Outside (in)

5,900 words

Windows fog with the humidity of the bus’s interior, passenger breaths all collecting against the cold glass and hazing. A single heater blasts hot air and charred fragments of foul-stenching mold dusts out from under one of the back seats, warming only one lucky quadrant within the slow-rolling machine cask. The driver whose breath reeks of nicotine and last night’s whiskey binge bitches to himself at the front. He mumbles and curses under his breath while he wipes a sleeve crusty with his chimichanga lunch at the windshield. His vision is just clear enough to see the streetlights vaguely outlining the confines of the road ahead as he presses from stop to stop, nearly veering into a collision every dozen or so yards. Seated at the bus’s midsection, pressed into the broken window next to a man that smells like unwashed laundry, Marie’s face is framed by her coat’s hood and a heavy knitted scarf. She leans forward in her seat to eavesdrop on this morning’s collective misery: straying husbands’ new holes, junkies’ new scores, latest superhero joint flops, latest celebrity sex scandal, Chris secretly resents his eight-year-old son, Kate can’t find a decent guy to fuck her brains out. White noise fuzzing staticky out the mouths of eight billion carcasses, echoing off the innards of the suburban sprawl and shotgunning into Marie’s internal computer to process and process and process. Needs unmet, wants ignored, citywide plague proliferating into every crevice—into her lungs, into her veins, into her womb—warping its fragile host from the inside.

Neighbors arguing on the other side of the wall—slap—then quiet. The lows of child sobbing rocks her to sleep. Tranq ghoul rotting away and cooing like an abandoned infant under the bus stop bench. She hopes the bus gets here before he stops breathing.

She’s succumbing—she’ll rise above—she’s smoking too much weed—she’ll build a mountain of killed dope fiend corpses and rise above it all—she’s wallowing in the pipe, only until everything starts feeling alright again—she’ll start painting again—she isn’t sleeping anymore, just nodding and nodding—she’ll get a date—she gnarls her canvas with a boxcutter, glances into the meat above her radial, passes out before she can finish—she’ll come down riding a sybian-equipped nuke to airburst over Atlanta—she doesn’t care if her dope is cut with xylazine anymore—she’ll clean the city, then she’ll be clean—she’s opened her wetting cunt to rape what’s left of the world’s innocence—she kills the sun so no one can see who she is—she looks best in the moonlight as it’s filtered through the branches of winter-gray poplars—she says she’s just like Jesus—she says she’s just like Jesus if Jesus were an infertile junkie porn addict—she says she’s just like Jesus if Jesus got a raging hard-on during his crucifixion, then got too embarrassed to die for all our sins—she hasn’t prayed since the last time her mom hit her, but she wants to try again—she shuts her eyes.

Conjure streets shredded apart with rocket bombardment. Concrete warps into her perfect warzone paradise, sidewalks the scene of her righteous culling. Bullets crater into brick and civilian meat. Her blades slip through soft throats. Her innards fill and fill with empty death and seize. She cleans from the outside in, her only path to purity. She’s building our suicide pact in her dreams.

Five lanes down from Marie, a concealed carry course being headed by handsome Henry Howitz. What’s the number one rule when you’re carrying? A tool that’s never given the opportunity to fulfill its purpose is inherently useless, incomplete, devoid and utterly obsolete. Some GI Joes out there’ll tell you otherwise, but I say the number one rule is that your weapon is a last resort, only to be used when all other efforts have been exhausted and peaceful resolution is no longer an option. Flaccid. He taps the side of his bald dome. Be smart. When you carry a weapon, something capable of enacting deadly force, you are obliged by everyone you encounter to be the most responsible person present—use as a last resort, don’t make other people feel unsafe, keep your weapon clean and, most of all, don’t go looking for trouble. Marie’s number one rule is that a gun looks just as sexy pointed at someone else as it does pointed at yourself—she’s known that ever since she took those polaroids for her boyfriend a few years ago, posed nude on her knees in her bedroom with the barrel of her dad’s 12-gauge pressed to the back of her throat. Howitz’s hollow sentiment is for the movies, cozy immateria to keep society running smooth. Marie doesn’t care. She wants a sensation she can hold right in her hands, something she can swallow into the deepest hollows of her body and expand outward through her fingertips like death-dealing laserbeams. She purifies herself from the outside in. She cleans the city, then she cleans herself.

