Note: This is a short story I published in first draft form a few months ago on Medium. I’ve since been working on it and will continue to tinker. It’s not exactly where I want it, but I have an idea of how I want to flesh this out a little more. This is the sort of story where I don’t want a lot of backstory because of the immediacy of the story (and in telling in mostly in the present tense, first person). For me, this story is about an awakening after loss. And I’m also playing with dark humor because candidly this is how I think. I laugh through darkness as a means to cope and I want to infuse that vibe in my work.
This is the first step in working on my new book—I take stories I like and have already written and re-work them. I’ve got a few (including the Lister series, which I’m cutting down and reworking substantially as I didn’t love where the series went after the first two installments).
In the past few months I’ve changed the focus of my book to less about everyone dying and more about broken people in various states of repair (or, in this case, disrepair). I have a few ideas centering on marriage being the flaw of love, re-evaluating the notion of marriage to focus instead of union and partnerships that don’t rely on archaic traditions of a man owning a woman. I also want to address cults (the obvious and not-so-obvious kind) and mental illness.
If you don’t dig fiction, I don’t know what to tell you. If you like what you’ve read, let me know, share this newsletter, blah, blah, blah. :)
On an unrelated note, I’ll be moving away from Medium more after the new year. Why? Mostly because of things like this, among other reasons. Apparently, you can’t escape creepy bros on the platform no matter how much you block and mute them.
I Wonder When You’ll Miss Me
Look at you, smelling of days-old tobacco, bad haircuts, and a lifetime of regret. Look at me, hands and feet stuffed into Ikea bags. You were surprised how much weight those bags could carry. I can’t swim without my arms and legs. All I can do is dig deeper through the dirt. All I can feel are the worms curling around my toes and the insects on my skin. Don’t you realize how much I miss my head? Where did you put it? My head? All I can see from the deep is a dog missing its teeth. Remember my hair and how it smelled of ash because you burned it?
Did you, do it? Take the dog’s teeth? Me, I understand. I mean, I get it. Men cut up women for sport. I can’t tell you what infuriates me more—how your laughter seemed louder than my screams or the hours I lost after. Because the afterlife is all James Taylor “Fire and Rain,” menthols, and so many rules. It’s like life, only a little worse. There are no pristine white gates and gossamer clouds, only endless lists of what you can and cannot do. There is no complaining, no asking to speak to the manager because what if I get shipped off to another place and its worse? I’m learning it’s best to take what I can get.
People wonder about the celebrities and serial killers. Do I run into Elizabeth Taylor and Ted Bundy? Or is it like life where they exist in separate cages—she in her multi-million gated community and he behind the iron bars of a jail cell. Mostly, it’s people like me who can barely remember before, furious that all their prayers and do-gooding got them to this place. To say this isn’t what we expected would be an understatement. This is what I get after getting kidnapped, killed, dismembered, and thrown away like garbage? Apparently, yes.
But let’s get back to the dog sans teeth. I see the curl of its hair. You did this to a poodle? That’s a whole new low. The poodle’s personal. Know I hold grudges of all kinds. Maybe that’s why I’m here and can’t move on to the next place. I’m furious with you.
And there you go, digging me up. Perhaps it’s because of Tanya, the neighbor who peers out her window waiting for something, for you to be the creep she believes you to be. Perhaps it’s all the dogs paraded up and down the street who love to pull over on their leashes and dig. Or maybe you’ve got one too many women tucked away here and you’re hitting no vacancy. Time to relocate and move on. You barrel down the 10, weaving in and out of exits. Not sure where to go because you always had somewhere to put women like me. Near your home, closer to you. But now you’ve got to relocate, find someplace new and you’re not good with new. I mean, you nearly lost it last week when your corner store ran out of the brand of oatmeal in that flavor you always eat. Yes, I can hear what you’re thinking—it’s one of the perks of the dead.
