Sinners Circle

by Sims, Karina

  Her little arms go limp, she looks at me like I’m crazy. Like I’ve just broken her heart. She looks at me like she’s actually seeing me. I throw my arms around her, “Sophie, please just trust me, OK? I’m not going to hurt you, I would never hurt you. But I’ve done some things and I’m scared. I’m fucking scared that these things are going to take you away from me. Please, just trust me. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  I pull away from her, kiss the lips that pressed themselves all over my body in the shade of her bedroom last night. But my heart it breaks completely when I look into her eyes, brimming with tears, and the whole side of her face is covered with my blood, rolling in big drops off her chin, staining her white shoes. “Sophie, I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Please, come inside, I don’t care what you’ve done, let me help...” Her words are warm, but her eyes tell me she lies.

  I grab her arm, push her towards her car and she screams help, I cover her mouth and drag her. I open the door and push her into the car, climbing into the drivers side. “You’re coming with me Sophie. You don’t get it do you? Do you think I’m fucking joking? Do you think I’d come here bleeding and screaming because I’m in love with some dumb fucking bitch and I can’t control myself? Like I’m so fucking crazy about some dumb cunt I just met and I just haaave to see you because you’re just sooo incredible and ...” She huddles into the window, I lean over and shout in her face, “... blah blah blah?”

  I shake my head, start the car and light a cigarette. “Get your fuckin’ head out of your ass.” I wag a finger between us. “All this, I’m fucking saving your life.”

  She doesn’t say anything and neither do I until we pass my car, all smashed on the side of the road, police cars and fire trucks blocking one of the opposite lanes. Sophie points, “Hey, isn’t that your...”

  I blow a mouthful of smoke out the window, shake my head and sigh. “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Hey! Don’t fucking act like that! You don’t get to show up and act like a fucking psycho without any explanation and not at least tell me where the fuck we are going!” She looks around out the window. “Hey, where are we headed anyway?”

  “My house.”

  “Why?”

  We stop at a traffic light, I slump my shoulders and rest my head on the steering wheel. “We have to go to my house for a couple minutes. I have to get some things.” I reach for the cigarettes, tap the pack around in my hands. “Then we’re going out of town to a motel.”

  “A motel? Are you crazy? I have work in the morning.”

  I sigh, rub my head, it’s still bleeding, but not as bad. I can tell because it’s not getting in my eyes anymore. “I’ll explain everything. Everything, I swear.” I pop a smoke between my lips, unlock the doors. “I don’t want to force you or anything, you’re free to...”

  She snaps the door open, I grab the back of her shirt, yank her back in the car just as the light turns green and drive off. She slaps my arm away from her, “Hey! You said I could go!”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not supposed to.”

  “What?”

  I light my cigarette, shrug and squint at the road with my good eye. “One of those test things that people do when their in love. And you my dear...” I give her a wink. “You failed.”

  She shakes her head. I laugh. “Amanda, this isn’t cool with me. I’ll give you till we get to your house but, I deserve an explanation.”

  “True. And all people get what they deserve, right?”

  “What the fuck? You think I deserve to be fucking kidnapped?”

  “No, no, no. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m saving your life, remember?”

  She rolls her eyes and says to the window, “Oh right, that’s what you’re doing.”

  “You betcha.”

  “You know, what’s so great about you huh? Why do you think you’re such hot shit? You’re not, you’re cold diarrhea. I see people like you every goddamn day.”

  “No you don’t.”

  She looks at me, then back out the window. “Every goddamn day.”

  “Sophie, look, you’re right. You’re totally fucking right. I am a total piece of shit, I’m not debating that with you. And I know this all looks, sounds totally fucking crazy, but trust me OK, please just trust me. I love you, I’m sorry I hurt you, honey. I’m fucking scared right now and I need you to see that and understand that and just trust me. If there’s one thing you ever trust me with, it’s this one time. Baby, please?”

  She doesn’t say anything, just bites her nails and stares out the window. We stop at another traffic light and I unlock the doors. She looks at me, puts her hand on the handle. “Would you really let me go this time.”

  I nod. “But I don’t want you to.”

  She pops the door a little, “Amanda, is it really that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I really need this in my life?”

  “No. But I need you in mine.”

  “Are you going to tell me things I don’t want to hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I don’t like them, you’ll let me go without hurting me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ok.” The light turns green. She closes the door. “I’ll go with you tonight.”

  I push the car into drive and roll through the intersection. On the side of the highway a bum is holding a sign ‘Repent: The End is Nigh.’ I close my eyes and see Marcy, scooped out and cut up. I gag and swallow whatever comes up. I look over at Sophie, she’s clenching her hands together but her knees are apart. I’m not sure how to read her body language. I look at the cigarette between my fingers, my hand is shaking. I toss the butt out the window and feel my forehead. It’s stopped bleeding but it aches, my whole body aches, inside and out.

  As I pull up to my house and kill the engine, I know that tomorrow I’ll have to find some way to keep Sophie in the motel while I come back to burn it down.

  “I’ll just be a sec. Wait for me, please?”

  She nods, I’m about to pocket the keys but she leans in and kisses me. “I’m not going anywhere without you.” I leave the keys in the ignition and get out of the car. I walk to my door, look back, she’s looking at me, scared but smiling. I open the door and close it behind me.

  I’m used to being alone, in all the years I’ve been here and brought someone back, killed them and kept their quiet corpse locked up somewhere, I’ve never felt it feel so empty as it does now. I don’t have to know Marcy is dead in the cellar to know that she isn’t here anymore. The vacancy of the building is loud and besetting. I walk into my bedroom, everything is as it should be. Nothing’s been moved or misplaced, it’s all exactly the way I’ve left it. My clothes are still on the floor, until I pick them up, stuff them in a bag from my closet. Under my bed, all the photographs and Polaroid’s of the women I’ve chopped up are still in their shoe box.