Her pleasure today, incomplete being a mere simulation, is punching 9mm holes into a human-shaped mockup ten and twenty yards down the range. Quick, easy, like an indulgent masturbation to hold her over until she can get fucked for real. No strings attached, no criminal charges with hefty minimum sentencings. The in-between of her thighs wet as the pistol moans out its little deaths. Blasts muffle through her mandatory ear protection, a sad prophylactic layer between sonic-pop-cock and lusty earhole. The gun spasms like a dying kitten in her grasp, jisms out the contents of its magazine until it’s completely flushed, chamber gaped and soiled with burnt-out fouling, gunsmoke leaking from the end of its muzzle lewdly upturned. The aftermath is like watching a brutal death in the movies—limp and sterile in its artifice—her body trembles with want for so much more. Cognition blurs and she dreams the gun easing into her weeping gash, emptying hollow-pointed death into her.

Howitz breaks away from his instruction. Blue Lives Matter iconographies adorn his baseball cap and too-small t-shirt. His HGH gut juts out and tapers into his jorts, where his belt holds a pair of holstered Glocks. The eagle-versus-cobra scene sleeving up his forearm around a Celtic cross, he’s explained in depth, symbolizes his personal battle with the fallen world and its sinful influence. Henry is God’s warrior, Ephesians 6:12 inked into his right bicep. Marie wants to see his cock dripping with her period blood.

Good groupings there, he says, nodding down toward her paper headshotted victim. Thanks, I’ve been practicing a lot. Yeah, I been seeing you here quite a bit lately. Her attraction for him has only grown since his divorce nearly a year ago, developing into something like a full-on crush. Marie met his ex-wife, once, when she’d suddenly stopped by their old apartment to grab photos, while at the same time Marie had just crawled through an open window to writhe naked in his bedsheets while he was at work. The ex-wife didn’t say much when she found Marie in her ex-husband’s bed—just, He’s moving pretty fast then, huh? with a wallowing tinge of regret that Marie found annoying and pathetic. The ex-wife acknowledged her very simply, then quickly left. I’ll just come back another time.

The amorous static between them crackles as Marie tickles a fresh magazine into the 9mm’s ass, throws back the slide, driving virgin lead into the chamber. Her eyes narrow in her arousal, never breaking contact with his. He opens his mouth as if to say something, just for a second, but apparently thinks better of it. She thought he was about to ask her to get coffee or lunch or have a quick fuck session in the backseat of his car behind the Applebee’s next door. Uh, Marianne, right? No. It’s Marie. Oh, yeah, Marie. Hey, I was close, right? It’s not hard to remember, one of the most common names in the world. I’m really bad with names and faces, sorry. It’s no big deal. He glances down at his watch. Hey, I’ll see you next time, huh? Next class starts in five. Sure, see you next time.

She keeps aloof with all but her eyes as he shifts away, irises eclipsed and shuttering slow until they break contact. She can’t help but fantasize and wonder how easy it would be to peel away that all-too-obvious righteous façade, lure him into her widowlike, break him down piece by piece and suck out everything he has, hollow him to a husk until he’s nothing but hers. She wants to ruin his life completely, and she wants to make him learn to love it.

Warps of television fuzz drown into her studio apartment’s bluest dark, waves of an RGB collage sparking across the walls, liquid light splashing onto her bare skin as she fucks herself on the couch. Fragile life leaves a slasher victim’s eyes, intestines spilling warm and red out her fresh knife wounds—dead whore número dos. Marie thinks about how she would have made the victim lick and suck her ear before she murdered her. She drools down her fingers as they work into her, staining milky the handmade quilt under where she’s splayed. She poses herself in the screen’s dark reflection to watch her quivering flesh whine in the blank microseconds between commercials. Throwing back her hair, she marvels at her skeletal, dope-thin frame as it easily swallows long curvatures of silicon. She sees herself in the process of transmutation nearing climax. Ragged breaths hitch—she lulls into her dissolvement with teenaged death rattles lowing from the TV speakers.

