by Jaym Gates
Those are the words they leave you with as they make their exit melting into the shadows. The pounding in your chest grows louder with each step, threatening to demolish your body. Everything you’ve worked for will wither and wilt like crops after frost.
No, this won’t happen. Fear propels you and you pull from the darkness to draw onto yourself. You dress in the flesh of husbands and wives, elders and children whisper you have — wrinkled skin, twisted limbs, a hump, a nose like a gnarled branch and hair filled with rats and centipedes. You rush to your tools.
Beneath a crystal lid, lies a spindle long and thin made from the thick bone in the princess’s shin and a small key carved from her big toe. You coat the spindle in oils that will make her sleep, something you should have done, had you not hesitated in the first place. A villain is what you willingly chose your role to be and your heart should bear to commit any sin against the savior of your family. Perhaps eternal sleep might be a mercy. It might ease both your suffering.
You take a place in front of the liquid mirror and with key pinched between long-nailed thumb and forefinger, you dip its tip. The reaction is instantaneous as the water hisses and billows into a thick mist. You see nothing for a breath and then sunlight rushes in from all around you. The ground hall of the tower is bigger than what you see in the water and if you were to simply pass through, you’d never think it’s really a cage.
The immediacy still shocks you as you now stare at the woman who looks so startlingly like you beneath the other people’s fears you’re wearing, you could have been sisters. In another life, you could have been running hand in hand through fields — she, fearless and assured, you, trying to keep up. But you’re in this life where you brandish the spindle bone and wish there is another way.
Her eyes land on the sharp tip tinted black, a single black drop forming.
“You’ve been an ungracious guest,” you chide with the voice you remember of your grandmother. “Trying to leave the place where you know you belong.”
The dark of her eyes burns and she steps away, slowly as you approach, her leg scrapping the floor. You try not to cringe, to stay bitter and terrifying the way your grandmother was the day you broke her heart.
“I go where monsters like you terrorize the innocent,” she says and runs towards the stairs.
“All the more reason to stay, girl. I’m never going anywhere and neither are you,” you call after her and give chase. The princess has nowhere to go. You have nowhere to go. Your liberation from poverty has bound you with ties far more dangerous than the ones of your blood. “Now stay true to your words and come to me.”
Even for a cripple, she is fast. You hear her metal foot stomp the stone as you try to catch up, but what you can’t achieve with speed, you accomplish with endurance. The long days of standing and walking have hardened your legs and you follow her. You both run, suspended in this one moment where the only promised thing is the next step, the world spinning slowly around the tower’s axis. She reaches the top well before you and you have a few moments to think about whether you can do this. Will you be the person to extinguish the one remaining light in this country?
“Stop your silly games, girl. This will be but a tiny prick against the skin,” you yell once you see the arch of the door frame. You have made your decision.
The moment you reach the final stairs is when you lose. She towers over you, her metal leg bare. Her foot’s edges scratched into blades. Your momentum propels you and you can’t slow down. The princess swings her leg for a kick and the metal cuts through your throat so fast you can’t even scream.
It’s strange to see your blood trickle. Stranger even to drown in it.
“Hunters never play games,” you hear the princess say, but you don’t have it in you to get angry. You feel your spells come undone, gently as a thread being pulled from a scarf, gently as your life runs down your chest and soaks your gown.
As you fall on your knees, your illusions shed off — no mask behind which to hide. That makes the princess step back, eyes diluted and glinting with recognition. Perhaps, this is your worst sin — betraying her trust. Death awaits and you’re not ready for it. What will happen to your man and your children? You’re too tired to be afraid any more.
You can plea for your family. You can beg for your life, but the choice you’ve made do not allow it and you want your last act as a person to mean something. You press a hand against the wound and will your voice through the blood.
“I’m so sorry. You deserved none of this,” you say and hesitate. You’ve cursed for so long, do you even have it in you to bless, but it has to be done. As life leaves you, you command.
“May the things that have been stolen from you, give you strength.”
Burning Bright
Shanna Germain
My gun’s name is Lamb. My daughter named it when she was five. Ran around with it going, “Wham! Wham!” I lost my mind thinking she was going to grow up a serial killer, until I remembered that’s just how she said lamb back then.
It wasn’t my gun then. It was her father’s. I have never owned a gun. Until last week when Dylan, my ex, showed up to give me this one.
It was right after the accident. Accident is Dylan’s word, not mine. I was in the hospital, grogged out of my brain on whatever was in my IV drip, and he showed up. That’s the story of exes right? Never there when you need them. Always there when you’re in an ass-open hospital gown and drooling like “What? I thought you were dead six years ago.”
He wasn’t dead though, it turns out. He was alive enough to press the metal and weight of the gun into my hand like a Get-Well-Soon gift. His hands. He’s always had good hands. Soft. Not like mine.
“Just in case there’s another accident,” he said.
What he meant was, “Just in case someone tries to kill you again.”
What he really meant was, “Just in case our daughter tries to kill you again.”
I didn’t know that’s what he meant at the time, though. Sometimes you have to peel back the layers of what someone says after, when you’re alone and he’s not looking at you with those blue-blue eyes.
