August 2, 2017
Fuck. Fuck.
This is what it’s going to be like, she thought, interrupted halfway through applying the day’s lipstick by the realization that she’d forgotten the sigil. This is what it’s going to be like: hours of blithe complacency—then the drenching shock of your own incompetence. She was an idiot. She deserved everything that was coming to her.
She wanted to take the makeup off, now, since putting it on had been so wildly precipitate. Instead she completed her bottom lip, tore out of the bathroom, and raced downstairs.
Her purse was still on the Volvo’s backseat. Of course it was. It had been sitting there, innocently guilty, all night and half the day. She opened it, scrabbled through the contents, found the folded piece of paper with the hand-drawn copy of the symbol she’d made. No time for fun and games with the chiminea now—but setting light to it indoors was out of the question. The odor of burning would linger, especially in a house like this, where mere empty space smelled as if it had been piped in from some dimension utterly unsullied by life.
She hurried back to the shed, found the matches, then went over to the storm drain. Matches. Sulfur. There’d once been a brand called “Lucifer,” she thought. She’d read it somewhere, or seen it in an old movie. Murder threw up these charming synchronicities. With the whimsy of the real Lucifer, in fact.
The single sheet of paper burned quickly, though she had to keep shifting her fingers to avoid the flame. When all but a few blank scraps remained, she fed them into the storm drain’s grid and stood for a few moments in the warm afternoon air, forcing herself to go over her actions again. What other oversights or fuckups littered her criminal wake? Maybe she’d left the gun in a ladies’ room? Maybe she’d neglected to flush the bleach or dump the tools in the lake? Maybe she’d neglected to bury him? If you were an idiot—as, manifestly, she was—anything was possible.
Eventually, after perhaps five minutes of wild speculation, she gave up and went back to the house. Either she’d made no other mistakes or she’d lost the ability to identify them. Regardless, the philosophical calm had returned. Quod scripsi, scripsi, as Pontius Pilate had said. There was no undoing it now.
She went to the kitchen freezer and took out a steak for tomorrow night’s dinner.
The right freezer, she told herself, with a mad Shakespearean image of what going to the wrong one would cost her. The right freezer, the right kind of meat.