Orange casts in the cage of her fingers as a sum of crystal molts in a charred glass round, alchemical phantomographizing down into her lungs and washing, a honey-venom cocktail sharding with the labored expansions of her alveolic interiors. Miasma hits her bloodstream like a thousand tiny, soft blades and torrents through, a Daytona 500-Million circuiting her neocortex, amphetamine fuel injection up her spine, gathering heat at her joints, licking its flames against her pulsing dark star and the soft apex of her inversion, cusp of barren womb plastic bashing and seared. Blunt agony stabs shallow into the lip of her cervix—that it hurts means she’s finally feeling something real. She punches at her clit and imagines riding into Henry Howitz, her well-trained doper stallion. She draws out his malformed DNA helixes with his will to live. His tastebuds stun with the savors of sweat salty off the soft of her undertit, tonguing greedy across her perked, purple areola, along her jugular, into the rawness stenching hot and wet in the pits of her arms, chalky chemical relics of deodorant from a week past. She pulls at the gasified quartz again. She’s humming from the waist down, tiptoes dancing in stilted figure 8s. It’s all upupup burning in the pipe, no F, no tranq. Made in America by serious artisanal craftsmen, a near-dead breed just cooking good junk for good times, no depression sauce baked in there fucking Marie’s brainwaves and making her some sexless fiend. The glittery hell flows across her enamel, tumbles down her trachea, lewd junking into her guts.

Henry devolves inside her womb—he’s nothing now, just malleable human mush for her to reform perfected in her image. Veins throb and bulge up his forehead as her hands grip tight around his windpipe, fingernails digging into his flesh and drawing blood. Wet, throaty gawks escape his face crater choking red. His expression is somewhere candy-sweet, between giddy, whorish elation and prey fear. His colon bruises as her knuckles curl in him, brutalizing deep into his intestines. Tender-cruel topographies crosshatch his chest where she sketches crude Fibonacci spirals and sigils. His skin furrows around the relics of old punctures where you’d think she’d actually tried to kill him—she’d never let him die. His scars vibrate under her fingertips when she runs her hands down him. Her blade’s tip courses along the contours of his atrophied muscles, rests in the valley between his ribs, teasing a full-on stab wound.

She washes herself off in the kitchen sink, the couch’s seam embossed across her bare ass. Glimmers of her blood flow down with cold microshreds of lead and legionella worms, passing over flooded pots and pans and blackened spoons. She wraps herself in the quilt as the TV chimes light and sound, Bugs Bunny seducing Fudd with pouty B-J lips painted bright red. She plugs a tampon and tosses the used husk into the dark across the room. Infomercials hoarse low, selling kitchen knives and fuck machines disguised as workout devices, buyonegetonefree assurances, superficial salesman lisp whining. It rattles all night into her unblinking retinas.

A gray-black wall of diesel smoke sucks vibrance out the air, forms of gaseous cancer stacks obscuring the early morning sun burning just below the horizon’s cusp, sickly pallid orange devoid of vitality. The venom mingles up into roiling wisps of low rain clouds pissing their sparse contents over Marie’s head on her way into Forest Park. She holds under the overpass for the rain to let up, then continues on past the screaming airport. Her body, wrapped in a camouflaged layer, submerges into the low light and stretches of distorted granite-piss-yellow deep in the most disused bowels of the industrial park. Streetlights stand dormant in their disrepair. Shadow lingers in the gnarled husks of old warehouses, corrugated metals eaten slow with oxidization cavities exposing asbestos innards and pit vipers coiled within their blackest alcoves. The orange haloing from a lone lamp reflects off brackish puddles semi-solid with coagulations of waste and sludgy rainwater, rippling as Marie’s tennis shoes pass through.

On the opposite side of the street, coming down from a rise, a night watchman appears, homeward bound after his sleepy twelve-hour graveyard shift keeping derelicts away from his employer’s truck lot, lunch pail pendulum loose in the cradle of his hand. Marie fades herself into the blue of an adjacent alley swarmed with shattered furniture and beer bottles and dismembered machine scraps. Passing by, the watchman is oblivious to being watched. The morning sun is darker than usual today with the cloud coverage, and this road will likely remain empty for at least another hour. With the watchman’s back to her, Marie comes out from the dark, stepping soft and careful as to not make any sudden noise. Just as her foot is dangled off the curb to cross the street, a pair of yellow headlights cast their glow over her and pass by, tires splashing a puddle’s contents over her legs. She looks back. The watchman’s gone, climbed over the next rise and passed along behind a building. She turns and continues along her way.