You hit the brakes and turn around, half expecting to find me alive in the back seat instead of packed away in an Ikea bag in the trunk. Did you lose the plot? You’ve never heard voices before, especially someone this loud and persistent. You get out of the car, open the trunk, and palm the bag. I’m still there, in pieces. You search for my phone because maybe it’s a recording. It’s beneath the bag, under me. But there’s only a cracked black screen from when you threw it down on the ground. Smarter still because now I can’t be located or tracked. I roll the eyes I no longer have and shout this isn’t a recording. This is real. I am here. I am not going away.
“You’re not real. This is all in my head. You’re in my head.”
“Oh, Mitch. I’m only just getting started.”
*
Before Mitch barreled down the street, ran me over, scooped me up in his arms, tossed me in the back seat of his car, and drove me to his house where he cut me up and tried to bury me in his backyard of all places, I was a normal person. A person who couldn’t get an Uber and walked home from the bar where I found my boyfriend hooking up with a woman who had that new car smell. I was a person who scrolled Instagram and wondered about the life I could live. I’m in Porto. I’m on a juice cleanse. I’m wearing expensive footwear.
Before Mitch hacked me to bits, I was scrolling flights and ordering blenders because why not Porto? Why not liquify vile, inedible vegetables? Here I was, being influenced. Saying blah, blah, blah to my negative checking account balance. Blasting mumble rap without my headphones on.
Because you only live once until some guy runs you over.
In the afterlife, I dream about plastering my ex-boyfriend’s head with post-it notes. Imagine if I’d been enough. Imagine if he hadn’t mauled that Shein-wearing, Alabama-Slammer-drinking whore. Imagine if he would’ve left her and drove me home because I couldn’t get a cab, and maybe we would’ve hate-fucked, or I would’ve sliced his face open with a dish I hurled his way because that sometimes happens. Do you miss me now? But none of this happens. Instead, he’s sad for two days and uses my death to ball Instagram bikini models.
All I have left is torturing Mitch under the guise of getting closure. What is closure exactly? The lid of my empy casket in the grave my brother might dig if he wasn’t on a conference call because is anyone ever going to find me? Where will Mitch end up leaving me? I don’t like the idea of my body being alone and cold, even if it’s parts of me.
*
Mitch might have run over a four-year-old in Texas and Texas is possibly the worst place to murder a child. Texas will gas you first and then go to work on you. Mitch didn’t mean it. Or maybe he did because this wasn’t the first time he introduced himself by way of metal. This wasn’t the first time he saw blood on the pavement. He could tell you that his mother locked him in the cabinet under the sink and beat him with an extension cord, but sympathy has its limits. It expires when he wraps the cord around a child’s neck and she howls and cries until she goes limp, and he buries her under the floorboards because although he hates her, he wants her close. Sometimes, he would reach between the cracks and touch her hair. He loved the feel of it between his fingers. Though if you asked him, he wouldn’t know her name.
Mitch could tell you he drove to Nevada where his father lived in a cheap motel and how his father said over and over, I don’t know you. Even after Mitch tied him to the bed and doused his face, flannel shirt and dungarees with gasoline, struck a match, and watched the room burn, his father wouldn’t know him. It’s a terrible thing to have no one. He had all this pain, and he didn’t know where to put it. So, why not make everyone feel a fraction of what he feels?
Mitch could tell you many things, but none of them would be true. He grew up in Woodmere, on the South Shore of Long Island, to a mother who was proud of her fried chicken cutlets and a father who vivisected feelings for a living. Mitch played lacrosse, went to community college, and worked as an actuary for an insurance company. His job was to travel the country and calculate risk.
So why do you chop up little girls, he imagines an interview under bright lights and a boom microphone over his head. He pictures a scenario where people try to understand him. Dissect him like surgery. But there was no dark country through which he waded through. There were no beatings in the closet and burns on his neck. There was only the gas, the engine, the foot, the accelerator, the table, the saw, and the Ikea bags. Mitch pictures himself shrugging. Wearing a suit two sizes too small. Smiling. Because they’re not all little. They’re not all girls.
Because I like it, he says. They cut to commercial, and the room goes black.
