i.

Alice stood along the edge of the bridge, overlooking eternity. 

Alone, confiding her sins to the dark side of the moon. 

She tossed his body over the side and watched his corpse plummet. 

A dull splash. The river rippled, then calmed. 

Swept away with the tides.

Swallowed whole.

Forever.

Gone.

It was all over now.

ii.

It was spring. The waters were rising. The river was flooding. 

Alice drove across the bridge on her way to work. The river absorbed the light of the morning sun and turned it into a kaleidoscope of glitter, but all she could think about was what lay below, where no light shone. A pruned, bloated corpse washing up along shore—lifeless, gauzy eyes staring right through her.  

In the rearview mirror, she saw what a mess she was. Deep, dark bags beneath her sunken eyes, red veins bulging against her scleras; hollow cheeks, stuffy nose, and a greasy rat’s nest pulled into a half-assed bun. She looked sick. She sounded sick. She felt sick. She could have called her boss, lied about a horrible case of explosive diarrhea, asked for a few days off to recover—why didn’t she do that? 

Someone blared their horn as she accidentally blew a stop sign and almost t-boned a car.

She barely registered the noise, just another sound bleeding with the rest of the world—the noisy chugging of her hatchback’s old engine, the crackling static of the untuned radio, the obnoxious revving of a nearby Harley, the cold planer tearing up Sixth Street. Even as she saw his face—hanging out the driver’s side window, middle finger raised and frothing at the mouth like a rabid bulldog—she felt nothing but the cold numbness of her disassociation. She wasn’t even there. Neither was he. Nobody really existed, not anymore.

She kept driving.

The clock read 9:15. A quarter past when she was supposed to clock in. She spent that night sitting by the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels, the thought of sleep not once entering her mind. And then, when her alarm sounded at eight o’clock on the dot, she chose to spend an hour absently scrolling through her Facebook feed like it was the morning newspaper, dreading the moment she saw an old photograph of her husband attached to a brand new obituary. But nothing ever showed. He was still alive to the rest of the world.

No. She didn’t want to think about that anymore. 

She could see the old cafe, where she had worked the same first shift every Wednesday through Sunday for the past ten years, in the distance. Living off seven dollars an hour, plus every crumpled bill and spare coin her strained customer service smile could earn her. She could still hear the nagging tones of her late mother grating her ears—“Just think, if you went back to college, you could have a real job.” But it was a mess in her head now, her mother speaking in a garbled tongue, three realities separate from her own. 

If she were still alive, she would have seen right through Alice’s facade. There was no hiding from that woman. Alice’s first cigarette at thirteen—Mother promptly sniffed her out and whooped her ass. Alice’s first boyfriend at fifteen—Mother caught him dropping her off after their second date and chased him off the property with her double-barrel shotgun. She was an omniscient creature, all-knowing and vengeful. Alice almost despised thinking about her more than she did James. 

There were too many ghosts haunting her. 

A siren wailed.

Flashing lights danced across her rearview mirror. 

She looked up and saw a cop car flying down the street, coming up quickly behind her. 

A deathly chill crept down her spine. Run. She gripped the steering wheel tighter and hovered her foot over the gas pedal, considering every side road and cramped alleyway. Run. Her subconscious was screaming. Run. 

She slowly eased the car to a stop along the side of the road. No. Parked by the curb. Run. Put her hands in her lap and stared out the window. Run, you bitch, you fucking bitch. Run, just fucking run, and don’t stop until you’re shot down in a raining hail of gunfire. 

Waiting for the end.

Heart pounding in her throat. 

Everything moving in slow motion, the universe’s way of taunting her.

This was it. 

She knew it would happen eventually.

Nobody escaped the hands of fate.

She just figured she had more time.

The cop drove on by, not even sparing her the slightest of glimpses.

She watched him peel around the corner and disappear behind a building. 

The siren had become nothing more than a distant ringing in her skull. 

Next time, she knew she would not be so lucky.

iii. 

Four days passed, but to Alice, it had been centuries. The hours were blurring together. She was working longer hours, picking up shifts left and right, not because she enjoyed keeping busy but because she tried to put off driving across that bridge for as long as she could. In the mornings, she flirted with the idea of quitting her job and fleeing the country. At night, she sat in the parking lot for hours just waiting for the dread to subside. 