The warehouse basement has been out of use for years, storage for old chairs and tables and tools bent and rusted with abandonment. A snack dispenser from the 80s lays on its side atop a one-wheeled dolly, a single candy bar still inside with generations upon generations of ants and flies living and dying on top of each other in a futile bid to one day unwrap the rotted chocolate and nougat carcass hidden in its non-bio-degradable coffin. Still under the cover of pre-dawn dark, Marie unlatches the basement door’s sheared padlock and lowers herself into the building’s depths, counting her footfalls down a set of stairs, skipping the fourth step whose water-rotted wood must have fallen away years ago. Her sole meets squishy soil. She shines a flashlight out in front of her, revealing that nothing has changed since the last time she was here, except that one of the rats has died and is providing sustenance for a swarm of beetles and centipedes. The rat winks at her with its empty eye socket just before a wolf spider crawls out then disappears again into the rat’s mouth caught in a jagged vomit-bloody yawn.

Slivers of light draw a thin shaft down through the door’s crack behind her and creep along the floor as a car steers into the parking lot outside. The light stills, catching in the starry glitterings of slow-flowing dusts. Country music twangs through the radio as the car growls idle a moment, then the engine gets killed and the driver slides out, keys jangling in hand. Marie’s ears track footsteps across gravel, to the warehouse’s front door, deadbolt turning. The door whines open, then shuts with a heavy metallic clack.

She swipes at spiderwebs as she makes her way into position: an alcove hidden in the walls between the warehouse floor and Henry Howitz’s big boss office. There she sits on a stool she’d salvaged from the basement refuse months ago, in a corridor three yards long and perhaps one yard wide, just enough for her thin frame to shuffle in at an angle. Along each side, she’s cut out squares of the cotton-candy-pink insulation and drilled holes through the drywall—barely noticeable from the outside, inconspicuous as if maybe pictures once hung there. Just a few peepholes on each side, the optimal angles for her to watch in at the workers and their Howitz overlord.

All day, she sits in the cramped dark, shuffling quiet from one viewpoint to another. As the morning shift comes in, they quickly set to their work. Boxes slide in and out of gloved hands, into stacks and shipping trailers, packing tape stretching and ripping, forklift engine whirring from one side of the building to the next. They break shortly for lunch, then back to it. Marie listens in on all the unfolding microdramas, catching the tiny nuances that otherwise go overlooked. Henrietta’s eyeing fuck-me at oblivious Josh as he feeds the forklift’s prongs into a pallet, cock stretching the linen of his teal coveralls with the sleeves cut off, his tribal ink twisting up around his discretely pierced left nipple. Floor manager Benny is smoking a stick of shit weed in the bathroom, coughing through a febrezey haze with the door locked. Henry Howitz lingers in his office, struggling to find work to do. His laptop’s screen, scrolling in his glasses’ reflection, is faced away from where Marie watches on the other side of the wall—a hole pricked through at head-level at the center of Howitz’s desk. The hours pass like days for Marie as she watches him click-clack into the keyboard all afternoon at nothing in particular, bored solitaire bouts, groaning here and there as the clock’s hands barely move.

Dusk settles in through the windows as the clock indicates closing time, darkening Marie’s view through her pinholes until she’s steeped in total black. She sidles out when it’s quiet, then up onto the warehouse floor, empty after hours, forklifts neatly parked, lights slowly humming down one after another. Her nerves tingle from hours crouched in her voyeur’s nest. Howitz is making his rounds on the other end of the building as the last car crunches gravel and hums away.

Her camo getup blends in so well with the office’s kitschy wallpaper stained nicotine brown. She melds into the corner’s umbra, peeking out her balaclava’s eyeholes, icy gray-blue adjusting to the dark until her mammalian night-vision settles. She hears his footfalls’ echoes dinning against concrete from off in the distance, the grunts of his slurping and gagging at the six pm protein shake he drinks every Tuesday and Friday before he heads to the gym.

