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Stroking his hair. Slipping Jos’ gun out of my waistband.

“I’ll take care of you,” I told him.

And then I shot him through the back of the head, twice, right where his topmost vertebra met the base of his skull.

* * *

I buried him upside down, so he’d dig himself deeper. Mud in his big mouth, mud on his traitor tongue. Two days now, and I can still hear him screaming. He’s getting weaker, maybe figuring out what I’ve done—but by now it’s just too late to turn around. He hasn’t got the strength to start over. Playing sick so convincingly, for all those weeks and months—all that year and a half, give or take a few days—maybe he even convinced himself he’d always been that way: The innocent victim, the helpless child.

I should’ve done it a long time ago; I guess I must have always known that, on some level. I sure as hell know it now.

When he’s quiet, I’ll go. I can’t do anything more. I’ll wait until he’s quiet and then I’ll go.

But I am Goddamned, I am God-damned, if I know where.

Rose-Sick

I wanted you. And I was looking for you. But I couldn’t find you.

—Laurie Anderson

O rose, thou art sick.

—William Blake

LOVE BLEEDS, LIKE ANY other wound. And though I believe it can be cauterized, I know I’ve yet to find anything hot enough to do the job.

Prolonged bleeding makes you weak. It tastes like sucking a quarter, but sweeter—the sour-sweetness of your own waste. A fermented-sugar high. Everything goes limp, languid. Dreams float through, breaking up just as they reach visibility: Static on an empty channel. Then the sweetness fades, and you start to ache—because, without either the sweetness or the dreams it spins to distract you, you’re finally awake enough to realize just how empty you’ve already become.

I want you, baby. I want your hands, your hot touch. I want you to lay them on. I want you to sear me clean again.

* * *

There’s a Laundromat of fairly recent mintage up on Yonge Street, the Spin Cycle, where a currently unemployed teacher of English (Romantic poets and Gothic novels a speciality) can load clothes and coin alike unhindered, then retire to the next room and sit comfortably back with the caffeinated beverage of his choice. You go there often, especially so since Lisa hit the highway; in fact, you’re there right now. The Spin Cycle is open all night, clean and quiet, free of memory or temptation. Few people to hit on, or hit back—and those who do turn up with their hands out (i.e., the bums who beg on the pavement just outside) rarely have sex on their minds.

She’s sitting by the window as you come out of the laundry section, having just separated and rebagged your clothing, and slide into place at the end of the bar for a final installment of liquid insomnia. A brief flash of downcast pupil as she notes—and measures—your proximity. Pale smudge of pale hair against the front window’s base-lit glass, indistinct shadow of full mouth under a short, straight hint of nose. Her skin is fair enough to show veins.

Under the lashes, her eyes catch the light: Cloudy blue. Arctic fathoms of lake water, glimpsed through ice. Matching neon rims her lips, bleaching them cyanose.

Cappuccino’s here. You pay, then sip, tensing against the jolt. Count off a shaky string of seconds before you risk a quick glance of your own.

Yes, she’s still looking.

You know you don’t know her. But she’s definitely acting like she knows you—like she knows you intimately, and your failure to acknowledge her is just a part of some kinky game you always play. A dominance thing. (People are into that, these days, or so you’ve heard.) Like she’s waiting for you to take control, to get up and go over, take her arm without a wasted word, and lead her off to some black leather Fantasy Island.

Padded cuffs. Paddles. Cigarettes pressed lightly to the fleshy underside of buttock or breast, right at the juncture, where the sweat’ll make it rub, and really start to smart.

These are freak closet thoughts, dumbed-down revenge fantasies—Lisa’s face hovering disembodied over an EveryCentrefold body, waiting for you to wipe away her sneer. Prospects you would never consider, if you didn’t have the very clear idea that this woman would like you to. That she’d want you.

And here’s the really pitiful part: They’re turning you on.

The foreshadowing of a smile hovers at the corner of that uneven, enticing mouth. She shifts her legs beneath the table, deliberately undeliberate: One smooth motion, pure skin on skin, no apparent panty chaser. Her eyes are lightless, inverse mirrors, archaic camera lenses; there’s someone caught in each of them, a negative reflection on the scrim of her cornea, doubled and reduced to his barest essence, filling her world entirely. And it’s not you, not yet—but for the simple price of a little white lie, it could be. All you have to do is let her recognize you, to be whoever she wants.

Secrecy and decay, Lisa’s voice tells you (giving you back your own words, the ones you once bewitched her with, back in your shared undergraduate days), the key elements of any good Gothic. Your life’s gone rotten, it literally stinks—so much so you spend all your off-time washing clothes, for Christ’s sake—so you want to trade up, identity-wise. Maybe even trade down. To see just how far you can get away from you, from your stupor of loss and hatred, your multi-foliated ache of thwarted desire.

But needs must, when the penis drives. So you snag your laundry and get up, unsteadily, cross towards her, brush by her. Open the door, hold it a half-breath longer than you need to. Waiting.

And she gets up—smile finally blooming, white-ripe; a fleshy desert flower—and follows.