If I hadn’t been drugged to the eyeballs, I might have said, Liv’s sixteen. Not an accident.
I suppose it was something most people would say was a nice gesture, my ex giving me a gun. Except he knows my relationship with guns. He knows better than anybody. I don’t know shit about guns. I hate them, which is absurd for my line of work. But there you go. I’ve never even aimed one, much less used one to kill something. I don’t even know for sure if Lamb still works or that she’s a she. Do guns even have genders, like ships? No idea. No care.
All I know about guns is that this one fits in my palm like a tiny metal kitten and she purrs to all get out when I use the weight of her to punch someone in the face.
That, and it’s the one my daughter shot me with.
#
Lamb’s not purring now. Partly because I’m not punching someone in the face. But also because she’s not in my palm. She’s lying about a foot away from me on dirty off-brown carpet while this dude’s got his big-booted foot on my wrist.
I’ll spare you the details on how we got here and how this guy looks like an unshaved ape and how his breath smells like bad pastrami. He’s already said all the things that big-booted dudes say when they’ve learned how they’re supposed to be from the movies. “Who sent you?” and “Why are you here?” and “How’d you take out the eight giant men with guns that were standing outside?”
Okay, he didn’t ask that last one, but he should have. I mean, come on. Those are the kinds of things I’m proudest of in my career and no one ever asks. Probably assumes they all fell prey to my seductive charms. That’s how female assassins work in the movies. Even if it doesn’t start that way, you can bet by the end, she’s put on some expensive snakeskin dress and a magenta wig and mile-high fuck-me-pumps and she’s saying things like, “I’m a gift from some Russian name that no one can p
ronounce.”
While Big Boot looks down at me, I can almost see him thinking, “Nope. Not gonna’ fall for that one.” Which is just fine by me. I’ve never seduced anyone on the job and I’m not about to start with him and his giant boots and his meat breath.
He also doesn’t ask, “How come I was able to take you down to the ground with your back on my dirty-ass floor when my eight giant men with guns couldn’t do it?”
He doesn’t ask that one because he’s all ego. And that’s good.
What’s bad is that I might have overestimated my skills a bit here. It’s never good when your weapon malfunctions. And my weapon is malfunctioning all over the board right now. My wrist is making some kind of crackling noise under his sole. It doesn’t hurt yet — the metal bracelets are taking most of the weight — but the ligaments in there are twanging like guitar strings getting stretched.
It’s my back that’s really feeling it though. Which makes sense. Because according to my least-favorite doctor, one of the bullets from the accident smashed through some part of my spine and I should never go back to work again. Clearly his words. Not mine. He doesn’t even know what I do for a living. So you decide how useful that advice is. I got a second opinion in the form of asking myself and myself said I was just fine. So here I am. That’s the power of second opinions.
Big Boots leans in, asks me again “Who the fuck are you?”
Let’s skip the boring parts about how I answer something stupid and smart-ass because he should know who the fuck I am and how he smashes me in the face with his sole. How the rubber clover-leafs on the bottom smear my lipstick — Killer Fucking Kiss, it’s called. I would have worn it for the name even if it wasn’t my color. How despite the pain that blooms in my nose, I manage to grab that receding foot. The one-two-three punch that drops him to the ground. Not dead. No one’s dead here yet.
Let’s also skip the part where I have to fumble one, okay, maybe two, of those little blue pain pills out of my pocket and swallow them dry before I can pick up Lamb and ask Big Boots ever so gently where I can find my daughter.
#
I figure every job has its shit element. Paperwork. A bad boss. That horrible customer that makes you want to claw your eyeballs out.
The shit element of my job is the death. Everything else is awesome. Training. The money. Research. Planning. Beating people up. Even cleaning the blood out of my knuckles is a task I enjoy. There’s something calming about the tedium, getting every last bit of red out of the wrinkles in my skin. Like deveining shrimp.
But the death. If I could change one thing about what I do, it would be that. I don’t even like to kill spiders — and I’m pretty sure spiders are God’s way of saying, “Fuck you humans and your big brains. One look at this and you’re still going to lose your shit.”
I’ve killed 98 people in my life. Two of those were accidents; that’s a story for another story. The rest were jobs. When my daughter asked me what I did for a living, I always said, “I’m a poet, baby.” It’s almost true.
#
Big Boots didn’t know where to find my daughter. But he told me who did. Of course he did. He works for the guy who works for the guy who’s in the know. Which is why I came here as soon as I got out of the hospital and realized Liv was missing.
I didn’t torture him. Torturing someone for information is like trying to get computer code out of a chip with a jackhammer. No. I put Lamb in my pocket and talked softly. Spread the possible poems of his future in front of him like a soothsayer. Here is the poem where you go gentle. Here is the poem where you rage. Here is the poem where you are the poet and you live to write more poems.
Before I was an assassin, I taught poetry to college freshman. I understand the power of alliteration, presentation, and promise, of the pause before that final push. I gave Big Boots the opportunity to write his own ending.
