Page 6

D eath denies Johnny on .

The chemical scent of house paint wakes her.

It’s dark, all sense of time stripped from the third-floor apartment.

She does not remember dreaming, and her thoughts come in piecemeal fragments.

The sliding glass door is painted streaky black, drying in clumps.

Whether night or day, Johnny is no longer sorry.

Her hair sticks to the tile where the blood has dried, weaker strands are ripped out as she sits.

“You killed me,” Johnny says, reaching for her throat.

It’s crusty but intact.

Alice pokes her head out from the bedroom, once again a woman.

In her hand, a paintbrush drips globs.

“I only beat you to the punch.”

There’s a pounding in Johnny’s skull.

She’s slow to stand.

“No.” The room feels as if it might tip over.

She braces on the hallway wall, letting her vision spin.

“No. What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” Alice sets the paint can on the floor.

The scent is thick, almost unbearable, and it burns Johnny’s eyes.

“I went through your bag.”

The room steadies and Alice grabs a bag from beside Lucy’s crate.

She drops it on the table, letting the contents clatter inside.

With the same two fingers that just Monday were inside of Johnny, coaxing her to climax, Alice fishes a knife from the bag, then lays it on the coffee table.

She pulls out the length of black rope, setting it beside the knife, then the roll of silver duct tape.

Alice arranges them next to one another, lining them up, one-two-three.

“When you had that duct tape yesterday, I got to thinking,” Alice says, adjusting the slant of the knife to a perfect ninety degrees.

“I knew you were pissed, but this seems overboard, don’t you think?”

Johnny’s mind gets busy: She knows.

She knows about Brenda Ramburg and the stalking and now the tape and knife and rope.

Alice will leave her.

Alice will certainly, absolutely leave.

She will flee from the apartment shrieking like a banshee.

My ex is crazy! She’s trying to kill me!

My ex is crazy! Please help!

But when Alice looks up at her, there’s no fear on her face, just curiosity, both childlike and sinister.

Alice lifts the duct tape, digs a fingernail under the lip and frees a length with a ripping sound.

She bites and tears, pulling off a strip about four inches long.

“Is this what you wanted?” It’s a playful challenge born of complete exhaustion.

Alice holds each end so the strip is parallel to her mouth.

Johnny doesn’t know what to say.

Her mind is empty of excuses.

“You want to kill me, Johnny?”

This is how it ends , she thinks.

Lucy’s frozen in her crate, whites showing around her black, beady eyes.

“Is that why you stalked me to the Speakeasy? To kill me?” Alice tilts the strip of duct tape back and forth.

Stalked. “I wasn’t going to—” The sound of denial is all wrong.

It’s meek. Unsatisfying.

False. She wants to grip the truth with both hands, cleave to it, dig in her fingernails.

Alice flips the tape back and forth, letting it stick to different fingers like a juvenile game.

Alice thinks everything is a game.

Thinks Johnny is a game.

A joke. Something to be toyed with.

“You want to kill me? I’ll make it easy for you. Look!” She points to a glob of paint on the glass.

“I even blacked out the windows.” Alice sticks the tape to her face, holding the flap over her lips.

“I would rather be dead than stuck here with you.” She smooths it across her mouth, then sits on the sofa and joins her wrists together, offering them up to Johnny and eying the rope.

The quality rope. Black thread, strong, smooth.

Even when planning revenge, Johnny couldn’t imagine skimping on frayed, prickly rope.

It’s light in Johnny’s hand as she unwinds the loop and drapes the center over Alice’s wrists.

Glacial eyes watch every movement, unafraid.

Does she really think that Johnny won’t do it?

After all she’s done to hurt her?

She loops the rope over Alice’s wrists once, before realizing it’s all wrong, more coy than violent.

Alice doesn’t love her.

Not then and not now.

And how dare she? How dare she?

She pushes Alice face down onto the sofa, yanking her arms behind her and tying her wrists tight with unforgiving knots.

Alice doesn’t flail, doesn’t cry out.

The only sound she makes is an uncomfortable keen when Johnny jerks her arms up at a severe angle and grabs Alice’s phone from the coffee table.

“Passcode,” she says.

It’s hard to hear the shape of words through the tape, but with enough repetitions, the phone unlocks.

Johnny opens the photo album, scrolling down to the hidden folder.

Face ID required.

Johnny holds the phone to Alice’s face.

Her lover’s features are pinched with discomfort.

Face ID failed.

Face ID failed.

Face ID failed.