*
That’s the deepest hole you can dig. Are you kidding me? I deserve at least six feet. I deserve protection from the elements. Hidden away from random coyotes looking to make a meal of me. I breathe down Mitch’s neck, whisper in his ear, maw his shoulder, and he shakes me away and tries to shoot me with the gun in his glove, and I laugh and say, “You gonna shoot a dead girl with your big, big gun?”
“Where are you?” He shouts.
“What do you mean, where am I? I’m here, where you can see me.”
We’re in Twentynine Palms, in the high desert, and Mitch must be losing the plot because this is military country. You don’t bury a torso near a base. You don’t drag a bloody Ikea bag around hundreds of guys with assault rifles. But he tells me to cool it, he’s killed in Texas. He could fill Ted Cruz’s house with body bags. And by the by, the “military” here are sloppy drunks always trying to ball tourists in Joshua Tree.
“Don’t oversell,” I say. “You’ve killed like seven people. Hardly enough to stack in a senator’s bathroom.”
“How do you know?” He catches himself. “Listen, I said I could.”
Mitch may know Lompoc and Dallas and Huntsville, but the ground here is hard on the level of concrete. There’s only sand, gravel, and rock, and Mitch calculates the hours of work and hauls me back in the trunk and drives to Pinyon Pines. I could feel the car soar, but it’s only the elevation. The air is cool, crisp and unlike Los Angeles in November. If I wasn’t dead, I would’ve needed a sweater. Then I hear what sounds like snow tap-tapping the car and I nearly shout at him to pull over because it’s been years since I’ve seen snow. I deserve first snow.
“You seem to deserve a lot for a dead woman,” Mitch snaps, adjusting the knobs of the radio station but there’s only static and my voice running at sotto voce, enough for Mitch to pull over and make a mess of someone else but all the signs say this is a town of 161 people and he doesn’t like the numbers. You need a bigger population for the work he likes to do.
“Do you even know my name?” I shout.
“I don’t need to know your name.”
I shout Daphne over and over hoping it would break him in two. Then we’d both be broken.
You owe me snow, I think, but I save it for when he carries me through a hiking trail. I save it for a short woman in soft pants with a taser in her pocket because she’s from New York and no way was she hiking alone without artillery. I save it for the moment she electrocutes him and discovers me in the bag and screams and screams and screams because although she’s a New Yorker, a torso in an Ikea bag is a lot.
I imagine myself in Porto, wearing goatskin sandals. I imagine myself whole rather than the sum of my parts. I wonder when people will start missing me. When will they realize I’m gone?
*
Mitch has rules and the four-year-old was a deviation from the script. That time, it was an accident, plain and simple. He got in the rental, gullet filled with brisket and beer, and drove the back roads home because maybe there’d be a woman on the way, maybe not, and the girl was sledding through the grass — sledding! — when she skidded out onto the road and then the thump under the wheel. Crack of bone. A tiny squeal much like an animal. Mitch stood over her for the five minutes it took for her to die. Headlights shining her face. He knelt on the ground, took her in his arms, and held her. Like how a child would clutch close their favorite toy. Mitch brushed the hair from her eyes and kissed her cheek. Laid her and her sled back on the grass from which she’d come and drove home.
Later, he’d read about the mother waking from a stupor and screaming. Later, he’d see photographs splashed across the local paper of a girl in pigtails and a road covered in her blood. Funny how he didn’t remember blood. Had there been blood? Had he tapped her or did her body soar through the air to collapse on the cold pavement? Later, he’d drive from Texas to Oklahoma to Kansas, alternating between trying to forget and trying to rewind the tape.
Mitch told himself it was an accident. But how good did her cooling body felt in his arms, the smell of soap on her skin, her hair?
*
Before Mitch gets tasered, arrested, and sentenced to death in four states, I want to lay it on thick. Though he doesn’t care about what I’ve lost only that I won’t stop talking. The talking’s what bothers him. The fact that I’m the first of eight to open my mouth and state my case. Telling him all the things I wish I would’ve done. All the people I would’ve loved and left. How I’d never know what it was like to not wrap my fingers around my wrist and panic if I wasn’t still small. If I could’ve just eaten the damn muffin. How I died without ever having a passport or having visited another country. I have so much to say—my body becomes a torrent when the others went quietly. Yes, there were screams and squirms and kicking of the feet, but after it was the cleanest of quiet.