The fourth day was Monday, her first day off work since the incident. She wasn’t able to get out of bed until two o’clock in the afternoon. She hadn’t eaten in forty hours, and yet she was at the bar, nursing her fourth old fashioned of the night. 

She only drank at Hilltop Tap because her best friend Jenny was the bartender and, on nights like tonight, when a mere total of five occupied the cramped dive, served her discounted drinks on the downlow. “Veterans’ discount for my favorite ‘Nam vet,” she’d snort with laughter, before mixing a drink strong enough to sedate a horse. 

Jenny was one of the few people left on this Earth that Alice could tolerate.  

They had, after all, known each other since high school, back when they were just two grungy girls with dirt under their nails and nicotine staining their teeth, skipping class to smoke shitty ditch weed, stems and all, in the backseat of Jenny’s Impala. Far from teenage beauty queens, that was for sure. At least, Alice was, with her snarled teeth and her perpetually angry eyes. Jenny would claim likewise, but Alice thought she was full of shit. 

Jenny was a party girl back in the day, surviving her twenties and early thirties on cheap booze and speed. Beneath the crow’s feet and laugh lines, you could tell. She had that face. The slight pout of her lower lip, the curve in her freckled nose, her big brown doe eyes that were still capable of breaking hearts, cheekbones carved out of marble—she was Aphrodite in the tired, worn body of a middle-aged woman. She still kept company in her mid-forties, guys she picked up from the bar, lying about her age by a couple years—thirty at the very least, because she no longer looked the part of twenty-five.

Just as beautiful now as she had always been—age meant nothing to a deity.

“Haven’t heard from James in a few days. What’s he been up to?”

The seemingly innocent question would have caught Alice off guard if she had not spent the entire day preparing for it. 

Jenny, absorbed in the whiskey sour she was mixing for an older woman, was oblivious to the cold, calculating stare worn upon Alice’s face. “Went to Nevada with a couple of friends from college. Y’know, those friends,” she said, staring down the bottom of her glass, studying her reflection in the still liquor. “Said he’d be gone all week.”

“Nevada or…Nevada?” she asked with a wink.

“The Nevada with flashing lights and topless women,” Alice sighed. “Five bucks says he’s already burned through half of our life savings at the roulette table.”

“Well, that’s James for you. Great guy, real smart, but, God, just the worst gambler you’ve ever seen. That man could bet on both sides of the coin and still lose.” Jenny paused, then cracked a shit-eating grin. “Another five bucks says that frat douche friend of his, Scott, will have his kidney stolen by a prostitute by the end of the night.” 

“Five bucks says that already happened five years ago.”

“Five bucks says he gets the second one stolen.”

“How ‘bout we just assume he’s dead in a ditch, call it even, and do some shots.”

Jenny slammed two shot glasses down on the counter. “Deal.” 

iv. 

In her dreams, he was there. 

The first couple of nights, she didn’t sleep at all. At first, she tried her hardest to stay awake; then, all she wanted to do was sleep, but she had seemingly forgotten how. It was an ability she had to relearn—trial and error, sleeping pills and booze.

She eventually remembered—but it was at a cost she knew she would have to pay. 

At first, he was just another face in the crowd, a blur caught in a passing glimpse; her subconscious barely paid him any mind. He was just there. A reminder of reality, slipping through the cracks in her subconscious reveries. 

Then, on the fourth night, he started talking. He didn’t say much. Just casual comments, remarks about the dreamscape. He sounded happy, which aggravated her to no end. Not even in the real world did he ever sound that pleased with himself—and he was a proud man, always needing to be right. But this wasn’t pride; this was a man genuinely content with life, a man who didn’t even know he was dead. 

But something was happening to him. He was rotting. Slowly, over the course of several dreams turned nightmares. Soggy flesh peeling from the bone. Ribs protruding from an eroded hollow in his chest. Maggots wriggling in his empty eye sockets. And God, the smell—not once in her entire life had she ever smelled an odor so wretched, so vile. She would wake from these nightmares retching, gagging, gasping for breath. She had started hitting the bottle at eight o’clock on the dot, a swig of whiskey before work, just to stave off the phantom presence of his rot. Every night was worse than the last. 

Each nightmare was becoming longer and harder to wake up from. Refusing to let her go. 

