FIVE

THREE DAYS WITH THE DEAD

Time runs like blood in snow. Everything is red and melting.

The sun is up. Then it’s not. Then it’s back. Then ice is hissing against the windowpanes. A mouse chews somewhere in the deep of the wall. A TV comes on. Video games. Maury Povich. Someone yelling. Someone laughing. A knock at the door. A candy bar shoved under it. She eats it greedily, a feral child starving. She sees the mouse in the corner. Eyes glinting, whiskers twitching.

Shoo.

Fuck off.

You’re free to go.

The mouse stays until it can get the candy wrapper. It sits on it. Licking chocolate. Then its paws. Then it’s gone.

The Trespasser comes. Dead Ben with his head blown apart. Dead gang-banger with his skull popped open. Louis with one eye, no eyes, three eyes. Eleanor Caldecott with a crow’s head peeking out of her mouth, squawking, picking tongue-meat. Andrew the yuppie prick with a twenty-dollar bill clutched in the clench of broken teeth. Red Wren, the girl with wings. Harriet, gunsmoke from both nostrils. Ingersoll tumbling down an endless spiral of lighthouse stairs. One-foot Ashley chasing her in a wheelchair.

The Trespasser never speaks.

He-she-it doesn’t have to.

Her castigation comes in her own voice:

You shouldn’t have killed that kid.

She’s killed before. (Uncle Jack’s voice intrudes: Nicely done, killer. But don’t tell your mother about this! Then he laughs, that asshole.) But this time was different. The other times felt earned and owned. Like she’d been drawn into something. Drawn into a grim purpose, into a tug-of-war that wasn’t her fight but was hers to lose or win just the same. Hers is the thumb on the scale. Balance by way of imbalance.

But then this. Andrew on the bus. A year’s worth of waiting. It was just an experiment. Just to see. Is this who she is? Is this what she does? She chose him randomly. She didn’t even like him. She liked Louis. Loved him, even. She liked Wren. They deserved life. Andrew deserved—

It didn’t matter what he deserved. That’s the thing. She wasn’t invested in what was owed to him. That kid, the dead kid in the Eagles jacket, who was he? Poor kid. Fucked-up life. Cigarette burns and undone shoelaces. Maybe that two hundred bucks would have changed everything for him. Maybe Andrew would have been his first and only kill. Maybe Andrew was the monster. Maybe he’d become a serial killer. Or run a bank that would one day foreclose on an orphanage. Or maybe he’d just never make anything of himself, maybe the girlfriend would shove that ring right up his ass, maybe he’d skulk off and suck on a tailpipe—

An endless string of possibilities like little crow skulls threaded with barbed wire. There in the sky of her mind, swallows dancing, mockingbirds mocking, the featherless heads of hungry vultures plunging deep into meat but finding no sustenance, the scream of a thunderbird, the shriek of a shrike—

Infinite variables, a ladder made of maybes.

You fucked up.

You chose badly.

Then one day it’s over.