I almost agreed to kill someone today. Almost. It sounds bad but it’s kind of my job. The person paying me, my employer you could say, was the guy who wanted to die. I wasn’t going to kill-him kill him, I hardly ever do. I just help people who are committed to doing it themselves. I make sure it reaches completion. The idea is to avoid a messy, half-finished outcome. I have sort of a good reputation in the business.
This is not what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t major in self-actuated demise planning. I didn’t even take the elective. My post-collegiate aspirations were to take my sports marketing major with the international business minor and perform essentially any task offered by the global sports marketing industry.…
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The itching was ridiculous. It was a fluttering torture, a soft-bristle brush teasing tormented nerve endings, making me want to laugh and cry, but mostly cry. It was like being tickled by a loving, giggling sadist.
It started in my toes — well, one toe actually. The big toe on my left foot. But the teasing, tortuous feeling didn’t take long to migrate to the other toes and onto the rest of my feet. The itch moved as it willed, meandering cruelly.
It started at night, kicking in just as I closed my eyes to sleep after a long day’s work. I didn’t know it at the time, but the night before that night was the last decent sleep I would ever have in my bed.…
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The pair looks strikingly similar. Like sisters, although not twins. Dark, short hair, blue eyes, nice smiles, casual t-shirts, and jeans. Neither speaks right away, each seems to be waiting for me to begin. The one on the right has an eagerness to her, slightly leaning forward, expectant. The other, on the left, is comfortably seated with her back against the chair, posture perfect, tranquil.
I’m not sure who to address first since I’d asked them both to come. When life puts you in between things with no clear direction, I thought it best to get second opinions—from both sides. Then the one on the right, Ms. Expectant, clears her throat slightly, to which Ms. Tranquil acknowledges the break in silence, shifting her torso to the side and then back again to her peaceful neutrality.…
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It looked orange when it went in the air and the sun was on it. It was easy to churn up, too. A gust of wind, a pickup truck taking too sharp a right turn, or when the women flapped their mats and rugs out of windows or off the sides of front porches. Sometimes, if you weren’t paying attention, it got in your eyes and in your throat.
Black folks lived in town and white folks lived outside town. It wasn’t always like that. Before there was a town, white folks made black folks live on and work their property under threat of whip and rifle. Once the town was established though, white folks only went into town out of necessity, and black folks avoided going outside of town.…
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Ted’s a good guy, but he’s got this rare condition called Blown-Out Heart Syndrome—or BOHS—where about once a day his heart gets blown out his back. It leaves an awful mess. It’s like his body sneezes out his heart and blood and such. I don’t know why. I’m not an expert. But his heart grows back, don’t worry.
Ted hired me in a CleanUp/Caretaker role a while ago. I used to do freelance crime scene cleaning, but now he’s got me on contract. I come in the morning and stay till the evening, waiting for Ted to have a BOHS episode and clean up afterwards. He tries to make it easy on me. For example, he’ll spend most of his day sitting in the living room with his back pointed to a blank wall.…
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I became a gargoyle in the Summer of 2022.
The neighbors used to call me the girl in the window, but that is no longer who I am. So much time has passed since that I imagine there is no one left that has ever known me in my original state. I didn’t expect it to happen, didn’t think such a thing could happen, but I should have known there would be some consequences to my sitting hunched over the windowsill for endless hours upon hours. I should have known there would be consequences to my life.
I had been occupying a small room in Paris, in an apartment on Rue de la Tour, not far from the Trocadero and close to the Cimitiere du Passy.…
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I don’t think I could have heard the shot; our houses were too far apart. But something woke me up in the middle of the night, and while I tossed and turned trying to go back to sleep, I began hearing sirens. I wasn’t thinking about the disturbance the next morning as I came up to Glen Boyd’s house. Glen and I aren’t really friends, but we frequently walk to school together.
Today, as I approached his house, I saw two police cars and a group of neighbors hanging around outside. One of the women in the group was crying loudly “Juanita killed Doral,” she kept saying over and over. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe it. She killed him.” Juanita was Glen’s mother, I knew, and Doral his father.…
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