A quick rip of the tape, a flash of the screen, and the folder unlocks.

Johnny secures the tape back over Alice’s mouth, surprised when Alice doesn’t scream.

Does she really want to die?

Johnny wonders as she scrolls.

Or does she think I’m too cowardly to do it?

The folder is a treasure trove of lingerie mirror selfies and elicit shower pics obscured by steam.

Some, Johnny recognizes.

Others, she doesn’t.

The most recent show a woman, strawberry blonde with square-rimmed glasses, front teeth a bit too large for her features, cheek pressed to Alice’s and toasting with a beer bug Johnny recognizes from the Berlin trip.

“There was a woman in Berlin,” Johnny says.

And then again. “There was a woman in Berlin.” She knew, Johnny assumed it must be true, but to see it, to have it confirmed, hurts.

It fucking hurts. “How many more are there, Alice?” She opens the text messages, finding Brynne right at the top.

A quick scroll up reveals emojis: kissy face, wet, hot.

I love the taste of your pussy.

Come get it.

Nobody makes me scream like you do.

I’ll drop off Lucy in the morning.

Thx for watching her!

“How many?!” Johnny screams, tossing the phone so it flops onto the sea-soaked area rug below.

Lies. All of it was lies.

She pushes Alice’s shirt up, exposing her scapula, the vertebrae between.

Fine hairs rise along the length of her spine.

Johnny snatches the knife from the table and drags it, smoothing those hairs back down, keenly attuned to the soft scraping sound it makes against Alice’s flesh.

The blade is thick, curved at the end with a mean-looking hole.

A hunting knife. Johnny bought it a month ago for a different game.

A hunt. She bought it to hunt Alice.

When Johnny traces the perimeter of the lowest rib, Alice pushes her head into the sofa cushion to muffle a pained groan.

A red line raises, a bloody little half-moon.

Would Alice still dampen her cries if Johnny slid the blade between those ribs?

She thinks not. She thinks that scream would buck against the duct tape, that Alice’s head would wrench back, tears pouring from her eyes, smearing the remnants of yesterday’s makeup.

How is Alice so slight beneath her?

More puzzling, how does she manage her smallness while still occupying all the space in Johnny’s life?

Ribs expand and contract.

Johnny’s flat palm on Alice’s exposed back feels the pounding of her lover’s heart.

Perhaps Alice is afraid, blood drawn, wrists bound, mouth sealed.

Perhaps the weight balanced on her back feels less familiar, more capable of violence.

But for all the drama in the pumping of blood, Alice lays still, unsquirming, even as Johnny lets the knife’s tip rest at the base of her skull.

“You left.” Johnny says.

Alice raises her head enough to nod, enough to expose the welling tears in the corner of her right eye, then presses her head back into the cushion.

Johnny drags the blade so it pulls up a layer of skin down the spine, but not deep enough to cut.

“You left and I wanted to kill you.”

Alice makes a garbled response, and Johnny needs to hear, so she reaches around and rips the tape from Alice’s lips.

For a moment, Johnny’s breathing stops.

She thinks Alice will scream.

That she’s made a mistake.

But Alice just says, “I know,” the words thick and clotted.

Johnny studies the knife.

A knife is a versatile bit of ingenuity.

She thinks, A knife is like a woman.

Both have the power to provide sustenance, nurture a life, both have the power to take life away.

My woman is a knife.

The blade pecks Alice on the nape of the neck, deepening to a French kiss that slides between vertebrae like parted lips.

Alice’s cry starts high, then drops in register, then grounds out in a gurgling, bubbly choke.

That salacious, wily knife slips through Alice and lodges itself in the couch fibers.

Becoming part of the woman it is so much like.

Skewered together, stitched, two become one.

Alice shutters. Twitches.

Then lies still.

Finally, Johnny is alone.

There’s a rustle from the hole in the wall where the creature Lucy crawled inside.

Alice’s blood seeps into the puddles of seawater, staining them wine dark.

The apartment, destroyed, feels alien around her.

Johnny is terribly alone.

The hem of Alice’s white shirt frames the drawn paws of a jungle cat.

Johnny glances at the skin beneath the thin fabric, finding a jaguar tattoo over Alice’s shoulder blades.

Johnny’s arms wrap tight around her lover’s limp body.

“Don’t leave me.”

From the wall comes a rumbling.

The hole in the wall, the hole that started with hope, with wondering their way to real, has grown cavernous, wide and tall enough for Johnny to step through.

