Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

Eric went to look at the target, his breath trailing behind him in feathery clouds. He made an incongruous figure all in black against the snow, with his spiky hair and his sunglasses. He came back clutching the paper target, holding it up like a trophy. "Excellent work. You're beginning to show some consistency. It's not just luck anymore."

They shoved the target in the back of Edie's rusted Pinto and drove downhill to the highway, Eric slouched back in the seat like royalty. He had his own vehicle, a blue Windstar at least ten years old that he kept in perfect running condition, but Eric Fraser never drove unless he had to.

Edie made a left by the old drive-in theater and drove the short distance to Trout Lake. She parked at the marina, under a sign that said, PARKING FOR MARINA CUSTOMERS ONLY. The lake was perfectly smooth, blinding white in the sunlight, except for the ice-fishing huts. Children were skating at the public beach where a square of the lake had been cleared for a rink.

They dodged traffic on the highway and went tramping up the hill. Now and then a toboggan loaded with children shot past them. He loved his walks, Eric, loved the outdoors. Sometimes he walked for three or four hours, out to Four Mile Bay and back, or out past the airport. She would never have guessed this about him, he looked so, well, urban. But the long walks, the hills and snow and quiet, seemed to calm a restlessness in him. It was an honor to share these times with him.

They stepped over a chain-link fence that was bent practically to the ground and continued up the hill past the new pump house. Edie was huffing and puffing long before they got to the top and stood beside the frozen circle of the reservoir. A small plane with skis where its wheels should have been buzzed overhead and wafted down toward Trout Lake. They stood gripping the protective fence with its warnings against swimming in or skating on the reservoir. Edie could see the spot, two hundred yards downhill, where they had buried Billy LaBelle. She knew better than to mention it, though, unless Eric did.

"You know how to be quiet. I like that," Eric had said to her once. He'd been in a sulk the whole day, and Edie had been terrified he was going to tell her he was tired of her, that he was finished with her and her fish face, but instead he had praised her. It was the first time anyone had praised her for anything, and she treasured his words like rubies. Now she could go for hours, not saying anything. When sad thoughts came, or the bitter ache of hating her own face, she just put them aside and remembered his sweet words. Utterly silent, Edie could stand beside him staring at a circle of frozen water, and Eric seemed to like it just fine.

"I'm hungry," he said eventually. "Maybe I'll get something to eat before I drop over."

"Do you want to come for supper?"

"I'll get my own supper." He didn't like her to see him eating. It was one of his peculiarities.

"What if our guest wakes up?" Eric had taught her never to call the guest by name.

"After what you gave him? I don't think so."

Edie turned away from the reservoir and looked out over the hills, the subdivisions around Trout Lake. Smells of pine and woodsmoke hung in the air.

"I wish we didn't have to earn a living," she said. "I wish we could just spend all our time together. Walking places. Learning things."

"Waste of time, most jobs are. And the people. Jesus, I hate them. I hate the bastards."

"Alan, you mean." Alan was his boss, always on Eric's back about something, telling him to do things he'd already done, explaining things he already knew.

"Not just Alan. Carl, too. Fucking faggot. I hate them all. They think they're so fucking perfect. And what they pay me- I'm forced to live in that pigsty."

Edie was getting really cold standing there, but she didn't say anything. When he started talking about people he hated, she knew what was coming. There would be a party, that was Eric's word for it. They already had their guest of honor in safekeeping. A flutter started up in Edie's chest, and suddenly she badly needed a bathroom. She pressed her lips together, holding her breath.

"I think we should move the schedule up a bit," Eric said casually. "Have the party a little earlier than we'd planned. Don't want our guest to get bored, do we."

Edie soundlessly released her breath. Liquid spots swam in the corners of her vision. From far below on the toboggan run, the happy screams of children rose high into the air and echoed off the cold white hills.

BUMP, bump, bump. It made Edie want to scream. They'd just finished dinner half an hour ago, what could she want, now? Bump, bump, bump. Like she's rapping that cane on my skull. Never any peace. Work all day at a nothing job, in a nothing store, in a nothing town, and then come home to what? Bump, bump, bump.

"Edith! Edith, where are you? I need you!"

Edie turned from the sink with a wet plate in her hand and yelled toward the stairs, "I'm coming!" Then, in a normal voice, "You old bitch."

The tree in the backyard swayed, scraping an icy finger on the window. How green and benign that same tree had looked just months ago. Eric had come into her life, and everything had turned into the greenest summer Edie had ever seen.

Bump, bump, bump. She ignored the thump of Gram's cane on the ceiling, willing the icy branch to turn green once more. The whole summer had been rich with color, saturated with a million different shades of green and blue, drenched with the rapture of getting to know Eric. From boredom and nothingness, Eric had created passion. From emptiness, excitement. From misery, thrills.

I am a conquered country, she had written in her diary. I am Eric's to rule as he sees fit. He has taken me by storm. The words put her in mind of another storm, a stupendous blast of wind and rain that had come whipping across the iron gray of Lake Nipissing, last September.

They'd killed the Indian kid. Well, Eric had killed her, technically speaking, but she'd been in on it, she'd helped him pick her up, she'd kept the kid in her house, she'd watched him do it.

"Do you see that look in her eyes?" he'd said. "There's nothing like the look of fear. It's the one look you can trust."

The girl was tied to the brass bedstead, gagged with her own underpants and then a scarf tied round on top of that. All you could see was the tiny little nose, the brown almost black eyes widened to their limit. Deep pools of terror from which you could drink deep and long.

"You can do it just like that," Eric had said a few nights earlier. They had been talking by candlelight in the living room, Gram fast asleep upstairs. Eric liked to come over at night and sit with her in candlelight- not eating, not drinking, just talking or sharing long silences. He had been telling her his ideas for weeks, giving her books to read. He had leaned forward toward the coffee table, the candlelight deepening his sharp features, and snuffed the flame with thumb and forefinger.

And he did it just like that: with a little pinch of the nostrils. Snuffed her little life out with a delicate pinch of thumb and forefinger. It wasn't in the least violent, except for how the girl struggled.

Edie's knees had wobbled, and her stomach had turned over, but Eric had held her, and made her a cup of tea, and explained that it took a little getting used to but that eventually there was nothing like it.

He was right about that. Virtue was just an invention like the speed limit: a convention you could obey or not, as you saw fit. Eric had made her understand that you didn't have to be good, there was nothing forcing you to be good. A realization like that was pure jet fuel in your bloodstream.

That day had been weirdly hot for September, and when the girl was dead the room seemed suddenly full of birds, singing with delicious sweetness. Sunlight spilled through the window like gold.