He chose wisely. I thanked him and went on my way. If there’s a code among thieves, then there is surely one among us. Don’t kill innocents. Don’t damage each other’s property beyond reason (and, yes, hired henchmen count as property in this case). And don’t kill each other.
There’s only one exception to that last bit of code. And I’m about to become that exception.
“My daughter is missing,” I said twice. Calm as calm. “Who knows where she is?”
And I heard the answer before he even said the name.
#
I have to stop home and feed the cats. I know how it sounds. Daughter missing. After she tried to kill me. Ex-lover on the loose. And here I am, with one cat clinging to my pant legs and the other meowing her fool head off about dinner.
But every villain needs to love a kitten, right? If I’m the villain, in this then I’ve got my share. For the longest time, I adopted a cat from the local kill shelter after every job. Atonement bullshit, that’s what Dylan kept saying. Saving a life for taking a life. All I know is it made me feel better to hold that vibrating mini monster in my hands.
But Liv was little then and allergic to all things with fur. And two-year-olds don’t really have the brainspace to figure out, “Oh, touching the furballs makes me hack my lungs out. I’ll just stay away from them.” Instead, it was more like “I’m gonna put all of this fur right in my mouth so you can take me to the hospital. Yay me!”
After the third hospital visit, I started donating money for every job instead. For the most part I stopped bringing home strays. Unless it was really bad.
#
The basement of the Unitarian Sect of the Second Divine has one of those tiny doors that seems like it was built for tiny humans, but was actually probably never supposed to get used. As was the basement.
But a couple hundred years of renovations and you get this glorious hunk of a room: sweating concrete and fitzing overhead lights and a bunch of folding chairs set in a semi-circle. There’s an empty coffee pot and a bulletin board littered with flyers. AA meeting, 7pm, Wed. Find Your True Self. Cancer Survivors Group. Cancer Widows Group. The group for people who thought they had cancer, but didn’t. Even Heroine Recoverers Unite! with its tagline, “We HeRe U!” the spelling of which makes my teeth hurt every time I see it.
It’s all there, if you dig deep enough. All except for the Aging Assassins Support Group. Horrible name, right? AAS Group? But it used to be called Hope Blooms. And I’ll let you imagine how quick that name got stomped to the floor. We would have taken something that spelled out SHIT if it got us away from sickly-sweet flowers and emotions.
To get to AAS, you have to go into the women’s bathroom, second stall. The toilet there has said OUT OF ORDUR for so long most of the ink has faded from bright green to grey. It’s not really out of order, but it’s grimy as all get-out and there’s no way I’d put my ass, or any other body part, anywhere near that thing.
I flush the handle twice with my foot, because germs, and then the toilet and the wall behind it swings open. Plush red carpet, dark red walls, dim lights. Sweet music that charms your heart into thinking it belongs to the body of someone who does downward dog for a living instead of death.
Barbara the Bouncer — yes, we call her that to her face — takes one look at me and gives me the complex chin movement that means: yes, I know you and you can come in. Her fists are as big as my face, with a dozen spiky rings that point in no good directions.
When I slide in, the group is already past the “Hi, my name is Rose, and I kill people for a living,” part, which is fine by me, because the members of this group haven’t changed in ten years. We all know that we kill people for a living.
But a ritual’s a ritual or it’s nothing. So I slide into a chair, catching more than one surprised glance. I guess they heard about the accident. I guess they didn’t expect to see me here alive.
#
Dylan doesn’t see me at first. He’s in the front row, his back to the door. I refuse to look at those broad shoulders, that skinny-down waist, the place where the belt of his jeans shows off his hips. I look in
stead at the one piece of hair that’s too long, a jagged edge of color against his shirt.
I didn’t really think he was dead. That was just my drugged up, pain-wracked brain talking. I knew that he was locked up in state facilities for the criminally insane. But I’d been telling Liv that her father was dead for so long that in some corner of my brain I’d come to believe it. The lies we tell ourselves accidentally are the hardest ones to see through.
I think about the last time I saw him — before the gun-and-drug hospital visit last week. Six years ago. Liv was ten. Dylan wanted to tell her what we did for a living, said she was old enough. But even then I knew that something was wrong with him. And that something was in Liv too.
Probably, I tell anyone what I do, and they’d think, “Yeah, she’s got a little crazy in her.” But the truth is no. The truth is, you can’t have a single psychopath gene and be good at this job. It’s too easy to get knocked off balance, to lose your way into madness, even when you start from a solid foundation.
Dylan’s foundation was never solid. I knew that, even when I didn’t. Every kill chip-chipping away at that tiny platform holding him up toward sanity.
And Liv? She’s got his genes. And mine too. It’s no risk I was willing to take. Your mama’s a poet, baby. And I’d sing her down some of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, as though the lines were my own.
Here are the two questions that continue to haunt me: How long has he been out? Did Liv try to shoot me on her own, or was that Dylan’s doing?
Dylan stands up and walks to the front, starts to say his part about how he’s been gone traveling. He makes a double-hitch in his talk when he sees me sitting there. I can’t kill him here. Code. That and the fact that he knows where Liv is.