The void stretches, swirls of indigo interspersed with the blackness.

An inky stretch of space seems to reach from the wall, curling across the room like a finger of smoke.

Darkness snakes over the coffee table, joining with Alice’s spilled blood where it streams from the couch, twisting into a cane of candy red and indigo black.

The cane splits into spaghetti rivulets, which worm their way into Alice’s nostrils and parted lips.

On , death denies Alice too.

Johnny can only watch, mesmerized and incredulous, as Alice gasps, sucking in the mixture of blood and void, drinking it into herself.

Her eyelids flutter and open.

Veins in her neck bulge and purple, angry lines like lightning down her neck, across her chest, climbing down her arms and legs.

When Johnny looks at her face, the hollows of her cheeks have deepened, the whites of her eyes are stained and murky, irises a seafoam stab in glassy black.

“Alice,” the word is a whisper of wonder and terror and hope.

Alice sucks in a groan, a monster waking.

“Alice?” Johnny grows frantic, yanking the knife from Alice’s spine and dropping it onto the carpet.

“Alice, are you okay?”

Alice, unblinking, looks into the gash in the wall, where a thing that once was Lucy wraps shifting tentacles around the opening.

Cracks spiral out. Wallpaper tears and drywall crumbles, powdering the surrounding tile.

“What have you done?” Alice asks, voice hoarse and grumbling.

Behind Alice, the void rears up, a hole torn in one world, a spectral snapshot into another.

Swirling black, glimmers of distant stars rising like a hunched beast, towering over Alice like a demon—or savior.

Before the specter of her terror, Johnny cries out, “Nothing! NOTHING! I just wanted us to be together. I just wanted to make it work!”

“You wanted to change me,” Alice says, rising from the couch.

Her body lifts, hovering in the air, which cradles her, places her on her feet.

“You thought I needed fixing, that I was broken.”

Johnny scrambles to her feet.

A loud crack comes from the wall, and the sliding glass door shatters.

Beyond the patio is endless black, a cosmos freckled by distant stars.

The rainbow hue of a kaleidoscope galaxy glows from a place Johnny will never reach.

“You wanted to possess me. Take me away from every other person, every other thing. Have my heart all for yourself.” A gust sweeps through the apartment.

Plates and cups and silverware rip past from the kitchen.

Lucy’s crate, the coffee table, then the sofa are sucked into the void.

Its vacuum tugs at Johnny’s flesh, rippling it and pulling at her clothes, but she remains planted where she is, as if Alice’s gravity is stronger than the pull of the emptiness around them.

Johnny always wanted her and Alice to be the only two real things in the universe.

But to see it like this, to have it realized, feels lonely, feels wrong.

“I just wanted you to love me,” Johnny says, as tile falls away beneath her feet.

All around them, earth’s crust opens and walls crumble down into unknowable depth.

In every direction, emptiness, thundering rock, roaring flame, the deep belly growl of the vacancy of infinite space.

Alice rises, a singular thing of void and beast and woman, magnificent and terrible in her beauty.

A cascade of popping sounds as her sternum cracks.

She tosses her head back, ribs ripping through her flesh one after another in quick time.

Black blood spatters Johnny’s cheeks, hot then warm then cold in a flash, freezing, frigid enough to burn.

Where should be a beating heart sits a shriveled clump of muscle, twitching where it should beat.

“Here I am,” Alice says, voice low and hoarse.

“Broken. Here is what you want.” Her arms extend, palms flipped upward, crucified.

“Take it.”

Johnny steps to the edge of the remaining floor, a ragged pillar over a whistling unknown.

Her toes curl at the ledge for grip and she reaches, bone shards of Alice’s desiccated ribcage carving out strips of flesh on either side of Johnny’s hand, but she pushes past, until her fingers trace the ruined, heart-shaped thing in Alice’s chest. She clenches around the shuddering mass.

“That’s it,” Alice says.

Johnny pulls.

Muscle squelches in her fist, sinew tearing, tissue giving way.

She frees it with a final, nauseating pop.

Alice’s shoulders jerk forward, her back curling concave, gaze fixing on Johnny as black liquid tunnels up from the dark O of her throat and drips from the corner of her lips.

Johnny cups Alice’s heart in both hands, a baby bird, a precious thing plucked from a bony nest. The twist of joining muscle, the frayed arteries limp, tassels from how they tore.

Its twitching is erratic.