The seventh night, Alice was in the kitchen, speaking to her old math teacher from high school—she wasn’t exactly sure why she was there, this woman she hadn’t thought of since third period of the tenth grade, but Alice was asking her a very specific trigonometry question that she was apparently just dying to know the answer to. 

“So the tangent—”

“Sweetie.” Mrs. White’s face was contorted in pure disgust, and Alice knew James had followed her. “I think something is rotting.”

“But the circle—”

“Sweetie, maybe you need to throw something away.”

“The mx and the—”

“Sweetie, the corpse in the living room—”

“No, but—”

“Alice. You killed him. I know you did. It’s okay. Just get rid of the body. It reeks.”

“But…but I did! I threw it in the river! It won’t go away, it just won’t!”

“Alice.” Her voice was fading in and out, crackling like static. “You killed him, Alice. It’s okay. Just throw the body away. No one will ever have to know. Just throw the body away. Just throw it away. Just throw it away. Just throw it away.”

“I did! I did! I fucking did! Just tell me how to make it stop!”

She was sobbing now, lying fetally on the kitchen floor and trembling uncontrollably. Mrs. White stood over her, slowly shaking her head. “Alice,” she whispered, in an overlap of voices, echoing one after the other—somehow drowning out her shrill cries. “Why did you kill him?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

“Alice,” Mrs. White kept prying, “Alice. Alice, why? Why did you kill him?”

“Please…”

“Alice.”

“I’m sorry…”

“Alice.”

She opened her eyes, and Mrs. White had turned into her dead husband. Alice sobbed harder. “Alice…” he whispered. “Alice, you killed me…Why? How could you do such a thing?”

Her sobs had turned into screams. “No, go away!” she demanded like a child.

“Alice, I loved you. Why? Why would you kill me?”

“I had to!”

“Alice, why? Why? Why? WHY? FUCKING WHY, ALICE?” He knelt down and grabbed Alice by the throat, forcing her head up to face him. He was fully decayed now, not even a sliver of humanity left in that rancid sack of rotting flesh and bones—the stench burned her nostrils, climbed down her throat and refused to let her breathe. She tried to close her eyes again, but James pried them open with the decayed stumps of flesh that were once fingertips. “YOU BITCH, YOU FUCKING WHORE.” A maggot fell from his black tongue. “I SHOULD RIP OUT YOUR FILTHY HEART AND FUCK YOUR SHATTERED RIBCAGE UNTIL YOU BLEED OUT LIKE THE STUCK PIG YOU FUCKING ARE!”

Alice woke not with a gag, but a blood-curdling scream. Drenched in sweat and a little bit of vomit, she bolted upright and clawed at her throat, feeling for those wet, fleshy hands that still remained in memory. 

Upon realizing that she was alone in bed, she lay back down and waited for her heartbeat to still—but before it could return to baseline, her phone started buzzing on the nightstand. 

A call. 

From James’s mother. 

She felt the familiar icy chill of dread as she hesitantly answered the call, but she could hardly get a single word out before Janet confirmed her suspicions.  

“Alice, it’s James…they found…he was…oh God, oh God, Alice…he’s gone….”

v.

Funerals were so goddamn expensive. 

Despite splitting the cost with James’s mother, there was still a large dent the size of four grand in her savings account. Hopefully James’s life insurance would even things out. Hopefully, it would be more than she needed. Hopefully, she would finally be able to afford a spot at that fancy resort in Cancun that Facebook’s advertising had been shoving down her throat for the past few months. God knew she needed it. 

There was some old country song playing from a speaker, but Alice wasn’t listening; Alice wasn’t even there. Though she was sitting in the frontmost pew, just feet from her husband’s casket, emotionally, she was elsewhere. Mentally, she was in the sky, above the funeral home, just drifting through the tides of time. She saw tissues, she saw tears, she saw the puffy, red faces of family and friends and strangers she had never met—but she simply could not compute.

She was sitting next to James’s mother, who was clutching her hand so tight she could feel her bones scraping together, cartilage threatening to snap. His sister was on the other side of Alice, clung to her boyfriend like he was an anchor, keeping her from floating away and joining Alice in the clouds. 

