by M. K. Hobson
What is wrong with him? He presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. These things sell. These are what people want. Why should they annoy him so? Why does he suddenly long for the smell of motor oil and rust and honey?
“Winnie!” he whispers loudly, looking wildly about the room. “Winnie, for God’s sake!”
Then, she is there. Sitting on the bed.
The transformation is complete. She is slender and sylphlike, with a delicate face and vacant eyes.
She looks, Ryan notices with sudden horror, exactly like his fiancée.
She is staring out the window, thinking unfathomable thoughts. Her hair shines, her face is perfect, her nails gleam, her skin is smooth as glass. She is perfect and perfectly self-contained.
“You know something strange?” she says distantly, her face wrinkling in a pretty frown. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
* * *
That night, Ryan burns it down.
Burns it all down; the bamboo flooring, the soothing mint-green walls, the new plaster. Everything. He storms through the dark virgin rooms with a five-gallon gasoline can. He lights the fire by putting a ripped piece of rag into the mouth of a bottle of vodka. Then he stands across the street and watches her burn, brilliant greens and oranges, deep mysterious flickers of blue, black billowing smoke that makes the sky weep.
He sits across the street, watching the fire trucks cluster around like busy insects. Dawn breaks, the sun rises, and no one notices him, no one knows who he is; he is just another man, sitting silently, watching something go up in flames.
He waits until the firemen have gone, leaving behind nothing but yellow tape and the smell of death and her gray, hulking, empty skeleton, charred and angular.
Crawling through the yellow tape, sneaking like an animal, he moves around at her feet, through her hot shadow. With a shaking hand, he fills a galvanized bucket with damp gray ash. There are pieces of wood mixed in with it; wood like bone.
He places both hands on the side of the bucket, closing his eyes. There is a warmth banked within, the warmth of pudding encased in a heating blanket, the warmth of rage and retribution and desire.
“Come with me,” he whispers, pleading. “Stay with me. Please.”
He puts the bucket into the trunk of his green Lexus.
* * *
He visits the gals at the County Assessor’s office. They are surprised again, because he smells like smoke and his face is streaked with ash and tears. But they take his check gladly and issue him a receipt with a formal red stamp on it.
And so he reclines with Winnie in the warehouse by the river. In the rain. On a stained mattress, drinking vodka from a bottle with a torn label.
Ryan’s appraising gaze shifts to the brick wall instinctively, out of habit. Once painted glossy white, now it’s grimy, smudged with old black handprints. How many layers of paint hide beneath there?
I should strip that paint, he thinks. Expose the brick. People like exposed brick.
As soon as the thought crosses his mind, pain sears through him, tearing his heart into little throbbing bits. He gasps for air.
“The secrets stay,” Winnie growls.
Ryan presses both palms flat against the sides of his head, as if he can press the pain out his ears.
“How did you . . .” he begins.
“You breathed in the ash when you were scattering it,” Winnie says, taking a drink from the vodka bottle. There is a long silence while she lets Ryan absorb the implications of what she has said. Then she looks at him with cool, unblinking, oil-colored eyes.
“You’re a murderer and a rapist,” she says again.
How could he not have seen it? It is a secret he kept from himself, only now brought into the light to be scoured away.
With a shaking hand, Ryan takes the bottle of vodka from her. He takes a long harsh swallow. He’s 40, rich and beautiful, and the ghosts of his victims will live within him for the rest of his life.
He lays his head on her soft, warm lap.
“You will remake me,” he says, closing his eyes. He will sleep. He will sleep for a long time. He will dream her dreams. He will remember what he never knew. He will savor the exquisite beauty of acceptance.
He feels her hand upon his head. She smoothes his hair carefully.
“There may be hope for you,” she says very softly, her voice sweet as honey.
© 2005 by M. K. Hobson.
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
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Document creation date: 18 July 2012
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