Stillness peppered by violent spasms. When it presses against Johnny’s lips, Alice combs Johnny’s hair with her fingertips, and Johnny thinks of all she has done for this slimy, thumping thing.

All she would still do.

“Go on,” Alice says.

“It’s yours.”

The organ slides against Johnny’s front teeth, easily punctured by her right incisor.

The texture of it is nothing short of divine, the flavor metallic and bitter.

Full-bodied. Johnny bites and chews, savoring the complex profile.

Her cheeks fill with Alice’s gnashed meat.

Chewing and rolling it over her tongue, sucking the taste down her throat in greedy pulls.

And when the taste of blood has drained, and Alice’s heart is a torn, bland mess of fibers in Johnny’s mouth, she swallows, gulp by thick gulp.

Johnny looks to her lover.

Her horrid and heavenly lover, splayed in front of her, and laughing—still laughing.

Singularity in her eyes.

“Is it everything you hoped?” Alice asks as the void presses tendrils through her eye sockets.

“Was it worth it?”

Dark goo pours down Alice’s cheeks like runny eggs.

Johnny screams, a desperate, strangled sound, wrapping arms around her lover’s waist.

But Alice is going.

Lucy’s featherless wings explode from Alice’s back, exposed bone framing raw musculature, dripping in viscera.

Claws curl at the wing tips.

Alice throws her head back, darkness leaking from her eye sockets, streaming down her throat, bubbling through gurgling gasps of forced air.

Johnny holds tight as the wings stretch.

They beat the air, fanning heat from teasing flames beneath, inciting them to rise.

The scent of burnt hair, baking flesh.

Somewhere, a phone buzzes.

Johnny hears the tight rattle.

She turns to look, finding the flames have died and the vastness of space all around her.

Alice’s phone floats some thirty feet away, rotating at eye level, unaffected by the void’s pull.

The screen lights up.

It buzzes.

Alice’s wings raise the pair of them higher, away from the phone, away from the flames, away from the incoming call.

Johnny feels she should answer, but equally strong is the urge to let Alice carry her away, into the dark, into the black hole, past the limits of the event horizon.

Alice twists away from Johnny’s grasp, her leathery flesh slipping from Johnny’s hold.

The phone buzzes.

Alice is leaving.

Writhing upward. Johnny’s hold is slipping.

She clings to her lover, but what is left of Alice?

What is left of Johnny’s dream?

Nothing. A gaping hole where a heart should be and an inky void where those glacial eyes once met Johnny’s.

Nothing is left and having devoured her heart, finally holding it in cupped hands, taking it into herself, somehow still felt empty.

With a final thrust of wings, Alice slides from Johnny’s grip.

Johnny’s surprised when she hovers in place, pushed away just slightly with each flip of Alice’s wings.

She has to get to the phone, she realizes.

Alice is beyond her reach, but she cannot be alone, and something else has been calling to her all this time.

Johnny swims through space.

Hand over hand, she strokes the vacuum, fighting zero gravity, glancing back as her lover flies farther and farther from her reach.

Progress is abysmal, great swathes of effort gaining only inches toward the buzzing phone.

Still, she pushes on.

The familiar number scrolls across the illuminated screen, 0-112-358-1321.

If she could just reach it, if she could just answer, she knows, just knows, there will be some answer on the other end of the line.

Johnny kicks her legs.

Reaches, wishing she could dislocate her shoulder from the socket.

She kicks again, slicing space with cupped hands, beating against the impossible emptiness.

The phone buzzes. She reaches a final time, and this reach puts her fingertips in contact with the screen.

Grit presses her forward, pushing the phone securely into her hand.

0-112-358-1321 calling.

She slides to answer.

0-112-358-1321 missed call.

She tries to open the phone, to call back the number.

Password required.

“Fuck!” Johnny screams. All the hope, all the wishes she’s stowed away in her heart, all the possible futures she and Alice might have shared fall away.

“Fuck you!” Johnny cries, hot tears gathering in her eyes, refusing to slide down her cheeks for lack of gravity.

She squeezes the phone, wishing she could crush it in her palm, wishing Alice would’ve carried her off to whatever vacuous end awaited them.

She is truly alone. Surrounded by stars and utter black, she will die alone, with no one to hear her sobs.

Hungry, thirsty, with only the cold comfort of oblivion.

Miserably alone.

The phone buzzes.

I will not give up on her.

Incoming call 0-112-358-1321.

Johnny sucks in a breath.

Slides to answer. The call time display ticks backward 0:03 to 0:02 to 0:01. “Hello?”