She didn’t recognize half of the people in attendance. Alice and James did not run in the same circles. James was charismatic and an extrovert by nature, while Alice had commitment issues and a drinking problem not many were willing to deal with. They did share a mutual friend in Jenny, who, twenty years ago, had played matchmaker for the two of them (much against Alice’s wishes). But Alice couldn’t blame Jenny—she was just trying to be a good friend; how could she have known things would end like this?

It had been almost three weeks since she killed James and dumped his body in the river. How strange it was that three weeks could feel like centuries and, at the same time, like nothing at all. Alice was almost surprised at how long she’d stayed undetected. Even now, at the funeral of the man she was supposed to love, nobody spoke a single word of her tearless face. Pretending to cry was never a skill of hers—rather unfortunate of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

The service ended with a final sermon from the pastor, speaking of heaven and Jesus and love and forgiveness and be sure to come to Mass this Sunday. Alice still wasn’t listening; she was just now returning to reality. 

With one final song, the funeral goers stood and slowly filtered out the door until only a few people remained. Among those few was Jenny, who immediately scooped Alice into her arms, squeezing like she had no intention of ever letting go. “God, this is awful…” she choked out.   

Alice only nodded, her face buried in Jenny’s shoulder. 

“I am so, so, so sorry. I…I just can’t believe this happened.”

“I know…” Alice sighed. “I…I’m still in shock…”

Jenny ran a gentle hand through Alice’s hair. “I’m always here for you, Alice. If there’s anything you need—anything at all—don’t hesitate to ask. Okay? I love you, girl.”

“I love you too, Jen.”

Alice stood there in Jenny’s embrace for as long as her friend would let her, breathing in her drugstore perfume. The rest of the world seemed to fade around her—nothing and nobody else existed but her and Jenny. And for the first time today, she felt truly human. 

But the weight of reality returned as she glanced over Jenny’s shoulder at the casket looming behind them, a monolith of shame, the immortalization of her sins. She had to look away. She couldn’t let him see her guilty eyes. 

They needed to bury this fucker fast.

vi.

The sun was setting by the time Alice was let out of questioning. 

She sat in her car and stuck the keys in the ignition. The engine sputtered before giving out. Choked, dead. She slammed her palms against the steering wheel and called her old, beat-up car every colorful word under the sun. Third time this month. Maybe that life insurance should go towards buying a new engine—or a new car.

If the universe wanted to punish her, she’d rather have the full commitment. Something real, something powerful—a true reckoning, leaving her beaten, broken, begging for forgiveness. Not this build-up of minor inconveniences, slowly but surely pushing her over the edge: the dead batteries in her smoke detector, a three-hour call from James’s mother, the brand new wasp’s nest built right above her front door, a series of non-tipping customers at the cafe. 

Getting called to the police station not even a full day after the funeral had only made her week the slightest bit worse than it already was. At least she could say she saw it coming. She spent the first few days after James’s demise concocting a story and an alibi—nothing that would immediately deem her innocent; just something to get the police off her case for a little while. A week or two was all she asked for. 

To her knowledge, she managed to pull this off. She had never considered herself to be skilled at acting, but in that interrogation room, she hardly recognized herself. 

“How the fuck haven’t you found his killers yet? How? My husband was fucking murdered in cold blood, and you’ve just been—what—sitting on your asses all day? Doing fuck all?” Alice had an emotional switch. Though she couldn’t physically bring herself to cry, she knew ire like an old friend. She manipulated the conversation with her façade of frustrated grief, unbridled rage bubbling to the surface. 

“These matters take time, Mrs. Warren,” they kept telling her. “It’s only been a week since he was found.”

“Let me ask then, have you ever lost someone that meant the world to you? Someone that you loved so much, it hurt? A week doesn’t feel like a week. It feels like years. It’s purgatory. I’m in fucking hell and I’m tired of waiting.”

She felt particularly Emmy-worthy after that little spiel. But she wasn’t there to test the limits of her emotional range; she was there to sell a story. When the detectives started asking questions, she had a practiced answer for every single one. 

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“About three weeks ago.”

“And what was the last thing he said to you?”

“He told me he was going to Vegas with some old college friends. Bachelor party or something. No, I don’t know their names, but I can find out. James and I didn’t run in the same circles. I just know they live all the way out on the west coast, and he said he was gonna take the Amtrack down there to meet them. That’s all he told me.”

“And you promise that’s the truth?”

“It’s the truth as far as I can possibly know. From James’s mouth, not mine.”

