A thief.
Probably a crazy thief.
“I have something to give you,” she says, holding her left hand out to him.
He gets up off the floor in a quicksilver snap, the way teen boys are able to do. Now he can see it: he is taller than she is, but she’s a little older than he is.
But that’s not what matters in the moment. What matters is that her face is flushed.
What matters is that her right hand is furious with her own desire. He’s never seen a girl’s desire before, only held and ravaged his own in his hand, his ejaculations captured in his own sheets or wiped up with socks.
What matters is that his cock is so hard, and his rage is ramping up, and this girl is so naked that it feels like a crack in the world is about open up.
The impulse to bite is so strong.
“Kneel,” she says.
What?
“Hold as still as a statue,” she says, and without knowing why, he does it. There in front of her. His face close enough to her hand and sex that he can smell the salt of her. “It’s not wrong to want to be loved,” she says.
His mouth lolls open.
Something is emerging between her legs, behind her hand. He stares so hard that he shivers.
An apple.
An apple blooms from between her legs, and she pushes her hips toward his head until the apple touches his mouth, and finally, the bite of him can come.
Then the apple is blood, or his mouth is blood — blood gushes between her body and his head. He pulls back. If they find a dead girl in his room, a bloody scene, his life is over — if he even has a life left to be over.
“My god, are you okay?” he screams.
Blood covers the floor. A tide of it rises in the room. The blood comes in waves, impossible waves, until they are both near drowning. He is terrified, but when he looks up at her face, she is smiling. Then laughing.
“We have to leave this place,” she says, cradling his head. “The waves are rising. Your drawings will come to life where we are going. You are not dangerous. You are not violent. Your drawings are not wrong. They are just in the wrong time and place.”
She smiles again as she treads the bloodwater. Though he knew no such thing was possible, he watched as the blood bored a hole into the wall of his room, like a mouth opening, like a portal, and they slid out of the hole together.
The Butcher’s Daughter at Dawn
Had she lost him forever? Another boy falling away? What happened?
Back in the heart of her city, Lilly walked the network of streets leading to her own apartment, but she kept turning away from home. You had one job, she chided herself, hating herself even more for the stupid fucking cliché.
Was she helping or hurting?
Who takes the side of boys who don’t belong to anyone?
Who steps inside male violence in some small hope of rerouting the story?
Who should?
How many boys had she failed? How many had she lost?
Mikael was gone. There was a hole in the wall of his detention room, as if a bomb had gone off, but there was no record of any bomb, except the news about Oklahoma, the homegrown terrorist loner, too many dead people to fathom.
The only thing left of Mikael was found later, scrawled underneath the shitty-ass carpet of his former room. A complex layering of drawings and carvings and scratches and clawings, full of shapes and buildings and strange forms no one understood. Like a landscape of chaos inside his mind.
She turned it over in her head as she listened to the pattern of her heels on the pavement. She hated the rhythm of her own feet, wished something would drop out of the sky and land on her, get it over with. She stopped. She looked up at the sky, the high-rises on either side of her stretching upward, constructed, unshaken. A pigeon flew by. Nothing fell from the sky to touch her. Not even pigeon shit.
She looked down at the ground, because that’s what a stupid woman whose guilt is eating her alive does after looking up at the sky, right? There on the ground near her foot was some kind of stain, dirty and brown and ugly. Or, maybe, a coin.
She squatted. Picked it up. Yeah, that’s it, a coin.
Rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. An old weird coin. Some kind of penny. A fucking penny. Probably worthless. It figures.
She dropped the coin back on the ground.
But there she was, alone on a city street, hunkered down on the sidewalk. She closed her eyes and took a breath, inhaling so deeply that her bra nearly cut off her circulation. When she opened her eyes and looked up, she realized she was in front of an old favorite bar: the Tabard Inn.
“Well, let’s give the old girl a drink,” Lilly muttered. She stood up and pushed her way through the door.
Nostalgia is a funny thing. At certain moments in life, it can hit you so hard that your whole body vibrates with it, almost like you’re on the verge of time travel. Lilly’s skin began to tingle — with the history of the place, and with her own memory of the last time she’d been there.
The story was that the Tabard Inn had been run by Marie Willoughby Rogers, who named the place after an inn from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Lilly went there originally because it was female friendly, not the usual misogyny cave. During the second big war, the inn had opened up as a boardinghouse for WAVES — the navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. She liked that. She liked the dark wood and she liked the low lighting and she liked the tiny indigo flowers stitched into some of the upholstered seats.
The last time she’d been there, she’d gotten into a fight with a woman she’d slept with exactly once before deciding she was too clingy, too needy, just wanted too much. The last thing the woman said before she stormed out was, “I’m not needy, Lilly — you’re just Antarctic.” If only the woman could have seen what Lilly needed most, which was to be cut open, aggressively, like an ice-cutting ship parting a frozen bit of sea. But all the woman wanted to do was kiss — incessantly, like some kind of fruit fly you can’t bat away — and cuddle and engage in a little sixty-nine. Absolutely meaningless.
In the bar today were four women and two men, and a girl bartender who looked to be about twelve years old. Youth culture—great. Her age, it seemed, was aging her faster and faster. The lines around her eyes increasing their creases, her eyelids growing extra lids. She sat down hard at the bar, averting the gaze of the mirror behind the bartender.
“Scotch, please. Neat. Make it a double.”
Here, at least, she could drink without some shithead pawing at her or trying to kiss her or making some pathetic pass. This town was filled with men who had no game, just suits and questionable taste in footwear and ties.
When a woman in an alabaster pantsuit sat down, one stool away from Lilly, she tried to shoot cold daggers from her eyeballs. Why can’t people give other people space when they’re clearly there to drink alone with their own rage and guilt? Isn’t it motherfucking obvious? Isn’t it all over me like porcupine quills?
But when the stranger failed to move, and Lilly turned to make her feelings clearer, what arrested her attention was the woman’s stern beauty. She looked to be sixty-something, maybe even pushing seventy. Her hair was silver, shoulder length, brushed back away from her face in waves. Her eyes were blue, or that kind of blue that fades with age. Even after Lilly turned away again, she could see her plainly in the mirror. The stranger noticed, but she didn’t flinch.