Sunset finally dips under the panel window’s lowest contours as Howitz makes his way back to his office, stilting up the stairs irregularly, the crushed stimulants Marie had smuggled into his protein slop hours ago beginning to take their effect, easing him soft into chemical oblivion. The office door gapes, weak rays casting in from the factory floor outside. In the dusk’s last waning glimmers, Marie can see how pale his face has gone, her eyes following a bead of sweat as it traces down the curve of his neck. He stalls at the door’s threshold, eyelids drooping over his tired orbs with slow shutters. The frame of his body trembles. Light breaking up the office’s dark vaguely reveals her shadow in its deepest recesses, standing perfectly still, not even a low breath in the vacuum between predator and prey. Howitz, unsure of the foreign shape, comes forward a step, back two, then turns and makes a few stomps down the stepway toward the warehouse’s exit before his sluggish foot catches on itself and he falls to the floor. He moans and reaches for the pistol concealed in his waistband, but his fingers may as well be liquid. Marie paces down casually, pulling up her mask. His mouth can’t form the words—Marie? What? Why are you doing this?—it wouldn’t matter if he could. Her hand grazes up his thigh and reaches cold into his khakis, her fingertips finally touching his skin. He’s softer than she thought he’d be, his stomach barely sporting its fine happy trail. She unlatches the holstered Glock and stashes it into her coat pocket.

His protests are weak as she takes him by the ankles and drags him out to his car. His heartbeat quiets as the fight in him recedes, then his eyes are closed and he’s asleep, laid out in the parking lot. She digs his keys out his pocket and strains to pull his dead weight into the car’s backseat. Two pairs of handcuffs chime as they latch firm at his wrists and ankles, then Marie ties a collar around his neck, just tight enough that his meat bulges out from under the leather and his Adam’s apple struggles to move as he breathes.

She can hardly keep her eyes on the road while Howitz writhes in the backseat, fighting unconscious against his restraints. His shirt goes dark with sweat and rides up his torso, exposed navel glistening in the rearview mirror. Every so often, his eyes open affixed to nothing, peer around lewdly in their haze, then close again. He’s deconstructing right in front of her, his humanity peeling away under her fingertips.

Stuck in the afterwork rush hour, she stuffs a hand down into her pants as she watches him twist and moan. He’ll sound so much better with his tongue cut out, she thinks. His thighs will bow further into his hips where castration will leave them unobstructed. He’ll choke on his leash as she traces red lines into his skin. He’ll starve until his muscles atrophy and his bones are visible and he’s too weak to stand on his own. He’ll be hers, completely.

She veers off the highway into a long line of cars waiting at an intersection, nearly home. The lights switch from red to green for the third time, traffic halted in heavy gridlock. Marie wonders if there’s been a wreck up ahead. The cars around lurch inches at a time, groaning in impatience. Electric light blurs in through the windshield as black clouds curl down onto the congested city and rain begins to lightly spatter and piss. She drums her fingers along the steering wheel, her gaze darting between the unmoving cars ahead and the rearview mirror where Howitz flickers in and out of focus. His consciousness is slowly bubbling up through the benzo smog, eyelids fluttering until they’re fully open, revealing bloodshotted sclera and blown-out pupils, the futility of his situation beginning to dawn on him. He tilts up, then down again, fighting against his own weight limp and impotent. Drool dribbles down onto the seat as he winces in his cuffs with his ass in the air. You’re really cute like this. He’s moaning ineptly, his collar biting into the flesh of his neck with every gulp of air. His whimpers become more intelligible as lucidity finally sets in, bargaining, begging to be let go. Hearing him, heat blooms at Marie’s core, waters onto the whites of her knuckles as she works between her thighs. Her breath hitches, and she shuffles her pants down nearly to her knees, her ass bare against the seat’s fabric. Their eyes meet in the mirror as she bucks with a rising tempo against her hand. She drinks in his fear, grinding hard onto her clit until it starts to hurt. The soft flesh swells and burns. Pools of salty tears well at the corners of her eyes as she abuses herself, chasing release. Agony spirals and blossoms. Clenching as she starts to overflow, she holds her breath deep in her lungs. Aftershocks quiver through her, ebbing along her nerves, then dopamine serenity.