“Do you think he would have lied to you at all?”

“Well…no, but sometimes I worry.”

“What made you worried?”

“He would work late a lot, and go on these long trips with his friends every few months. It’s…I don’t know, probably normal and I’m just paranoid. But my mom never trusted him when she was alive. Said he’d cheat the second he got the chance. She beat me down with that information. Never let me forget. But…But he wouldn’t do that. I know he wouldn’t.”

She wasn’t exactly fighting for her life in that interrogation room. But she also wasn’t exactly lying. An exaggerated truth, sprinkled with outright dishonesty. James was a man of sparing words with an incurable wanderlust, a known fact amongst all of his friends—he’d leave the state at a moment’s notice, sometimes not even telling Alice until he was halfway across the country. A spontaneous trip to Nevada that only Alice knew about was far from unlikely.   

Besides, nobody could prove words shared between the deceased and their last witness. Nobody needed to know what James truly said in his final moments. Alice was going to take that knowledge to the grave, no matter what happened next. 

She tried her keys again. Sputtered, choked, dead—fuck. 

Slumping back in her seat, she sighed and closed her eyes. 

Perhaps this was the universe giving her a second chance to confess, begging her to do the right thing. And it was the right thing to do—she knew this. It was the moral thing to do. It was the sane thing to do. But she wasn’t breaking that easily. She would much rather spend the rest of eternity stranded in her car than waste another second in that police station.

No, if they wanted her confession, they needed to it.

They needed to beat it out of her. They needed to make her hurt, make her bleed. They needed to hurt her in a way that only the dead could ever know, and only then would she confess. 

There was a sharp knock at her window.

She nearly jumped out of her skin, and her pulse spiked even harder when she opened her eyes and saw a police officer standing at her door. Reluctantly, she rolled down the window and visibly calmed when he offered an awkward, lopsided smile.

“Need a jump?”

She forced a small grin.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

vii. 

(cw – suicide ideation and attempt)

In the bathroom, Alice held a knife to her throat. 

She considered drinking herself to death. She considered downing an entire bottle of Ibuprofen. She considered breaking into James’s lockbox and aiming his inherited pistol between her teeth. She considered throwing herself into the river, in an act of poetic justice that maybe James’s spirit would find somewhat amusing. 

Not once did she consider confessing. No, she had decided this was a secret she would be taking to the grave. The police were investigating, the city was on a witch hunt, and the thought of dying a grieving widow was more appealing than living a heartless murderer. 

Alice did love James. Once. Somewhere, somehow, some time ago. Maybe eons. A distant past long forgotten, a vacancy in her mind—she still remembered the feeling, just slightly. But more so, she loved the idea of James, and the fact that her mother had despised him, the same way she despised Jenny. With James, she had this power over the wretched woman. Her mother craved control, and Alice reveled in every opportunity she received to strip away that control. Her mother tried time and time again to convince Alice to leave James, and Alice made an effort to laugh in her face every single time. The woman even objected at their wedding—she made such a fuss the priest refused to marry them, and in the midst of familial turmoil, the two snuck off to Vegas where they eloped and drank their body weight in champagne. 

Then her mother died. And people stopped trying to break up her marriage. 

Stopped being fun after that. 

She pressed the knife a little deeper. A small spurt of blood trickled down her throat.

“You don’t get to die.”

The blade fell from her grip, clattering to the floor. 

Hastily, she looked around. Behind the shower curtain. Under the sink. In the fucking toilet. There was no one. She knew now she was losing her mind. An auditory hallucination, she reckoned. More of a reason to go through with it—she did not want to live her dwindling moments of freedom in a state of insanity.  

She picked the knife back up. 

As she went to raise it to her throat once more, her eyes fell to the mirror.

And she found herself staring into James’s lifeless sockets. 

Alice froze, unable to tear her gaze away. He watched her with a crooked smile, half of his teeth missing, the other half rotted to the root. 

“What makes you think you’re allowed to kill yourself?”

Her fingers tightened around the knife. 

His image was phasing in and out of reality—he was, one moment, a whole image, and the next, a hazy splotch of color and movement, barely resembling a face. She tried looking away, but he wouldn’t let her. Those phantom hands around her throat kept her still. 

“You don’t get to take the easy way out. The world must know what you’ve done.”

