Who: Esme (closed, narrative) What: Emil is dead. (Esme doesn't live here anymore.) Where: Around town, and the building. When: Starting the night of Emil's death. Warnings: ...general crazy?
Esme went to the morgue to identify the body. When she'd heard the news her eyes had gone black, and she looked at Emil's body and saw nothing, saw exactly what she saw, saw a shell.
She reached down and picked up a small pair of scissors from a tray of implements to be used in the oncoming autopsy. She clipped off a lock of his hair and pocketed it. The police officer behind her moved to stop her, but he was held back by an older officer, looking on.
She looked down at him. This was not her lover. This was what was left of him. The flesh of him could no longer be haunted with his presence.
"That's him," she told the young police officer, told him with a sweet sweet smile. He stared a little too long at her mouth, but she had already left the room by the time he might have noticed that smile wasn't really sweet in the least.
Nor did he notice that something had been taken off the body.
**
She'd taken the locket off Emil as she clipped the lock of hair from the back of his head, while the two officers were distracted with each other. Misdirection. Her father had taught her about that, reeling people in, calling their attention, moving in such a way that they couldn't take their eyes off you and thus missed what they should be watching for. She put it in her pocket next to the lock of hair and walked home.
It didn't rain, though that would have been appropriate.
**
She thought about the woman Emil had died for, the woman from the kidnapping. She'd had hollow eyes and a deadness about her. That leadenness had taken Emil down to drown in a dark place, in that well, alone.
She wondered if he was with his family now. She wondered if he missed her, or, in some perfect heaven, he'd forgotten her entirely.
**
On the way up the stairs, she stopped a girl going down, told her she had seen her pierced with fire, told her she was going to die, die in a way teenagers never believe they will. She walked up the rest of the steps, oblivious to the girl's reaction, if she had one at all.
**
When Esme reached 804 she found the door slightly ajar. It was like he had just left, like he might be coming back at any moment, like he was just down the street. He was buying her cigarettes. He said he'd be back in a second, and he'd kissed her, a lightness to his step that did not exist anywhere else but in this constructed memory, and then he'd gone out, leaving her waiting.
She pushed the door open with the tips of her fingers.
The room was quiet and dark. In the back, television monitors hummed with images captured from surveillance cameras.
She shut the door behind her and leaned back against it for a moment, shut her eyes. Snow. Ice on eyelashes. Children crying, three of them, frozen solid. She chopped them free, and didn't mind when one lost a leg, snapped clean off.
She opened her eyes again.
**
She walked through the apartment, touching things. The weapons on the table, the cork on the walls. She glanced at the room with a hook but didn't go inside. She knew who that hook was meant for, and one day, he would hang on it.
She walked into the surveillance room. The cameras were all still functioning, showing a few stragglers from the party tottering soberly home. The moved in and out of the camera's view, distorted and fish eyed, large in the approach and tiny in the distance. Everything smaller from far away.
She sat down in front of the screens, then turned the chair away. She could see the mattress from where she was sitting, and the door.
Behind her, the screens shone white, lighting her hair from behind, graying it. Her eyes shone dark and ruddy, garnets set into a shadowed face.
**
Esme dreamed of fire.
She also dreamed of more snow, more children, old women clicking at her in Russian dialects, white hands tearing a young man to shreds who was too brave to cry when they taunted him by waving his severed arm in front of his eyes. She dreamed of pretty girls and horses, horses bright as the sun and dark as a moonless night and achingly beautiful and hers hers hers. She dreamed of dark abysses where the wind howled, and she screamed only there, because the wind carried the sound away. She would wake up with her throat sore, but no one complained about the noise. No one complained about the noise the same way people didn't approach her in the halls. She swept her sunless eyes on them like searchlights, blind and cold and illuminating and vacant, and they kept walking.
**
In the days following, she attended the funeral. Only Emil's in-laws were there, them and her. She was wearing a black dress that brushed the ground. She didn't know if he would have liked it. It didn't really matter. He was dead.
She tossed in a flower she'd stolen from a grave in the cemetery where they'd met. It felt apropo--steal from the dead, from memory, to honor the dead. A neat circle.
She never did speak to his in-laws, who wore dour expressions and seemed curious about her. She offered them a distant smile that used to be sweet, and went back to the apartment building.
**
That night, she spun in circles on the chair in the surveillance room in 804, picking petals off of the flower she'd kept for herself. She flung them away from her as she spun, using her bare, dirty feet to keep her turning, and she laughed.
He loves me
**
She had the locket between her fingers, and she was carefully placing the lock of his hair inside, over the picture of his family. She clicked it shut and clasped it around the back of her neck. The locket hung low and heavy on her chest, and while she walked, while she dreamed, she carried a dead man and his family with her.