Memory loosens her hold as
the sun
subsides and
night enters
the fray
I fell
toward you, I know
even as the
first breath of loss
corrupted my
lungs
but truth is
an endless singing in
the ears
I cannot
quiet it
I must bend
my knees before
the moon
as need suffers
another
death
Alturis spun the hunting knife in slow circles, a thoughtful expression on his face. “You must have been sad to leave your friends when you moved here," he said.
“Not really.”
He arched an eyebrow, an invitation to explain. Megan didn’t
particularly want to, but given that he was the psychopath with a hunting knife—and her
only hope was to keep him talking—she forced herself to say, “I’m not good at
having friends.”
“You’re a woman. All women have friends.”
Megan laughed a little. “Not in my case. I mean, I tried to.
I wanted to have friends. But something always got in the way.”
“Such as?”
“Well…when I was little, and I lived with my mom, we moved around a lot. Even if we stayed in one place for a while, people
figured out pretty quickly that she was a drug addict and we were poor, so no
one wanted their kids to play with me. By the time I went to live with my aunt
and uncle I was just tired of trying, I guess. And it was embarrassing to
explain why I didn’t live with my mother.”
“But you are an adult now. No one cares about your mother
anymore.”
“It still feels like too much work. I guess I’m just not comfortable with small talk,”
Megan admitted. “I’m not that great at just sitting around chatting with people. I
can do it for a little while, but then I get tired, and people realize I’m
weird.”
Alturis made a dismissive noise. “In my experience there is nothing weird about
the inability to make small talk.”
Megan didn’t ask him what those experiences were. The last
thing she wanted to do was to remind him why they were sat in the Miller’s
kitchen, with Mr. and Mrs. Miller dead in the living room.
“No friend in Minneapolis, though?” Alturis pressed. “Not a
single one?”
Megan allowed herself to look away from that knife, as she said, “I had one friend for a little while. Someone I met at my yoga class."
"Had?"
Megan shrugged.
Alturis peered at her, the knife suddenly still. Her heartbeat exploding again, Megan rushed out, "She was funny, yet really nice at the same time. I almost felt comfortable around her. We’d go out to lunch after class and I’d come back not hating myself like I usually did after social experiences.”
“What went wrong?”
"I don't know. It--well, Alice said I spent too much time at home
alone, so she started inviting me along when she and her friends went out to
see a movie or a show. At first it was okay, even nice. But then I realized one
of her friends—Jody—didn’t really like me. That would have been okay, except
she and Alice were as thick as
thieves.”
Megan stopped short at this ill-advised metaphor. If Alturis felt
insulted by it—because, after all, he was a crook as well as a murder—he didn’t
show it. After a moment Megan cleared her throat and continued, “I got the
sense that Jody was making fun of me, and that Alice was laughing along with
her.”
“How
so?”
“They were always making jokes about people. And then I saw some
back and forth between them on Facebook that seemed to reference things I’d
said. I’m not always—smooth. I can say sort of
dumb things.”
Snorting, Alturis replied, “This is true of us all, is it
not?”
“I guess. And maybe I was reading too much into everything--maybe they weren’t talking about me at all. But I don't think so. I know I can be paranoid, but I have a pretty good radar for this stuff, after all those years of people judging my mom, and then me by extension.”
“That is very sad, if true—and if not, even more sad that
you doubted Alice.”
“It's impossible to say,” Megan answered. She was generally willing to accept she might be wrong, and god knew, with this she had wanted to be
wrong. She’d really liked Alice. The problem was, she couldn’t quite make
herself believe it. “But that's over now,” she said. “In a way I was
glad to move—to get away from the not knowing. It was a relief to just
be done with it.”
His hunting knife in motion again, Alturis
concluded, “And now here you are.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “Now here I am.”
