She liked to hide the bodies in unlikely places. Today an overpass. Tomorrow beneath it. Today’s body was unique for her though. She’d met him two years earlier. Appreciative of her ‘work’ he’d said.
There were lots of lost morbid souls in the world she’d realized long ago. His was no different because like all the others he’d found her even when the authorities couldn’t. Or maybe they hadn’t tried because in some ways she was offering a service that themselves might’ve been slightly envious of.
She was helping to rid the world of murderers, rapist, malicious criminals whom upon the end of their spree wanted something more of the world they’d already taken so much from and she obliged them.
As she did me.
When I first scoped her, I thought to make her my next victim. No doubt she’d come across others like me that had likely thought the same thing. She’d even caught me staring across the fountain numerous times. The water shooting out just behind her, it was the place she took her breakfast and sometimes her lunch. Dinner was reserved for the bench. She took all her meals outside, even during the winter months. I like to believe it was this curiousness on my part that spared her.
One spring afternoon I sat beside her on the ledge of the fountain. “I’d like to be posed at a pier in San Diego, hands collapsed, staring at the ocean with a smile on my face and my eyelids sewn shut.”
She nibbled on her tuna melt and dabbed a small trace that lingered near the corner, “What about what lies beneath?”
“I want you to remove them and send-”
“That’s not what I do,” she interrupted before I could finish.
I thought she might be resistant to that. “They’re for someone,” I lied but immediately I thought about the blind woman I’d made a widow. I thought of her. I remembered her husband and the way it felt.
“I want them out,” I said.
“You’ll have to do that yourself then,” she said as she took another bite. “When is the expiration date?”
“A year from now.” She’d stopped midair from taking another bite.
“Have you not settled your debts? My fee doesn’t change for anyone,” she said and for this she turned and looked at me head on. It was the first time anyone had really looked at me in a long time, except my victims, they had no choice but to stare doe eyed as their life slipped right before them.
“That’s what the year is for,” I said, another lie but again I thought of the blind woman then the boy whose mother had been snatched by the monster in the night.
“Tomorrow,” she said disrupting my spiraling mind and it’s debt. “You’ve watched me for this amount of time. If you haven’t settled them by now, you won’t ever settle them.”
“But you’re fee,” I said not really caring but curious by the sudden change. She stood up and the wind swept her sandy brown and black lockes. “You’ll still do it?”
“I know what you are,” she said looking down at me with that gaze of hers. She tossed me a phone, “Find your pier by tomorrow evening and I’ll be there.
Do you know what the dead can’t tell you? What it’s really like. Sure there are the assumptions even by the well-researched but what you can’t expect is the unexpected so when I awoke in the middle of the night with my arms bound and my mouth suddenly coming alive with feeling I knew she’d already begun.
She worked with a quiet ferocity even as more and more of me became aware of places that had already been poked and prodded. My mouth sewn shut so when she asked, “What to do with your eyes?” I knew it was a question she’d never intended for me to answer.
As she went in for the eyeball I hadn’t felt any solidarity. There was no peace. I screamed into my cheeks and blacked out.
I never woke again. I’m not sure when the dying took place. I couldn’t see the world anymore. I couldn’t beg for forgiveness. I don’t think I wanted to and yet I wanted this feeling. I felt the moist air. The sea breeze was there. Everything was as it should for one fleeting moment it seemed.
I pictured my body posed and somewhere on my skin would be her signature, my identifier SB #11. Somewhere she’d post my history, my victims, and somewhere she’d place my eyes. I don’t know where and didn’t really care.
I wasn’t owed anything.
I just didn’t want to see what came next.
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