“Are you going to kill me now?” she says, and the horror is gone and a calmness envelops her pretty features. She’s a little girl once again, and I am a little boy. We are playing in the mud, and she is chopping off worms’ heads. And she is telling me how they will grow a new head and everything will be okay, even if it hurts for a little while.
Am I going to kill her?I wonder.Is that why I brought her here? To kill her? Because if I can’t have her, nobody can? Is that how strong my love for her is? Is that how deep it runs?
“I should,” I say. “You ruined my life. You turned me into a murderer, but I never murdered you, or your dad. I never did those things.”
She nods like she knows, like she understands, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know shit. So I tell her that.
“Don’t you nod at me like you get it, like you have any idea what it’s been like. You don’t know shit, Carrie Brown.”
She looks away with shame.
And I am angry now. Furious, even. Because how dare she nod and presume to know what she put me through. Seeing my mom’s heart break over and over. Being beaten and abused in prison. But worst of all, the feeling of that blade cutting through my dad’s chest, through bone and skin and muscle and then heart. That feeling hasn’t gone away. It did for a while. I blotted it out. But it’s there now. I can feel it running up my arm. The sharp tug as I pulled the blade back out, and bone and muscle cling to the blade in the hopes of resurrecting life out of his body.
It wasn’t her fault. But it wasn’t mine either. Yet I suffered for her all the same. She made me suffer for her. But then, when I think of her life now, of how little she has achieved and how grown-up Carrie is just the same as little-girl Carrie, I wonder if she suffered just like me too.
“Well?” she says. “Are you?”
I stand up and I go toward her, and even though I’m full of rage and hate for her, my hands still want to run through her soft hair. They still yearn to stroke her smooth skin. To feel her thighs wrapped around me while I move in her and on her, feeling her hot breath against my neck. To hear her say she loves me. To finally hear the words that I’ve been chasing for so long. So long that it feels like forever.
She watches me come toward her, and she doesn’t cry though I know she’s afraid. And when I am in arm’s reach, I stop and we stare at one another for a long time. The silence permeates around us. The echo of our entwined breathes bounces off the cold metal walls of the slaughterhouse, and the gun in my hand that burns my palm.
“If you’re going to do it, then just do it,” she says, and though her words are full of defiance I can hear the sadness in her tone. The grief at a life unfulfilled.
Really, it would be the humane thing to do for her. To put her out of this misery.
I feel the trigger under my finger; just one little squeeze and it would all be over. For both of us. This torture that we put ourselves through would be over. No more pain. No more anything.
Just one little squeeze.
“Ethan?” She whispers my name just as a car backfires outside, the abruptness of the bang so loud in my head that I startle.
Carrie startles too.
Her eyes grow even wider with both shock and fear, but she’s brave and she holds my gaze steady and she waits like a good girl. Because she is, deep down, a good girl. Things just got all messed up, and I get that. It happens to me a lot. But hey, maybe that’s just life, right?
I’m not used to holding a gun. The metal is warm against my palm, the gun heavy. My arm is aching from holding it, shaking under the strain.
She sobs. Her lips are quivering, and I frown as the car backfires again.
But, ‘It’s okay, Carrie,’ I soothe. ‘Everything is going to be okay now. Because I’m going to set you free—I’m going to set us both free.’