Mitch loves the space he occupies between the screams and the shovel over the dirt. He feels clean and safe and warm. It reminds him of his mother’s chicken cutlets and his father patting his back. Smoothing his hair. But more importantly, Mitch doesn’t feel alone. We still have our scent. Our bodies have only just begun to cool. We haven’t yet moved on to rigor mortis. We are asleep and he would curl up beside us and sob into our hair. He’d weep for all the hate and love and pain and anger and rage he has with no place to put it. But he doesn’t weep for the women or the lives he took. For him, they are tissues. They are things he could weep into. They are things he could talk to. No different from boxes of Kleenex or stuffed pillows.
With me, there’s nothing but loud sounds. There’s no peace, no sleep — just me prattling on about my ex-boyfriend and the life I could have lived. I show him my Instagram feed, which was aspirational and somewhat desperate, and he says he’s not on social media. People like you exist? Serial killers, for sure. They’re all over Netflix. Horrible men played by hot actors. But people who aren’t on social media? Explain this, please. He has no explanation.
But maybe I’m in denial or angry or frightened because who could possibly process getting run over, chopped up, and dragged around a car for hours waiting to be buried? I tell Mitch I am processing this.
No more rain, no more jasmine bushes in spring or bougainvillea that smelled of nothing when you expected perfume. No more sandwiches from the good place in Larchmont. No more walking on pavement and feeling the burn of the sun on my neck. No more toes in the sand and ice cream on Santa Monica Pier. No more rage blackout holidays where my racist family would speak, and I would shout in return. But there was my mother’s sweet potato pie. There was my sister studying organic chemistry. There was Buddy the rescue pit bull who slept on your legs until you went numb. No more of this. No more first dates, first fucks, first ache and heartbreak and who cares because we lived for it happening all over again because maybe, just maybe, he’ll be the one who’ll set your heart on pause instead of your teeth on edge.
No more dreaming of wearing black and blue on your wedding day and having children and wondering if you were built for this — would you be a good mother even if your family was a colossal disappointment? No more catching your face in the mirror and watching it thin and wrinkle and age and it’s fine, perfectly fine, because there’s your son with his boyfriend he’s marrying after the parade of assholes who broke his heart, and there’s your husband who’s decidedly not an asshole. Your husband who knows you crave cherries all seasons. Your husband who realizes you’re a cactus but is willing to stick it out because of the beautiful bloom. No more dying on your own terms. No more closing your eyes and smiling because while this might not have been one for the books, it was damn close.
This is all hitting me now and it hurts in ways and places I couldn’t have imagined.
I’m twenty-six, in the back of Mitch’s car. Finally going through rigor mortis, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone although it’ll happen to everyone. But humor is how I deal. I laugh when I’m terrified. I laugh at funerals because it’s impossible for me to cry; I’m a cactus who hoards all her water. When I felt the hit of the car, I laughed. When I saw the saw, I laughed. When we drove hours to the desert and the mountains, I laughed. When I felt the chill of the cold on the remainders of me, I laughed.
It's only when a woman hiking at daylight, a woman who maybe senses something, a woman who could smell something, a woman who takes a taser out of her coat pocket. Then, Mitch and I go down. It’s only when she opens the bag and screams so loud it wakes the 217 people who live in a small mountain town, do I cry.
Here I am, my whole life, holding on to it all, and there I go, a river. I am a flood, a tidal, a tsunami. And then I’m angry because it takes me dying to finally feel something. But I’m also a grudge-holder who will go to work on Mitch when he’s here with me.
I’m patient. I can wait. Because of the poodle, because of me.
Lacrosse - check, community college - check , actuary - check. He's a serial killer alright.
Awesome work as always Fee! Thanks for sharing.
OMG. I love this. Yesss queen. More please.