fingernails

The evidence of my crime was tucked away neatly underneath my fingernails. Despite the training they received in police academy and despite their best intentions and interrogation techniques, I doubt they will ever find him. He has the best hiding place in the world, ten in fact. A suicide, the official record reads. He took this many pills when his stomach, tired organ that it was, could only take about half. The acids that have resided in his abdomen broke through and, like a rebellious teenage gang, vandalized the rest of his pretty pink insides. Maybe the autopsy will reveal my name burned into his intestinal wall, carved into his arteries or maybe the villi of his lungs have been arranged to spell out the letters that address me. I doubt it though. He never saw it coming, he never had time to prepare, to plan revenge.

I pointed a gun to the pretty little triangle where his eyebrows and the top of his nose meet. It’s like a park between neighbourhoods, the perfect place to hide a body for children to find. I had kissed him over a dozen times in this exact spot. I had felt his skin, his years and his acne outbursts of the past, through him right there, in that spot. When I lifted my chin and contact was broken, I wonder how much of him I stole away. How many of his skin cells did I carry on my body, adding excess numbers to my bathroom scale? Tonight I shall boil myself and rid myself of him. Tomorrow I shall get a manicure and pay someone to scrape beneath the white tips of my nails and remove him from me permanently. These are the scissors, the razor, the sharp edge, that I will use to cut the thread that had connected us for so long.

At gunpoint, he swallowed. Down the hatchet, washed down by his please’s and don’t’s and oh god oh god’s, those pills were the last things he will ever have tasted. Not me, not my skin or sweat or lips or hair or tongue. It was gel encapsulated death and fear.

Once his eyes sewed themselves shut, I touched him. Oh lovely boy, why did you make me do this to you when I loved you so much? How selfish, how cruel. We could have been happy together, at least five days out of seven. This is when I made my mistake: fingers in his hair, tracing the corners of his mouth and the figure of his bones through his skin, I collected him as a keepsake. Slowly it built up, all that grime and dirt and tissue and sweat collected to form a dark organic mud. My soft patter, patter on his cold body took too long, was too thorough, I was too silly a girl. I hold my hands in my lap and look at them and wonder why this man in a uniform is not looking at them too. They have such a great story to tell and no one who wants to listen and that is the greatest tragedy of all this week.