Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

And I turn and run off, awkward. The backpack heavy and banging against my spine, the cat too light in my arms.

I get back to the apartment and only then realize I am still carrying it. What do I intend to do? Bring it inside?

Shit.

I look around. The industrial-sized garbage bin in the back parking lot.

I walk around to the parking lot. But I can’t let it go. The eyes are still open. Green-yellow. Staring.

I want to apologize to the cat. I want it to close its eyes. I hate how death does that, steals even the silence of closed eyes. It just keeps fucking watching you. It stares at you as you descend into jibbering madness, watches your mind escape out the back door while your hands are covered in blood and viscous fluid from a severed eyeball —

Shitfuckshit.

I’m kneeling on the gravel and it’s sharp in my knees like broken teeth. I claw the backpack open. The knife is in my hand.

I want the cat to stop watching me. The smell of it. The shining smell of viscera and iron-scented blood. The clean snap of its bones. I wish I didn’t like the sound so well. The feeling of it.

Stop it , I say. I scream at the cat. Fucking stop it .

The warmth of the apartment flushes against my skin. I look like a ravaged golem, the cat diarrhea turning tacky and blood drying in flakes.

I walk into the kitchen. My body feels buoyant, a jellyfish floating in a saline silence. I can’t tell if I’m dreaming. Aidan comes home. I hear him at the door behind me. The kitchen light is off. A pale rain-washed gloaming leaks through the large living room window.

My hands are buried in the kitchen sink, rinsing the knife.

He sees the knife lying in the sink, the faucet running uselessly. Some sticky red substance crawling towards the drain.

“Mickey, what—? Is that — is that blood ?” He won’t stop nattering away. “I’m not trying to be nosy , but I think I’ve got a right to know why my knife’s got blood on it and is rusting in the sink.”

My back is to him, head bent, hair fallen down in front of my face and he comes up behind me and I move my head, a curtain of hair falling over my shoulder. He reaches out, his fingers in the fall of hair, and I turn into his hand.

We stand that way in silence, his palm electric against my skin. And then I move with the quickness of a thought, a blink, a flicker. He makes a small hitch in his breath.

I stare at him and the lines of his face and neck are as sharp as awl-etched copper. He looks down at himself, at the rough black knife grip jutting from the sticky brown-red smear on his shirt. I put a hand against his chest and jerk the knife back. He makes a sound like a scream, only faint as a kitten’s cry, and falls to his knees. He hits the linoleum with a dull thud.

I hold the knife under the water again. Turn the faucet handle to hot. Scrub it with lemon-scented suds. Then I dry the knife on my jeans and lay it blade-open on the countertop. I step over him and say, “What did you fucking think would happen.”

I startle awake. I’m sitting in the corner of my bedroom, my arms wrapped around my knees. There is a knife in my hand and I’m shivering. Have I been dreaming? Hallucinating?

My dreams are always filled with death. The problem is, my memories are too. Sometimes I have a hard time differentiating them.

Once when I was little, but this was after I killed that guy, so let’s say I was twelve, Dave and I went down to the park near the corner of Rose and Exchange Street. He went to play basketball and I sat cross-legged on a park bench reading a book while listening to the dangling rusted chains of the baskets creaking in the wind.

A girl about Dave’s age came up pushing a baby stroller. The kid was wailing, snot pouring out its squashed-looking nose. I put my finger in the book to mark my place and watched them come up to the bench. I pushed out my jaw and lowered my eyebrows but she didn’t stop. Didn’t even look at me. A basketball bounced across the grass and hit the wheel of the stroller. The girl looked around. “Hey!” she said. “What’s with you?”

Dave came jogging across and scooped up the ball. “Sorry,” he said, grinning down at her. He pointed a thumb in my direction. “But you might want to think about moving the kid somewhere else.”

“Oh yeah? Well, it’s a free country, buddy. In case you hadn’t noticed.” She put her hands on her hips. She had a belly ring, and her shirt rode up when she put her hands on her hips so that we could see it. I watched her with interest. Dave balanced the ball on one hipbone, ran a hand through his longish hair. He knew he looked good and he liked to get girls to come on to him. The girl pushed out her lower lip but her eyes got wider and curious, not squinty and angry.

“That’s my sister,” Dave said. “And she’ll eat that kid of yours if you don’t shut it up. You think I’m joking but I’m not. I’m telling you for your own good.”

“Oh, whatever,” she said. But she looked over at me. I was sitting neatly like a little Buddha, a heavy old hardback copy of The Iliad on my lap. I looked back at her, unblinking.

“I’m serious,” Dave said. “Really.” His voice had taken on that warm, soft tone. The earnest, almost husky cadence that had everyone from teachers to parents to hormonal, post-adolescent girls melting. Believing .

“You’re crazy,” the girl said, looking sideways at me but talking to Dave.

“Crazy?” Dave shook his head. “ She ’s the crazy one. My little sister here killed a man a couple years ago. Just because he tried to touch her. I’m just saying, for your own sake, that you might want to move that kid.”

The girl glared at Dave and grabbed the stroller. She pushed it over the bumpy grass, glancing over her shoulder at us. Dave bounced the ball twice, caught it again, and sat down next to me. He leaned his elbows on the ball and rolled it to his knees and back.

“What book is that?”

I tipped the cover to show him.

“Blood and guts, the original version,” he said. And giggled. He rubbed the back of his hand under his nose. Then he reached over. I ducked under his hand but he grabbed my hair anyway. He held my head with his fingers knotted in the hair at the nape of my neck. Then he put his other hand over my mouth and said, “No biting. Don’t bite, now, little girl.”

I bit him so that he would move his hand, a pinch, not a real bite. He giggled again and pulled his hands away. I shook my head and opened the book and started reading again.

“What?” he said. “Am I boring you?”

“You’re annoying me. There’s a fine difference, but those with acuity can tell the difference.”

“Acuity. Do you even know what that word means?”

I rolled my eyes without looking up at him.

“So,” he said. And stopped rolling the ball. “Should I have left it here? The little victim? The cute little kid with those big, delicious, juicy—”

I hit him with the book.

He laughed.

“I don’t eat people.”

“You might. Someday.”

I didn’t say anything. Then after a long time, I said, “I wouldn’t eat people.”

He shrugged. “You never know. They might taste good. Jeffrey Dahmer thought so. He was like you. He was antisocial. But he dated people. He liked them. Then he ate them.”

I was quiet for another several seconds. “That’s stupid.”

“What is?”

“Eating your girlfriend.”

Dave laughed. “Well,” he said. “You’ll never know.”

“Why?”

“Because of how you are. No boys will ever date you. I’m pretty much the only person who’ll ever love you.”