The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (10 page)

“But there are so many things that could give you away. What about DNA? It’s almost impossible to kill someone at close proximity without leaving something behind. What if I scratch you? What if you leave a fingerprint somewhere, or clothing fibers under my nails? And you need a plan to dispose of the body. Unless you want to go down for first degree, you can’t stab me in my own home and then just leave me here—too much evidence. Do you have a car?”

He throws his head back, incredulous, still smiling. “And you’re telling me all this...why?”

“Because—” and my voice sounds shrill and much too loud. I take a deep breath, smile like I’m selling real estate or dishwashers and start over. “Well, because you’re doing this all wrong. If you really want to kill someone, it has to look so much like an accident that no one will even investigate.”

For the first time, his smile wavers. His jaw is tight with something like rage. “And how do you know so much?” In his hand the blade looks very sharp, reflecting the glare from the overhead light. His expression is watchful, and I’m certain that he’s imaging my blood.

I take a deep, shuddering breath and blurt out, “When I was twelve years old, I drowned my sister.”

For a second he doesn’t respond. Then he moves closer, looking almost troubled. “Why?”

The story rushes together in my head and I claw through the pieces, trying out answers and discarding them: because I was jealous of her beauty and her popularity, jealous of our parents’ affection for her, angry because she broke a toy that mattered to me or always teased me or never loved me?

“Because I wanted to know what it was like,” I whisper, trying to look how he might think a child-murderer should look. Honest, but unrepentant. “Because I’m like you.”

He covers the space between us in two steps, and suddenly I’m frozen, balanced on the point of my most expensive kitchen knife, chin up, head tipped back at an awkward angle. “Are you lying to me?” he snarls.

The steel is cold against my throat. I shiver and breathe out but never look away from his face. “No,” I say softly. “No, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Good. Because if you’re lying, I will gut you here and now.”

“Look—I’m just trying to help you. If you want to kill someone, you should do it where no one will find the body. Or where people die anyway. Where it will look like a freak accident or a crime of necessity. I can help you,” I whisper, biting down on every word, horribly aware of how my pulse beats in my throat, thrumming against the knifepoint. “We could find someone really good—disposable, a lowlife who deserves it. Some people just aren’t meant to live. I can show you how to get away with it.”

“Right.” He sounds disgusted. “Why would you do that? Why would you help me?” His face is close to mine, cheeks red, teeth bared, but anger is better than flat, affectless nothing. Flat means no remorse, no reasoning. It means one centimeter away from being stabbed to death in my kitchen.

“Please, I told you about my sister. I told you a secret!” I gasp it, almost wail it, trying to sell the promise of camaraderie—that it will be me and him, two sick customers, partners in homicide. The promise that I am not lying.

He nods, stepping back, looking dazed, and lets the knife drop from my throat. I go limp inside but don’t sigh aloud.

“And if I walk out of here,” he says, sounding almost sad, “what’ll stop you from calling the police?”

“You know about me. I could never turn you in—you’d tell them what I did!”

He sets the knife on the counter, looking lost and pitiful, like maybe all he’s ever wanted is for someone to know about him.

“We should make a plan,” I say, giving him a quick, sideways look. Almost flirtatious? “Meet downtown somewhere, do some recon. If we dress right, we can pass for vagrants or barflies. No one will remember seeing us. We need someplace with loiterers and lots of foot traffic—maybe the bus station? In two hours? Let’s meet behind the bus station.”

My voice sounds wrong, a little forced, but his eyes are hopeful and he wants so badly to believe me.

“You better not stand me up,” he says, shaking a finger at me. “I know where you live.” But he says it with a smile. On someone less homicidal, it would sound almost like he was making a joke.

I let him out through the back door and watch him go, waving from the porch steps.

After he’s over the fence and out of sight, I go down into the basement and stand at the workbench, sorting through my supplies. It’s nice, living alone. I can leave things lying out now. Taser-plus-piano-wire is very efficient, but I like cyanide for strangers.

The story of my sister was a risky move, hard to sound convincing. The memory is clear but featureless, gone over so many times I’ve worn the details off. I don’t even remember what it felt like.

I didn’t want to do this so soon after Dalton, but the neighborhood seems content to take that for the heartrending tragedy it was—her longtime boyfriend, poor girl—and I don’t see any other way.
Some people just aren’t meant to live.

One of the reasons we named ourselves the Merry Sisters of Fate was to play up the idea of mutual creation—the three women who spin the same “story” but each have different roles. The spinner, the weaver, the cutter. (We may have spent several hours near the beginning discussing who is who...) But each fate has a different specialty, different preferences, different weaknesses. To me, the common prompts exemplify this. We pick an image, a fairy tale, or some piece of folklore to use as inspiration, and each of us writes a story. They can be any kind of story, so long as it comes from the prompt. I’m always amazed at how different the stories turn out—the ways that Brenna and Maggie will find aspects that never occurred
to me. The prompt weeks have been my favorite since the beginning because it feels like a real chance to play—there’s characters and world and story already, so I don’t have to worry about them. I can twist and experiment and have fun.
—Tessa

The prompts are one of my absolute favorite aspects of Merry Fates. The idea of a common starting place is really exciting to me, because as a staunch supporter of the arcane, I’m always looking for the most obscure, mysterious, esoteric parts of a thing—the underlying theme or unspoken implications—and the prompts are the perfect venue to really dive into the core of a story. Not just the characters and the action of it, but what it means. Also, I am unapologetically obsessed with what things mean. —Brenna

I always think prompts are going to be easy. After all, part of the work has been done for you! But a story is really a reverse telescope of narrowing opportunities. With every sentence you write, you reduce the number of paths open to you as a writer. And it’s hard enough when you’re the one doing a narrowing, choosing how you box yourself in. But a prompt! It immediately slams several doors before you’ve even said “
boo
.” All of the paths seem to point unerringly toward a very literal interpretation of the image or fairy tale. For me, then, the challenge is to figure out how to open those doors back up again, to be clever with my handling of the subject matter. In the end, it’s like all the other stories I write. I have to ask myself, what am I really trying to say? What question am I trying to ask? What is the magic really going to stand for? And then I have to put the prompt back on top of that. When I look at it that way, it becomes a puzzle with the edge pieces already done. The weird part is always looking at what other people have done with this puzzle, though. I mean, we all had the same edge pieces, didn’t we? How in the world did they get a city scene when I made a
moose
? —Maggie