The streetlights and fast food signs are blurred through her closed eyelids. She suddenly feels cold rain hit the back of her neck as the car door clicks open behind her—she’d forgot to engage the child lock. Howitz worms out into the street as Marie wrests her pants up and unlatches her seatbelt in a frenzy. Like a drugged worm, he writhes onto the wet asphalt, yawning out awkward pleas for help at the surrounding cars. In his struggle, his khakis catch on the door frame and tear down his left leg. An oily puddle splashes up across Marie’s tennis shoes as she pulls at his ankles, dragging him back to the car. Horns blare all around, people yelling out their windows. He’s heavy. She claws the fight out of him in the middle of the street, kicking at his sides and pulling him into the backseat.

The door’s inside thumps against his head when she slams it shut, quickly engaging the child lock as she takes her spot back in the driver’s seat. He fiddles with the handle to no avail, yelling for help, begging Marie to be let go. Concerned expressions all around peer in through the car windows, phones raised to ears while they catch glimpses of Howitz still fighting against his confines. Some are still honking at her, but no one gets out to do anything. Howitz’s soaked clothes cling to his body while he thrashes, rocking the car on its squeaky axles. A trickle of blood streams down from the fresh wound splitting skin above his left brow.

The congestion lets up, and traffic begins to flow again, inches at a time. As Marie presses the car past the light, she catches a cop sitting at the curb of a Wendy’s. Just as she’s moved past the lot, the patrol car materializes behind her, blue strobes pulsing in through the rain-slick rear window, soaking the car’s dark interior. Before Howitz can scream for help, Marie pushes the pistol’s muzzle into his forehead, runs it down and presses the tip of the barrel to his lips. Wordlessly, she commands him, Open. She pushes the full length of the barrel into his mouth until he starts to gag. His tongue worms at the bottom of its shaft. She hisses through her teeth, I’ll blow your fucking brains out, I don’t give a fuck. When they ask, you’re my boyfriend and we’re doing some fucked-up roleplay thing. The bullshit excuse will work, she knows, if only she can unwind her anxieties enough to sell it right. Nod if you understand. The gunmetal chimes between his teeth as his lips pout and his eyebrows upturn in defeated resignment. I’ll kill you, then I’ll kill myself.

She fixes her hair in the mirror as the cop comes up warily, thumb tacked into his belt with his fingers brushing against the holster of his service pistol. The cop ducks down to look into the open window, nods to Howitz. License, proof of insurance. She pulls the plastic from her wallet. Honey, where do you keep your insurance card? Uh, the glove box. We got more than a few calls about y’all’s little episode back there at the light. I’m so sorry, officer. We, uh—this is embarrassing—we like to, y’know, roleplay a little here and there—and I guess we just got a bit out of hand. That true, sir? Yes, we’re just playing out, you know, a scenario kinda thing. It's roleplay. And you’re playing the victim? Marie can hear Howitz’s throaty gulp over the pounding rain. Yes, sir. Well, I can’t say I ain’t seen stranger things. You’d be surprised how often this exact thing comes up. Listen, what you do in the bedroom ain’t my business, but when you’re rolling out into rush hour traffic all cuffed up and screaming for help—well, then you’re bringing everyone else into your weird shit, y’know. I understand, sir. Just take it easy, keep it in the bedroom. This insurance card was expired last week. Oh, I’m sorry. It’s still insured, just— Naw, this happens all the time, no worries. I’m gonna run your info back at my car. You two just sit tight. He points at Howitz and grins. You don’t go nowhere, y’hear? Yes, sir. Lighten up, geez, both of you. I’m just gonna check out your stuff, then you can get back home to do…whatever the hell it is you do, I guess.

The cop’s silhouette distorts as the rain picks up, heavy droplets hammering into the car’s roof. Howitz is pleading under his breath—he knows it’s no use. Marie drags a hand down his wet hair and along his jawline while he cries. Her fingers come back with little dilutions of his blood—metallic against the tip of her tongue, just a taste of what’s to come. She considers reassuring him, to quiet him down, but the prey fear in his eyes is too sweet to let go. Rivulets of sweat and rainwater trickle at his exposed thigh, muscles quivering cold and anxious.