In a fit of spite, she tried to plunge the knife into her stomach, but it was ripped from her hands, thrown against the wall. Bitter laughter rattled in her ears. 

“You fucking coward.”

“Fuck you…” she spat.

She blacked out for a momentary lapse in time, coming to in a dizzy haze, realizing then that she had put her fist through the mirror. All at once, a wave of pain crashed over her. Rivers of blood were flowing down her wrist; shards of glass were pushed deep between her knuckles. 

She bit her tongue to suppress a scream.

Shaky and losing footing, she leaned against the sink and brought her hand under the faucet. Running cold water over her wounds, she plucked every shard of glass from her skin, wincing and whimpering and even shedding a few tears, despite her best efforts. 

She left the knife on the floor. 

She couldn’t bring herself to move it. 

As she bandaged her hand, she ruminated on every possible excuse she could give for when Jenny inevitably asked about her injury. Cooking mishap? She hadn’t cooked an actual meal since ‘92. Fell into a box of knives? Stupid, but maybe it would make Jenny laugh. General drunken dumbassery? Believable, but the last thing she needed was another “Maybe we should drink less” talk.  

Oh well. She’d think of something.

As for right now, she needed to cover every single mirror in the house with a sheet. 

Immediately. 

viii.

James’s cigarettes were on the coffee table. 

He bought them a month ago. Alice hadn’t touched them. 

They were menthol. Alice didn’t smoke menthol. She stuck with her Reds, through and through. The mint made her dizzy, made her nauseous—but her last pack had run dry a few days ago, and she didn’t have the strength to face the world long enough to go buy another. So, in her state of nicotine-deprived agitation, she settled for stale Camel Crushes.

Even though the pack was only half empty, she lit up his lucky cigarette, just to spite his spirit. She sat next to a cracked window, blowing smoke through the screen. Every drag burned like poison in her lungs. Maybe it was the age, or the mint, or the fact that it reminded her of James, but nicotine had never ever tasted this vile.

She wanted nothing more than to throw away the entire pack, but she knew she couldn’t. Not now. Not when she couldn’t even leave her house to get her mail. This, and the few bottles that remained in her liquor cabinet, would have to suffice for as long as possible. 

“You think you can just get rid of me?”

This was not a voice in her head. No, it was a voice—a living, breathing voice, right behind her. Spitting out the cigarette, she lurched to her feet and turned to face the person she already knew was standing there.  

James was in the doorway. His clothes were drenched, dripping water onto the floor. Face bloated and skin discolored, veins dark and bulging against his shriveled flesh. He was no longer a long-rotted corpse, but a waterlogged body, recently washed up on shore. But the stench of decay was stronger than ever. 

“You think covering up a few mirrors will fix your head?”

“Leave me alone!”

“You’re sick, Alice. You’re a sick, wretched creature.”

Alice looked at him with malice burning in her eyes—pure, unbridled hatred. Then, she stormed to the kitchen and grabbed the bottle of bourbon from the top shelf. “Fuck you,” she seethed. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

“You promised you’d stop drinking.”

“Why won’t you just stay dead?” she screamed.

“You won’t let me. I’m not really here. You know that, right?”

Letting out a strangled sound of frustration, she poured half the bottle down her throat, sticky streams of bourbon trickling down her chin and neck. The whiskey burned in a way it had never done before—it burned beyond her throat, her chest, her stomach; it burned her soul. 

“You’re slipping.”

“Shut up.” 

“You’re losing your mind.”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe if you didn’t drink so much—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up!” 

She hurled the bottle at James; it phased right through him, hitting the wall and shattering on impact. He cocked his head to the side tauntingly. She was screaming incoherently now, pulling at the roots of her hair and letting out a drunken battle cry. She continued throwing things—empty beer bottles from the recycling bin, apples from the fruit bowl, a paring knife from the cupboard, anything and everything she could possibly get her hands on at that very moment. All to no avail. All she was left with was a pile of glass on the floor, a knife stuck in the drywall, and a list of excuses for her landlord regarding the eventual noise complaint she’d receive from her nosy neighbors.

James was gone now, but he would come back. His presence lingered, as did his rot. 

Alice was sobbing now in a messy heap draped across the kitchen table. 

Begging God to just kill her now. 

viiii.

“Jen, it’s one in the morning.”

