heart has been rubbed raw with steel wool. Words need to come out of my mouth, and soon; otherwise I’m going to lose it. I swallow. My throat stings with the big gulp of clean air.
“There are lots of people here.”
“Yes. Many people.”
“Did they get sick?”
A pause as he translates on the fly. “Some. Not as many as the city.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It is life. Many of my people die young.”
Corrugated iron walls and roofs form makeshift mansions. Maybe fifty in all. Nothing that couldn’t be broken down easily enough and hitched to the back of a donkey. The Roma have livestock. They congregate untethered at the edge of this shanty town, smart enough to stay close to food they don’t have to gather themselves.
Yanni’s boot-clad feet halt outside a shack slapped with white paint. “Your husband is in here.” He tugs my sleeve as I stumble toward the door. “He is not good.”
I’m a shit lying to this boy. But I make it right inside my head, tell myself they chose to believe this. They assumed the Swiss and I were together. A lie of omission. They were there, they saw him bleed. They could have gone the other way, seen the truth, that I cut him to save myself. To bring him to break bread with the Reaper.
The boy hangs back, lets me enter the building alone. It’s a cracker box room with a thin curtain bisecting the space. The room stinks of blood and shit and piss and death.
Foot by laborious foot toward the curtain. He’s back there, that Swiss bastard. His boots jut past the flimsy fabric. They do not move.
I hope he is dead, or at least close enough to tumble over that edge into the long sleep.
My fingers jerk back the curtain and there he is. I half expect him to leap up from that military cot and strangle me, but he doesn’t. His eyeballs perform a vigorous ballet under the thin membranes. His chest rises and falls rapidly; his breathing is shallow. Parchment skin stretches across the planes of his face. He’s a parody of himself carved in damp wax. Not so male now. Not so intimidating. All the bite leached from his bark. Across his throat a poultice sips the infection from his body, but the area is raw and red. The infection has taken hold. Death creeps.
Too slow.
I’ve tried so hard to be good, to stay human enough to recognize myself in those quiet moments when it’s just me and the voices inside my head. But the gods of this land are either testing me or telling me something, because they’ve placed a thin pillow covered in striped fabric just inches from my hand.
Ladies and gentlemen, the parade marches through my head. Theme: Thirty Years of Yearning. On the first float a pony stands, its saddle so polished that all my other desires reflect back at me: Cowgirl Barbie with Dallas the horse; just one more chocolate-frosted cupcake; red shoes, like Dorothy; impossibly high heels; a Trans Am; a Ferrari; Sam; a good education; and then Nick— only Nick. On the last float, the Swiss takes his final breath and exits the world stage left.
The pillow is in my hands, then it’s not, then it is again. My hands keep changing the game. So easy to wipe him out. One firm, enduring press and there would be one less thing to worry about. A rectangle of salvation. All I have to do is act.
But… but…
Lay the pillow across his face and lean as I would on a ledge. Easy. Pretend the tin wall is a shop window filled with unbroken things. Mentally, I could tally the coins in my pocket and choose one thing as a treat for coming this far, while the Swiss finally climbs off the fence and chooses death.
Inside me, tectonic plates clash and collide, scraping at each other, wrestling for dominance. To kill or not to kill? That is my question, my imaginary friends. I push the pillow away from me, release it from my tight embrace, lower it onto the Swiss’s sweat-slicked face. The stopwatch starts in my head. I need three minutes, maybe four.
Thirty seconds. His hands twitch at his sides as he tries to suck air and gets nothing but cotton for his effort.
One minute. A struggle. Jerking shoulders. Snapping knees.
Two minutes. The Reaper chews a breath mint, shoots his cuffs, primes himself for seduction.
Then my baby kicks, swift and hard, right where it counts.
The anger dies. A disappointed Reaper slinks away, toting his blue balls. I’m tired, I want to rest, I want to go home and find my family still alive and raise my child with Nick. I don’t want to have to kill to survive.
The Swiss isn’t coming back. There was no real fight in his movements, just the herky-jerky reactions of a brain stem with enough power left to simultaneously breathe and piss his pants. He’s already dead, it’s just that nobody’s bothered to deliver the bad news.
“I don’t know how the fuck you’re still alive, you bastard. But if you don’t die, I promise I will kill you.”
Yanni is still waiting outside, cigarette dangling from his lip. A little kid playing at being a man. I want to snatch the cigarette from his mouth, tell him to be a child awhile longer, because being an adult isn’t always fun. Hard choices have to be made. Battles need to be fought. Struggle is inevitable. Then I look around and see this is no place to be a kid. It’s a hard world encapsulated in a brutal new world. Being an adult before his time might just save his life.
The boy rushes to steady me.
“He is not your husband. No?”
“No.”
“I did not think this is true.”
“Does anyone else know?”
“No. I hear everything and no one says nothing. They say he is a dead man.”
“Good.”
“Is he a bad man?”
“Worse.”
He leads me back to my own bed. I don’t look back. If I do, I might race to the building and finish what I started. I want to. I don’t want to.
If he leaves that bed, I will kill him. Can I look myself in the eye if I do that?
I think I can.
Nick watches me for cracks. I watch him for pleasure when he’s not looking. Life has changed him, scraped away any softness he once had, so that he’s all hard edges. If we two were strangers passing in the street, I’d hold my purse a little tighter while checking him out.
“I’m not crazy.”
“I know,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“I know.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Are you sleeping?”
His fingers are long and thick, even curled around a pen. Capable hands. Safe hands. I wonder how they’d feel cupping my ass, tearing off my clothes, holding my legs up over his broad shoulders. How would he look holding our children? Dangerous thoughts anytime, but now more than ever.
“Zoe?”
“Some.”
“Do you dream?”
“No.”
He knows. It’s in the set of his jaw, the steel in his eyes. He knows when I lie.
“I dream about Pope. Fifty times a night I lift that ax and let it fall. His head bounces. Not like a ball. Have you ever dropped a melon?”