His silent begging halts as the cop returns, under a wide umbrella with a second officer wearing a pair reflective shades alongside him. The first hands Marie the license and insurance back. Everything came back fine. Looking back to his friend, I say they’re good to go. He pulls down his sunglasses to lock eyes with Howitz through the window. He looks in a long few moments as Howitz wheezes and shuffles in his restraints, pleading wordlessly with a shaky bottom lip, then he comes to the driver-side window. Ma’am, could you step out just a moment? In this rain? Step out, ma’am, and give me the keys to those handcuffs you got on your boyfriend there. We’re gonna need to speak to you two separately. He just said this happens all the time and we’d be able to go if we just— Ma’am, please just step out of the vehicle and come with me. Sternly, I’m not asking. Keeping the keys in the ignition, Marie cracks the door and slides out, stepping past a deep puddle to stand with her back to the car’s hood. Let’s just go over here to our car and talk. Look, it won’t take too long since it’s starting to really pour. Okay.

Following behind the officer, they make it halfway before Marie unholsters Howitz’s Glock from her waistband and puts the muzzle directly up against the back of the cop’s head. Despite all her practice at the range, despite steeling herself into the perfect idealized killer, she’s still shaking. She flinches as she pulls the trigger. The supersonic pop stuns her unveiled virgin ears and liquid warmth fountains across her face. His body goes limp and collapses to the ground, red spurting out with chunks of bone and pinkish brain matter from the exit wound at the front of his scalp, scattering in the rivers of rainwater flowing down the curb. She turns back as the other cop scrambles to unsheathe his own weapon and return fire, sputtering out unintelligible expletives and fingering ineptly at the radio on his shoulder. Her arm goes perfectly still before a trio of staccato bursts erupt, a rhythmic one-two-three, imprecise into his center of mass. The gun’s recoil feels different when she’s shooting at something alive, profoundly lewder in the way it kicks and cries. The first two pumps surprise her with their immense force, but her body’s warmed by the third, begging to unleash more hell into her target. The cop catches the first bullet in his side, barely a flesh wound, damage mitigated by his Kevlar vest. The second is on the right side of his lower chest as he jerks backward with the first shot’s impact, shattering at an upward angle through low ribs, tearing through soft intestines. The third passes straight through his left thigh, into the fatty meat just below his groin and out.

Marie marvels at her work as he falls to his knees, still struggling to grab his service pistol. She thinks he’s already dead when his full body is laid flat against the soaked asphalt and his blood makes feathers into a puddle—she doesn’t see as his arm outstretches with sights trained on her. The cop fires, emptying his entire magazine. He only manages to hit Marie twice, in her left side and shoulder, then he goes limp and his gun clatters to the ground. The initial blow feels like the two hardest punches she’s ever received, then a sharp, searing pain saturates into her nerves, glowing hot through the traumatized flesh all around the wounds. Her blood blooms out, staining into her clothes. She grips the hole at her side, where she’s bleeding the most, but the torrent doesn’t stop, just expands and leaks out down her leg. The scene blurs around her. A new lightness permeates down from her head and settles in her gut, making her knees buckle under her weight. Howitz’s screaming fuzzes, all noise dissipating against the wall of pain and nausea as she hobbles around the dead cops and falls back into the driver’s seat.

She presses down on the gas pedal. The car howls, dials rising and rising, but the car goes nowhere—she hasn’t taken it out of park. It’s too late to make some heroic getaway when a cavalcade of blinking, screeching patrol cars make an inescapable barrier between her and the exit. They’re yelling through megaphones, demands that’ll go nowhere. If she wanted to surrender, she wouldn’t have killed those two cops to begin with. The frames of a dozen officers, with their guns drawn and trained on Marie, shadow into the car before the blipping reds and blues swirling fluidly. It’s cold. Marie’s blood drains onto the floorboards, splashing red and sticky with her feet as she shifts her body into the backseat, a pistol in each hand, rounds chambered, safeties disengaged. Howitz is warm under her. His five o’clock shadow itches across her nose as she nuzzles into his neck with weak kisses. Strobing cacophonies from the cops outside come in and out with the beat of her eyelashes, slow until it’s dark and quiet and soft. Heat dissipates in her limbs—her legs, then her arms—and a cool numbness permeates throughout her entirety, a stillness ebbing from the inside out.

guyliner, 2025