Sister

powers and that the deities are scientists who are improving what it is to be human. He said that his gene would one day safely get into the gene pool, and that would mean who we are as humans would be irrevocably changed for the better.”

His overweening hubris was huge and naked and shocking.

He was shining his flashlight in my face and I couldn’t see him. I was still trying to move but my body had been too drugged by the spiked tea to respond to my brain’s screamed commands for action.

“You followed her into the park that day?”

I dreaded hearing it, but I needed to know how you died.

“When the boy left, she sat on a bench and started writing a letter, in the snow. Extraordinary thing to do, don’t you think?”

He looked at me, waiting for my response, as if this were a regular conversation, and I realized I would be the first and last person to whom he’d tell his story. Our story.

“I waited awhile, to make sure the boy wasn’t coming back. Ten minutes maybe. She was relieved when she saw me; I told you that, didn’t I? She smiled. We had a good rapport. I’d brought a Thermos of hot chocolate and gave her a cup.”

The gray park is darkening now into soft pansy purples and blacks.

“He told me that the hot chocolate was full of dissolved sedative. After he’d drugged her, he pulled her into the toilets building.”

I feel overwhelmed by exhaustion and my words are sluggish. I imagine them inching along, slow, ugly words.

“Then he cut her.”

I’ll tell you what he said; you have the right to know, although it will be painful for you. No, painful is the wrong word entirely. Even the memory of his voice makes me so afraid that I am five years old alone in the dark with a murderer bashing down the door and no one to help me.

“It’s easy for a doctor to cut. Not at first. The first time a doctor cuts into skin, it feels a violation. The skin, the largest human organ, covering the entire body unbroken, and you deliberately harm it. But after the first time, it no longer feels an abuse because you know that it’s to enable a surgical procedure. Cutting is no longer violent or violating but the necessary step to healing.”

Mr. Wright tightens his warm fingers around mine. My legs are turning numb now.

I could hear my heart beating fast and hard against the concrete, the only part of my body that was alert as I looked at him. And then, astonishingly, I saw him put the knife into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Optimism heated my numbed body.

He helped me sit up.

He told me that he wasn’t going to cut me because an overdose is less suspicious than a knife.

I can’t use his actual words. I just can’t.

He said he had already given me enough sedative in the tea to make it impossible for me to struggle or escape. And that now he was going to give me a fatal dose. He assured me that it would be peaceful and painless, and it was the false kindness of his words that made them so unbearable, because it was himself he was comforting.

He said he’d brought his own sedatives but didn’t need to use them.

He took a bottle out of his pocket, the sleeping pills Todd had brought with him from the States, prescribed for me by my doctor. He must have found them in the bathroom cupboard. Like the bicycle chain and the flashlight and the knife, the bottle of sleeping pills showed his detailed planning, and I understood why premeditated murder is so much worse than spontaneous killing; he had been evil for far longer than the time it would actually take to kill me.

The dusk has brought the chill of darkness. They’re shutting the gates now, the last of the teenagers are packing up to go. The children will already be at home for baths and bedtime, but Mr. Wright and I remain, not finished yet. For some reason, they haven’t made us leave. Maybe they didn’t notice us here. And I’m grateful because I need to keep going. I need to reach the end.

My legs have lost all feeling and I’m worried that Mr. Wright will have to carry me, fireman style, out of the park. Or maybe he will get an ambulance to drive all the way in.

But I will finish this first.

I pleaded with him. Did you do that too? I think that you did. I think that like me you were desperate to stay alive. But of course it didn’t work; it just irritated him. As he twisted the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills, I summoned the residue of my physical energy and tried logical argument.

“If I’m found here, in the same place as Tess, it’s bound to make the police suspicious. And it’ll make them question Tess’s death too. It’s madness to do it here—isn’t it?”

For a moment the irritation left his face and he stopped twisting the cap, and I’d won a reprieve in this perverted debate.