch around so I can see.
I study it.
Five bees. Coming to the plant. Sustaining it. Sustained by it.
“Do it.”
I stare at the ceiling while she gets everything ready, and when she peels the stencil back, the purple lines sit over my heart. The plant is rooted near my sternum. The bees fan out across my pectoral.
“Lie back,” she says, starting the gun.
The first line goes in over the rib. Sharp. Bright. The pain is specific and clean and entirely my own. It is not the pain of watching Fury almost die. It is not the pain of being powerless except to grip her hand and promise the universe I’d never let go. It isn’t survivor’s guilt.
It’s just pain. Sharp. Steady. Real.
I can take it.
With every line Margery lays in, a little of the filth that’s been building in me bleeds out—like maybe the needle scripts a story under my skin that can’t be erased by memory or regret.
The machine’s buzz and Margery’s rhythmic wipe, wipe, wipe, and the antiseptic stink—these are sensory absolutes.
I focus on the ceiling tile above me and relax into the bite.
“You know they’re all female, right?”
I cock an eyebrow and shift my eyes to Margery.
“The worker bees. The boys are drones, they’re useless.
Can’t even feed themselves. When it gets to winter and the hive starts to reduce, the females kick them out and the useless bastards die.
” She shakes her head in disgust as she continues to run the needle.
“Their sole purpose is to nut in a queen bee. That’s it.
They go for two seconds then explode. Poof!
Seriously, that’s their entire utility. The girls build the hive.
Feed the brood. Forage. Defend. They have to feed these suckers all day long. ” She shakes her head.
“I know,” I mutter, staring back up at the ceiling.
Margery looks at me over the glasses and huffs.
The bees aren’t meant to represent us five guys. They’re for Fury. For the different parts of herself she gives each of us. The sage is the whole of her. The roots, the stem, and the delicate petals.
The needle moves and I close my eyes.