Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

And Anne could see behind Gloria where Richard hunched in a seat at the kitchen table with his back to the open bathroom door and his shoulders trembling. He tilted his head with one ear perked, listening for an outcry. But Anne knew the danger her voice would summon. If she uttered a warning, even whispered, he’d surely stab them both dead. So she swallowed all her noise deep into her chest.

Gloria lowered herself down onto the toilet seat. She fingered the silky hem of her thigh-high nylons like an intimacy. “What are you getting yourself into?” Gloria whispered. Anne winced, but then she understood that Gloria was talking to herself.

“Oh, sick—” Gloria said. “Come here, Rich — look.”

Anne’s airless lungs ached. She peered but could not see what Gloria was lifting from beside her feet. A chair scraped the kitchen floor, and there was Richard in the doorway — his unshaven face and those black-stained hands. His one undamaged eye scanned everywhere, even the ceiling, until it fixed upon the open edge of the shower curtain through which Anne saw him. His blind, shattered eye saw nothing.

“They must’ve — you know,” Gloria said. “’Cause look at — she cleaned up her blood with this sock and just left it here. Think I should go rail on her, knock on her door?”

“No,” Richard said.

Gloria said, “What are you all grumpy about? I told you the date sucked. I was going to call you tonight anyways, maybe even ask you to come over. But as usual you jumped the gun. Lucky I’m feeling forgiving.”

The toilet flushed, and Anne lifted her nose from the water. She inhaled a breath filled with Gloria’s sweet berry perfume. Gloria ground her body into Richard’s. She took his limp hand and pressed those grimed fingernails around her hips. But Richard’s dead sparkling eye still watched Anne, watched until Gloria flicked the light away.

How long Anne waited beneath the water and behind the curtain — she couldn’t count the minutes. She measured time by the distant thump of Gloria’s bedroom door, their voices and bodies settling into bed, Gloria’s smoky laughter, the steady chilling of bath water, ripple by ripple.

She wanted to remain until events reversed themselves, but her mind kept firing her muscles to run. She imagined escaping without her body, slipping upward from it through the bathroom ceiling and the apartment above, floating into the night air. She wanted to find Daniel in the ether and mingle with the particles of his afterlife. From ceiling height she watched her body dripping and cast in blue. Those limbs and ribs and spine were no more than any collection of bones, but she stayed tethered to them by nervous cords, webbed in dendrites and axons.

She wanted to cut those bonds — even as her body began to quicken, peeling back the shower curtain, slumping and slipping over the tub rim like a new birth. She watched her naked bones stand upright and walk, dripping bathwater onto the kitchen linoleum, gaining strength. She saw herself slump against the kitchen counter, saw her own hand draw another long blade from the knife block. She watched herself with that knife and believed that she could use it.