Romance

Short Story. Fiction.

She said her name was Lilly.

She was straight to the point. When we first met, she introduced herself by saying her hobbies included paddle boarding and ketamine. Looking me in the eyes, in a pantomime whisper, she said she likes being punished. “Can we make that work?” she says. She asked if I knew what she meant. She said she’d been on lots of dates and couldn’t get what she wanted; she doesn’t want to waste both of our time.

I said, ‘I know what you mean’, despite not knowing.

I said, ‘This isn't my first rodeo’, despite it being.

I said, ‘You’re in good hands’, despite the fact she was absolutely not.

She said, “I want you to hurt me.”

So I did.

She’s been dead a while and, now, all I feel is a low-level frustration at the mess I’ve got to clean up.

She’s in the bath, eyes unseeing as I shower beside her. I try to get hard, rubbing at myself as the water splashes her unblinking eyes. I’m getting nowhere. It doesn’t seem to be worth the effort so I stop.

She needs to go.

In my head, I used to skip all the administrative stuff and focus on the final act. The end. Now, sitting here trying to fold butchered body parts into slippery wet bin bags, I’m suddenly less than keen. This is the porn after the cum-shot. All of the mess with none of the horn.

The black bags squeak like balloons against her bloodied white skin. Little pearls of fat stick to the plastic, small and yellow and speckled with the dust of sawed bones. I finger around some of the specks so they look like a constellation against the bag.

She told me she was a Libra; me being a Gemini, she said we could probably make a go of it.

Some of the stars shoot from the sky and land, almost invisible, on the white plastic of the bath and I make a mental note to buy more plug hole un-blocker.

I chat as I work, sometimes to myself, sometimes to her; tearing strips of duct tape with my teeth as I talk.

Years ago, I say to her, probably before I was old enough buy cigarettes but old enough to get the bus by myself, I saw a cat get hit by a car. I watched it crawl with a broken back or broken legs or whatever, to where I stood watching. It didn’t cry out or anything, there was just the sound of the impact and tyres struggling for grip.

As it lay at my feet, I put my hand on its chest and I watched it die between two almost white Nike Air Max 90s.

Someone nearby said something, came running over to see if I was okay. See if the cat was okay. She stood above us, looking down at me crouching above a mound of brown fur with my fingers pressed into its ribs.

I was okay.

The cat wasn’t.

I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if my squeezing its chest finished it off. That small act of compression could just... make it stop. What else could I make stop with that same act?

Lily lies in the same position now. Arms out, legs twisted, eyes glassy.

It took me years of experimenting. Moving on to bigger and better things until I finally did it.

She didn’t cry out either.

I held her close until both her blood and breath had both run out.

I’ve always been a romantic at heart.

Now she just lies there with her bruises and lividity. Lying there naked with all her red fingernail scratches and razor nicks; blood blooming from small skin trenches like poppies.

Now it’s over, she needs to be taken away and disposed of.

Getting rid of dogs and cats is easy. Maybe you’ll see a missing poster somewhere, or maybe someone’ll come knocking, asking if you’ve seen a fat tortoiseshell tabby. They’ve not been home for a week, they say, it’s not like them.

What you don’t say, is that they should’ve checked number 31, 34, and 36’s bins on Wednesday night.

You don’t say: there’s maybe three or more little graves in the back yard, they could be in there.

Instead, you take their little flyer and say you’ll keep an eye out.

You say you’ll give them a call if you see anything.

Like a good neighbour.

What I like, are the efficient and forward thinking people who take the bins out the night before they’re due for collection. They’re almost certainly not going to check them again, so it means I can slip unassuming little packages into each of them. With a rucksack full of tightly wrapped black bundles, I can make a few deliveries in different neighbourhoods until all I’m carrying is the memory of their last breath.

But if a person goes missing, someone’s surely going to notice?

There’s a knocking at the door and I’m not dressed for visitors. Naked, I towel off my arms and legs and check myself in the mirror. Passable. I have to throw on some shorts and a t-shirt in a hurry.

My big bare feet bound down the stairs and I am slightly out of breath as I peek round the edge of the front door. The knocking is silenced by the door moving slightly out of reach.

“Ruben, right?”

I say yes, but no, it isn’t.

A short woman stares back at me.

“She told me she was meeting someone called Ruben. Did you meet her?”

“I’m sorry, meet who?”

“Lilly,” she says, “Have you seen her?”

“And you are?”

“Her sister.” She says, “Lola.”

“Oh,” the surprise only slightly feigned, “Yes, we met.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“That’s it? Nothing else?”

“We didn’t click.” I say, “She came back for drinks and left later that night.”

“She came here? When did she leave?”

“An hour or two later. She didn’t stay long. She said she was going to carry on drinking with some friends. Why? Is something wrong?”

She looks me up and down. I can see she notices the blood around the cuticles of my toenails, the smeared red drops around my knees and up my thighs.

“I haven’t heard from her.” She says.

“Since when?” I say and fold my arms covering my hands.

“Since she met you.”

Everything smells like blood and bleach. Like a butcher's floor or a broken heart.

“That’s terrible,” I say. I step to one side and gesture with one hand, “Would you like to come inside?”