“And you’re drunk. Come on, I’ll join you. You shouldn’t be drinking alone, anyways. That’s, like, rule five of the alcoholic buddy system.”

Alice squinted at her.

“Besides, the apartment’s flooded. So I need to crash.”

She was reluctant to let Jenny enter. Between the tears and the bandaged hand, she figured she would be answering a lot of questions in the next few minutes. But Jenny gave her a little pout and Alice caved, stepping out of the doorframe and allowing her friend entry. “The fuck did I tell you about living along the river—the Mississippi floods just about every spring.” 

“Yeah, and every summer, I get my own personal swimming pool.”

“You really shouldn’t swim in that water, it’s disgusting.”

They made their way to the kitchen, where the scene of Alice’s imaginary dispute with James still remained. Luckily, Jenny did not mention broken glass they had to step over, or the knife lodged into the wall. 

“Oh come on, straight from the bottle? We gotta get you caught up on the buddy system readings. As your best friend, I insist you use a glass. Or at least a water bottle.” Jenny rummaged through her cabinets and produced two coffee mugs, and Alice could not help but laugh for the first time in what felt like forever. 

They drank and smoked endlessly into the night, and between the bourbon and menthol smoke, they talked of memories, sharing stories they had both already heard a million times. Many of Jenny’s stories included James: that Fourth of July when he drunkenly punched a cop and spent the night in jail, that day trip to Chicago when he managed to smooth talk his way out of a mugging, that morning after his proposal when they all got together for lunch to tell Jenny the news. She had gotten particularly weepy in her recounting of the first time she and Alice met James—at that old country bar they used to frequent in their early twenties, winning twelve dollars at a slot machine and buying the two each a shot of bottom-shelf tequila, cracking dumb jokes all night just to make Alice laugh. 

Alice, on the other hand, did not evoke the man at all; she, instead, reminisced on moments from their teenage years, the last true moments of happiness she had ever felt—stealing her mom’s Firebird at three in the morning for a joyride, vandalizing the English teacher’s car for giving them a detention, doing acid at the park that one summer vacation. Alice was beginning to feel some semblance of stability—a facade, most likely, but she pretended as though it was real.

Then that awful voice returned, and she sank into despair.  

“She loves you dearly, you know. Or so you think.”

James, vile as ever, stood behind Alice, leaning down into her ear, his gravelly voice sending a jolt of shock straight to her heart. Alice tried to ignore him, but he only got louder. 

“Tell her,” James demanded. “Let’s see what she thinks of you when you do. She could never love you then, right? She would have to see you as you truly are. A murderer. A cold-blooded killer.”

Jenny was talking; Alice was trying so desperately to listen, but all she could hear was his horrible voice.

“She deserves to know, Alice. She cared about me, too. More than you could ever know.”

She curled her fingers into fists, digging her nails deep into skin.

“Tell her. Tell her the truth, and relieve her pain of ever having known you. It just might set you and me free.” 

That word burned itself into her brain. 

The truth.

In her drunken state, she considered a truth. Not exactly the one James had in mind, but a truth nonetheless. A truth that…she figured Jenny deserved to know, in this calm before the storm. Or, at the very least, a truth Alice deserved to tell. 

Everything would come to light, all in due time—Alice knew this from the start—but she figured this truth, this one truth, could come straight from the source. So when she inevitably became a tragedy or a public villain, Jenny would hopefully know that she wasn’t wholly heartless.

She threw herself at Jenny, latched herself onto her lips like a leech, sucking, sucking, sucking for blood or some sense of affection. Desperate, just desperate—painful desire, agony tearing at her heartstrings. It was painful, actually painful. Her soul was burning. Her skin was peeling from the bone. She was dying, and just needed something—something to feel alive. 

Jenny pulled away. 

Afraid. Or disgusted. Or somewhere in between, according to the look in her eyes. 

‘Alice…” she whispered, backing up a couple of steps. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Jenny, please,” she begged, just a whisper barely breaking the sound barrier. “Please.”

“I…I can’t. I can’t. I really can’t.” Jenny took a few steps back, almost stumbling over her own feet. 

“Of course,” James sneered. “Of fucking course.”

“Shut up…” she whispered. 

“You never loved me—that, we both know. But you know you don’t love her either, right? You don’t love people at all. You can’t love people. Just ideas of people, right? You are a hollow creature, Alice. Even Jenny knows it.”

