White Horse

knew she was hurt, her mind clouded.

This is my fault for walking away from her when she was my responsibility.

Blood. Blood. More blood. All the way up the street, past abandoned tavernas, past shops with no clientele. Some wear shattered windows and battered doors, but most remain untouched, as though humanity just up and walked away from life.

The landscape changes. Retail starts a gentle shift toward car yards hawking vehicles old and new. Most are gone. The rest are scrap metal. Others have tried to take a car, get the hell out of here, and failed. A skeleton hangs from a steering wheel, his or her arm snared by the driver who has rolled the window up to form a fatal trap. The driver is there, too, only sloppier. The other guy has had his body picked clean by predatory birds and overzealous bugs. The driver is a meat sack dressed in rotting rags.

I can’t care about them right now.

Lisa’s blood trail leads me to a squat building with windows made of wire-threaded glass blocks. The sign on the door is all Greek to me. Ha-ha. I can’t even laugh at my own joke. I wind up being sarcastic to myself, a sign that I’m on my way to crazy or already there.

The blood leads here, to this beige building with Greek letters and business hours from 9:00 a.m till 5:00 p.m. on some days of the week that don’t matter. I don’t even know what day this is; they’ve blurred since leaving Brindisi. That was the only date that mattered, and it’s gone.

The smell hits me the moment I lean against the door with my shoulder. It makes a pah sound, like an old, wealthy man sucking a cigar in a casino, holding, holding, then exhaling into the face of his date—the one he bought for too much money, yet doesn’t value. A lungful of institutional air is what I get. Pine that’s never seen a forest, or a cone, mixed with the cat-pee stench of ammonia. It almost, but not quite, covers the bright copper of fresh blood.

My heart clacks on my ribs. Get the hell outta here, it taps in Morse code. But this is like one of those dreams, we’ve all had them, where the Big Bad Wolf is coming right for us but we can’t move for love or bags stuffed full of money.

Clack, clack.

Chairs. Plastic molded chairs, the kind they have at the DMV. They’re set up in a square horseshoe surrounding a table. The laminate is snapping off at the edges so the cheap board underneath peeks through. There’s a counter with frosted glass panels that slide on ball bearings. There’s a bare spot on the wall where a television used to hang.

I want to laugh, because when disaster strikes, people always prioritize by racing for the electronics. Take that, Joneses, they seem to say. We’re just as good now. Which is all well and good, except the Joneses are probably lying in a gutter facedown, rotting. They don’t care about television or toasters that cook eggs and bacon at the same time as their bread. Death is the great demotivator.

Clack, clack.

My feet won’t work. They wriggle inside my boots, ignoring the flurry of messages from my brain.

Clack, clack.

This place, I know it. I don’t want to admit it, but I know. There’s only one kind of place that smells the same the whole world over. It’s like they all get their cleaner from one central warehouse. I know it. I worked with it. The smell is as familiar to me as chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven or Nick’s sunshiny skin when I’d breathe him in as deep as I could take him.

This is a clinic. A medical facility of some flavor. The furnishings give nothing away; the paintings are generic prints of scenery: flower-filled fields, a grazing cow. The Virgin Mary stares down from one wall, also silent as she balances her babe on one knee.

Lisa’s blood is here, too, smeared across the floor. A monochrome rainbow stretching down the hall.

Pine and blood. Copper and autumn.

Clack, clack.

My legs move like they’re new. The joints grind and squeak beneath my skin. But then I realize, no, that noise isn’t me, it’s coming from the other end of the Lisa rainbow, the one that’s hidden around a corner at the end of a hall. It’s the sound of cutlery rattling around a stainless steel sink.

Clack, clack.

Someone thought it was funny to run a line of yellow tiles down the hallway. Lions and tigers and bears— oh my! I follow them, because that’s what lost girls do when they want to find the wizard and get the hell home.

Down the hall. Turn right. Follow the yellow tile that’s orange in places where Lisa’s blood overlaps. A door that isn’t closed, just pushed until a narrow crack of the world beyond is visible. I nudge it with my knee until it swings wide.

Clack, clack, pow.

Lisa is there. At least, I think it’s her. There’s so much blood, I can’t tell what’s what. She’s on the examining table, legs in stirrups, arms flaccid and dangling off the sides. Her head lolls toward me but she does not know I’m here. She won’t know anything again except maybe Hades or God or whichever deity she prayed was real.

Between her legs is another figure, also doused in blood. His clothes are soaked, his blond hair smeared and flecked, all of it a bold and vivid red. Which strikes me as weird, because Lisa is dead and yet her blood still looks like it should be in a living body.

When the Swiss turns, he’s holding her insides in his hands. I don’t know what a uterus looks like except as a line drawing in an anatomy book, but I think that’s what he’s dumping into a metal basin.

He swings around, his eyes wild and blue and stark inside his painted face.

“It should be here,” he mutters. “It should be.”

“What did you do to her?” My throat is numb, my lips feel flabby; it’s a wonder the words come out in any order that makes sense.

He picks through the Lisa-meat with the edge of a scalpel, then looks up at me. “It should be here.”

“What?”

“The fetus!” he screams. He hurls the bowl at the wall. It ricochets and lands at my feet, where the contents spill in a grisly mess. “She was pregnant. There should be a fetus. Where did it go?” He’s still screaming. With every syllable he stabs her, then he drags the scalpel to him, vivisecting her from the waist down. “It is in here and I will find it.” He reaches inside her with both hands until he’s up to his elbows in viscera.

“You killed her,” I say simply.

He shakes his head so vigorously, his drenched hair flicks dots on the wall. “No, no, no. She killed herself. She laid down for the father. She got pregnant. She sucked my cock while pregnant with another man’s child. She came willingly while you slept. ‘Help me,’ she begged. Who am I to refuse aid? I have assisted many such women.”

“You killed her.”

“I… did… not… kill… her!” he roars. His body shakes with the anger but he does not look at me. “Where is it? Where did she hide it?” He whirls around. “You took it, didn’t you?”

I don’t understand. Lisa was pregnant. He said she was. All that morning sickness, no evidence of White Horse. If not that… then what?

Tears roll down my face. I wipe them away with the back of my hand.

“Look what you did to her, you monster,” I say. “She was a human being. Just a girl. What’s wrong with you, you crazy fuck? You’re like one of those insane women in the newspapers, the ones who cut open a pregnant woman and steal her child. You’re a crazy woman, not a man.”

This enrages him. Between the blood and the twisting of his face, he’s a portrait of insanity and he’s racing toward me, scalpel in his hand, covered in more blood than I’ve ever seen in my life. He is a ruby gleaming under the dead fluorescent bulb.

I run. He follows. We slip and slide down the hall on Lisa’s blood. Two stooges. The Swiss lunges for me, but I jump right while he keeps going straight. I snatch up one of the plastic chairs. The symmetry isn’t lost on me. I’ve done this before: used a chair to save myself.

When he realizes he’s missed, that I’m not in front of him, he turns. That’s when I smash him in the face.