There are destined tools in a murderer’s kit. There are objects that are prized for their cruel, metal heft, and there are objects that feel like a gun in the hand.
From the first lover’s quarrel, she knew she was to kill her man. When did murderous blood start to sing in her veins? Birth? Marriage? Insemination, after which she felt too dirty to stand in the shower?
Her stomach was warm with child now, begrudgingly loved. She wanted to kill her man when the baby kicked. She wanted to kill him when her stabbing back pain came back, the result of a spine pulled in by a bulging stomach and pushed out by work. She felt gnarled, rotten, like the trees they had to cut down across the street when they got ash borers.
She found herself believing she could see ghosts. Nobody could tell her she was evil, and no doctor could wholeheartedly diagnose her with anything, so she didn’t quit.
A ghostcat curled up at her feet every night, never opaque enough to earn a name or a dish of milk. A ghostdog accompanied her to the train every working day. She was thoroughly haunted, thoroughly sick.
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Like blood in water, people become murderers, deranged monsters, incapable of anything else. Objects become murder weapons in their own way. They become stained with blood, or too carefully thought about.
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They are fighting now. He has her on the ground, at the mercy of a hammer he’d picked up from a side table. Blood is pooling under her from an especially nasty blow to the head, and she is howling in pain as she clutches a fire poker.
He sneers through a sheen of sweat: “That stupid fucking baby! You hate it so much, don’t you? You want me to get rid of it for you?” Her voice gets more hoarse and desperate with every passing minute. She is wailing now, desperately crying and screaming for him to leave. She doesn’t want to hurt him anymore.
But when her man stomps on her stomach, an infant creature shimmers above her for a moment. Before the form dissipates, the woman is standing. She is again motivated by pure, hot rage. She is going to hunt, she is going to maim and kill.
She punches him hard in the cheekbone, lingering just too long on his face to try and stick a polished fingernail between his eye and the socket. He grabs her arm, and she swings it around in a circle, the only move she ever remembered from her self defense badge. She pushes him away, kicking his stupid, prone body until he falls to the ground.
Pinning him down with her shoe on his chest, she brings the pike down on his jugular. It splits the ligament, driving apart vertebrae and leaving ash in the gaping wound. Warm, dark blood seeps under the peeling linoleum floor tiles.
Her hand flies off the handle of the poker and it clatters to the floor.
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Desperation breeds so quickly that it blinds reason. The fire poker burnt red hot without melting through the plastic of the evidence bag.