  I carry the bag of clothes into the kitchen, walk to the couch, lift the cushion, grab my syringe, walk back into the bedroom and throw some clean underwear in the bag. And then my heart skips a beat as the sound of footfall descends the stairs connecting Marcy’s floor to mine.

  “You think you’re so smart, dontcha?” Harry stands in front of my couch, arms crossed. “So fuckin’ clever, dontcha?”

  I can’t even look at him. He steps closer in the dark. “You think you’re just gonna do whatever you like huh? Hurt whoever you want and it doesn’t matter, because you’re so fuckin’ smart they’ll never get ya. You think you’re in so much pain and you’re so fuckin’ badass killing women, huh?” He laughs, “You ain’t shit.”

  He leans in the doorframe, chewing another huge wad of gum. “You think everyone else is pretty stupid, huh? Think you’re putting something over on us?”

  “Harry—”

  “No, fuck you Amanda Troy. Fuck you and your little miss serial killer bullshit. You know why bitches always get busted when they start killing people? Because they start fucking up, they start comi
ng to work with blood under their fingernails and all over their shoes. They come to work reeking of death. You think you’re a monster?” He shoves a thumb into the fat in his chest, “You’re among the wolves now. We can sniff that shit out. People who don’t know that smell, they just chalk it up to bad hygiene. But you ain’t shit, you’re just one sad little piece of fucked up virgin pussy that needs a good ol’ pumpin’” He thumbs his chest again. “I’m the big bad wolf, baby; I can smell a rat like you a mile away.”

  I back up, he doesn’t move. “Ya know, at first I thought, gee maybe she’s just nuts. But your buddy there... Carl, he came over one night when you were out bangin’ that hooker bitch in your car.” He shrugs, “Yeah, I got that on camera, made some good coin from it. Anyway, your buddy, we got to talking, told me some interesting stuff he’s found around your place while you’re all doped up on smack nodding out...” He points to my bed. “...like a fuckin’ junkie. Yup, found some video tapes. Did you know we’re pulling in fifteen grand each little episode of yours? We sell ‘em to the Koreans in town here. Lord knows what they do with them.”

  “Harry...”

  “No, no, let me finish please. See, we got to thinking, if there’s a market for that, well, what about the bodies? There’s no sense in wasting them. So we got those too. We sold them in parts, skeletons and junk, human body parts will go for quite a bit of dough, so we didn’t mind if you ate one or two, because the cash would come in anyways. So we waited, we waited and waited and kept getting more and more money from your little shenanigans. Thing is though, Amanda, when Carl told me about your little girlfriend...” He backs into the kitchen, looks out the window, “...is that her? Gee, she’s pretty.”

  I slam my elbow into the window, grab a shard of glass and run at him. But he’s faster and punches me in the face, stomps on my chest and slices my hand open wide as he pulls the glass from my fist. “Carl told me about that little bitch of yours, how you started acting. We couldn’t lose our little investment because you think you’re in love.” He laughs so hard he starts coughing, “Seriously, Amanda, look at yourself. You’re not a person, you’re a monster. Look what you did to all those people. Look what you took away from them. They were happy and in love, and you took that from them. And now you want me to let you live because you have it? You did this to yourself. You did this. So you tell me little girl, you fucking tell me why you deserve to live after all the lives you’ve ruined and stolen and the hearts you’ve broken, what makes you so goddamn special, huh?”

  He kicks me in the ribs hard enough for me to hear them crack. “So, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna sell those tapes. We’re gonna sell those weird fuckin’ pictures under your bed and we’re gonna cut you up. You and lesbo lady over there in the car, and we’re gonna see you in parts. How’s that sound?”

  He steps on my wrist, dips a finger in my blood and licks it off. “But you, I think I’m gonna sell that little pussy of yours first. I mean, once you’re dead.”

  Carl walks down the stairs, shotgun swinging at his side. “Oh hi, Amanda.”

  Harry looks at Carl, “How about it? You want a go when she’s gone?”

  He smiles, brushes some of that fag hair of his out of his face. “Hells yeah.”

  He opens the door walks outside. “Heya Sophie!”

  All I can hear is her screaming, even when Harry pulls me by my hair out the door onto the lawn and up against the house. Even when Carl bends over, waves at Sophie and blasts straight through the window, firing twice, all I hear is her screaming and it blends into the echoes of the children burning in their beds, the choir of women roped to the chair in the cellar, my mother weeping at the hands of her murderers. I don’t see Harry take a revolver out of the back of his pants, but my hands go up like I don’t want him to shoot. And when I do see and he does shoot, I really don’t hear or feel the bullet pass through my ring and middle fingers. I just see them in a motion slow enough that they just float away from the others and it doesn’t hurt when my cheek burns hot, or when my teeth slip down the back of my throat or explode in my sinuses.

  I don’t feel any of that. I don’t see any of that. But what I do see is the thunder storm forming in the summertime. And what I do feel is the breeze of the weeds blowing on the back of my knees. And what I do hear is my mother’s heart pounding as we rush through the wheat before we’re captured as thieves.

  About the author:

  Karina Sims is from Beaver Falls, British Columbia, Canada. She attended Selkirk College, skipping most of her classes to play guitar with the music students. She was never in a school play and she likes cats more than dogs. Her greatest weakness is women. Karina has been published in several online magazines, this is her first novel.