“Alice?” Jenny choked out. “Please. Say something. I don’t want you to hate me.”

“No. You should hate me…” Alice whimpered to her.

Her face softened. “Oh, no, no—sweetie, I could never hate you. You’re my best friend. You’re sweet and your amazing, and I love you like the sister I never had—”

“SHE’S LYING.”

“You’re lying!”

Jenny’s eyes widened at her sudden shift in tone. “I’m not lying! I would never lie to you! Alice, what are you—” 

“You can’t love me!” she screamed, pulling at her hair. 

“SHE THINKS YOU’RE A BITTER, MISERABLE ALCOHOLIC WHO SHOULD HAVE LEFT HER ALONE IN HIGH SCHOOL. 

“But I do…”

“You can’t! You don’t fucking know!”

“Know what? Alice, seriously, you’re scaring me.”

“A CLINGY BASKET CASE THAT ONLY STICKS AROUND BECAUSE SHE IS TOO EMOTIONALLY STUNTED TO MAKE ANY OTHER REAL FRIENDS.”

“You don’t know…” she was sobbing. “You don’t know…You can never know…”

“SHE HATES YOU. SHE DESPISES YOU. SHE AND I USED TO FUCK BEHIND YOUR BACK AND LAUGH ABOUT HOW MUCH OF A HORRIBLE PIECE OF SHIT YOU ARE. JUST FUCKING ASK HER.” 

Alice stopped. Her shaky breath hitched in her throat. She turned her swollen, red eyes on Jenny. “Did you fuck James?” 

“Alice!” Jenny gasped. “What—where is this coming from? No! Of fucking course not!”

“You said you’d never lie to me.”

“I’m—I’m not? Alice, I would never fuck James. I would never betray you like that!”

“You’re lying. You’re fucking lying.”

“Alice, please, you’re hurting. Let me help you. Please.” Jenny too was sobbing, broken down. “I would never hurt you. Please. Please believe me, Alice. I would never, ever hurt you. I love you, Alice…I love you so much.”

Alice wanted so desperately to believe her, and deep down she did—but James had sunk his rotted teeth into her psyche, and she had finally unraveled. All at once, everything on display. Every emotion she ever repressed, every thought that ever crossed her mind, every memory of every moment in her entire life—burying her alive.

Jenny—this perfect creature—could never love her. 

No, she could only love someone like James.

His ghost was standing behind Jenny. Wrapping his swollen, blue arms around her waist. Stroking her arms. Holding her close. While the real Jenny stood on edge, anxiously waiting for Alice to shatter the heartbreaking silence, the Jenny in her deepest delusions melted in his embrace, enraptured by the hideous cadaver.  

She stared into his lifeless eyes, seething. 

I won’t let you have her. Not in this lifetime.

“Then do it,” he taunted. “Set us free.”

She ripped the knife from the wall and lunged for Jenny’s throat. 

x.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“My name is Alice Warren. I live on 122nd Ave West, Illinois City. I need you to help me.”

“Is everything alright? Do you need medical assistance?”

“No. No. She’s dead. She…I…I did something terrible. I didn’t want to, but I…I just wanted him to stay away. Send the entire police brigade. Tell them to shoot me down where I stand.”

“Emergency services are on the way. Nobody is going to shoot you. We’re just going to get you some help, okay? Are you saying that you killed somebody?”

“Yes. I thought he would leave me alone. But he lied. He fucking lied. I killed her. But not just tonight. You said it yourself—I’m a murderer. A cold-blooded killer.” 

“I never said—nevermind, who else have you killed?” 

“My husband. James. A month ago. Tried to hide it. But he won’t stay dead…”

“James…Warren? The body that was found in the Mississippi river?” 

“Oh, good fucking work, detective. He’s been dead for a whole month, and nobody knew it was me? You needed a fucking confession? Tell me, is he even dead? Because he looks pretty fucking alive to me!”

“Alice, we’re going to get you some help. Just try to remain calm and wait for the emergency services to arrive.

“No, no, no. I’m getting the shoot-out I asked for. See, I found the key to James’s lockbox. He’s got a pistol and enough bullets to lay waste to half of their team. Tell them there’s gonna be mass casualties if they don’t shoot first.”

“Ma’am, please, you don’t have to do th—”