“What are you doing?”
“Already told you.”
“No.”She scans the polar night, searching for me in the shadows.“You didn’t tell me you were leaving.”
“We have all these talks, but you haven’t heard a thing.”
But she does hear me.The problem is she can’t hear the dead parts inside me.
“You’re standing on the edge of the cliff for the same reason I stood there two months ago.”She moves closer.“Leo talked me down that day, and I’m so fucking grateful.”
Sure, she is.She’s also terrified, freezing, starving, and facing a looming, excruciating death.
“The idiot should’ve let you jump.”The lie is easier to swallow than the thing breaking the bones in my chest.
“You don’t mean that.”
“We’re murderers.”
Oh, she hatesthattruth and comes at me with her flapping, frantic kindness, throwing words like lifelines, trying to talk me off the ledge.Begging, bargaining, and making promises about bright futures.
She says all the right things and nails every line that used to latch onto me, but the hooks don’t catch anymore.I’m done talking.Done hurting.Done feeling.I’m just done.
“I want to die.”Like a coward, I aim the pistol at the space between her ribs.“In my heart, I’m already dead.I need you with me.We can finally be together.”
Her eyes dart to my finger on the trigger.“Wait!Please, I don’t want to die.Not like this.”
I would never hurt her.She knows that.
“I love you.”It’s small, true, and entirely useless.It’s the last honest thing I have to give.
Training the gun away from her, I pull the trigger.The shot cracks, and white-hot pain detonates up my arm.Kody’s voice cuts through the shocking, blinding agony, and I look down at the arrow sticking out of my bicep.
He shot me.He actually fucking shot me.
Leo emerges from the dark with a rifle as Kody reloads another bolt.
It all arranges into neat geometry—Frankie in front, them at angles of protection, me the loose thing in the middle.
“You’re choosing her over your own brother?”I spit at them, dizzy with blood loss and shame.
“No, they’re not,” Frankie cries as Kody shouts, “Yes,” and that one word, that final truth, makes me instantly, violently sick.
Sick with envy.Sick with wrath.Sick with all the deadly sins.
I drop the gun, spread my arms like Christ on the cross, and step back.I’m hellborn and hell-raised, and so I let hell pull me back in.
The fall is a slow burn of moments I want to forget.A collapse of memory and regrets.The wind strips breath from my mouth.My stomach climbs into my throat.My whole life becomes a long, mournful note on the saxophone.
Will they miss me?The thought islame and painfully human.But the answer is omnipotent.
Yes.
Yes, they’ll fucking miss me, and they’ll suffer for this.
In a tunnel of wind that’s mine to die in, something inside me startles awake.Not heroism.Not courage.It’s a single godawful thought.
I can’t let them drag my body from the river.I can’t throw them a corpse and call it escape.Picturing Frankie and my brothers sifting through pieces of scattered bone and organs… That’s the too-late image that changes my mind.
