A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

“If I fuck you, will you kill me?”

Michael Wayman recoiled from the question, from the woman’s intense green eyes, from the set of her chin that defied him to ask her to repeat herself. He stumbled back, leaving his bag of groceries on the sidewalk beside the woman, where he had placed it when he leaned close to ask her what was wrong.

She sat there, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, hands clasping forearms, as if she were hugging herself–or taking up as little space as possible. Her hair looked uneven and ragged, like it had been chopped with a machete. Her eyes–one of them swollen almost shut–followed him, then flicked to the bag and the end of a loaf of bread that stuck out the top. He saw one of her hands twitch, but she didn’t reach out. She returned her eyes to him.

Chennie. The resemblance was so strong, he almost said the name out load. But this wasn’t Chennie. And the resemblance wasn’t physical. Chennie’s hair had been darker, her face wider, the almond shape of her brown eyes more slanted, and Chennie would be in her thirties now, at least five years older. But the dirt and bruises on the woman’s face and her arms, the despair that hid behind the bold glare, the demands–spoken and unspoken–that she made with just a look, all of that was familiar. It was thoughts of Chennie, knowing it wasn’t her but unable to resist looking closer, just to be sure, that had made him stop.

“Well?” said the woman, interrupting his thoughts. “What’s it going to be?”

The on-off blast of a police siren sounded, maybe a block away. A reminder.

“Maybe you should come with me,” Michael said. “It’s almost curfew, and the cops have been in a shoot-first-categorize-it-as-dangerous-later mood the last two nights.”

“Then maybe those are the men I need to see,” the woman said. “I’ll just sit here and wait for them.”

Michael stepped toward her again, leaned over and looked into her eyes. “I won’t hurt you–”

The knuckles of her right hand struck him on the cheek, knocked his head back. He felt the skin split as he staggered backward.

“I will hurt you,” she said, resuming her curled up posture. “It’s what I do best.”

Michael blinked the tears out of his eyes, and pushed his hand against his cheek, trying to stop the bleeding, feeling the first stings of the swelling. “Shit,” he said. “That hurt.” His tongue found a tooth out of place. “And I think you loosened a tooth.”

The woman nodded, then watched him as he used a thumb to push the tooth back in place. He tried not to wince, but that hurt too.

He wiped his hands on his shirt, leaving streaks of blood. He held out his right hand to the girl again. “Come on,” he said.

She looked at his hand, then back into his eyes. “You can kill me here,” she said.

That she meant it hit Michael almost as hard as her backfist. Almost. His tongue pushed on the tooth as he looked at her. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said finally.

Her eyes held his for a few seconds longer, then moved back to the sidewalk in front her, to whatever she had been looking at when Michael first approached her, ignoring the hand he still held out to her. “Then fuck off.”

He suppressed the anger that flared, the urge to just walk away. As if he could do anything else. That was why Chennie had left. Because he couldn’t. “No,” he said, with as much emphasis as he could.

The woman looked up at him, surprised maybe. Or maybe sizing him up for another bitchslap. Chennie had pushed him away too, at first. Even struck him. His persistence had surprised her too.

“The cops are coming,” the woman said, her voice flat. “They’ll kill you.”

“Then save my life,” Michael said, “by letting me save yours.”

The woman snorted. “Don’t you get it, Galahad? I don’t want my life saved.”

“Fine,” Michael said, standing up straight again. “Come back to my apartment. Fuck me. And then I’ll kill you.”

Now the woman laughed, a harsh sound but with a touch of genuine humor in it. “I don’t think you got the balls for either one, Galahad.”

Michael smiled. He had reached her, at least some part of her. He held out his hand again. “I’d show you here, but the cops–”

“The cops are pigs,” the woman said, “and wouldn’t give a damn if you danced naked in the street. Some of them would make you do that, anyway, before they shot you.” But she disengaged one hand and held it up for him to grab.

She pulled against him, and he found that she needed him to support her weight. As she unfolded, he saw that her right leg had a bloody bandage wrapped around the thigh and she wouldn’t put weight on the leg. He wrapped his left arm around her, hand gripping just under her rib cage. After a short hesitation she wrapped her right arm around his waist.

“Can you grab the bag of groceries?” he asked.

“Only if you kill me,” she said, but without the intensity. She reached down and snagged the grips of the plastic bag and hefted it up.

“I thought you were going to fuck me first,” Michael said.

“Fuck you,” she said with no malice. “Carry your groceries. Whatever.”

They started a slow, limping progress along the sidewalk.

A police car, red and blue lights flashing, pulled up as they went around the last corner before Michael’s apartment. The siren blasted, startling Michael. The woman’s right hand, the one holding his waist, tensed, and her fingernails dug into his side.

“Curfew,” blared a voice through the car’s bullhorn. Michael could see two uniformed cops inside the car. “You got less than five minutes to be indoors.”

Michael nodded, and pointed with his free hand to the entrance to his building, half a block away. “Almost there,” he said.

They continued walking, and the car kept pace with them. About ten meters from the door, the siren blasted again, one short, loud note, and the bullhorn said, “Halt.”

They halted. The woman’s grip on his waist hadn’t let up, and now she dug her fingers in more, making Michael gasp. “What?” he asked, looking at the cop who stepped out of the passenger side of the police car.

“What happened to you two?” the cop asked, no longer using the bullhorn. He had his gun drawn, but held to the side, not pointing at anything or anyone in particular.

“Stop it,” Michael whispered, wondering how many of the woman’s nails had punctured his skin. “That hurts.” The woman’s grip loosened a fraction. Louder, to the cop, he said, “We had a disagreement.”

“A disagreement?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “First it was mac-and-cheese versus spaghetti. Then it was her place versus mine.”

The cop didn’t look amused. “Is this your place of residence?”

“Yeah. You want to see my ID?” Michael pointed with his right hand at the pocket he would have to pull it from.

The cop’s mouth twisted in a lopsided smirk, and the hand with the gun relaxed. “So you won one of the arguments, at least?”

Michael nodded, risking a smile even though it hurt. He pointed to the growing welt on his cheek. “Yes, sir,”  he said. “This one is the mac-and-cheese.” He pointed at the woman, whose hair had fallen in front of her face so that she seemed to be looking at the cop through unevenly cut bangs, and added, “That one’s my place.”

“How did she hurt her leg?” the cop asked.

“I wanted to walk,” Michael said with a shrug. “She wanted to take the bus.”

The cop looked at Michael, then at the woman. “Have you two known each other long?”

Michael looked down at the woman. Her face was unreadable. He thought of Chennie again. “Years,” Michael said with conviction, because he had known Chennie for a long time. Then he shrugged. “Off and on. You know how it is.”

The cop nodded, then he said, “Have you seen anyone suspicious? We’ve had reports of a prostitute in the area.”

The woman snorted. Michael said, “Just one?”

The cop’s expression hardened, wiping the traces of smile away. “This one’s a killer,” he said. “So far we’ve found two dead johns. One had his throat ripped out. The other’s neck was broken.”

The woman’s fingers dug into Michael’s side again and he didn’t have to fake his look of surprise. “No. We haven’t seen anyone like that.”

“You better get inside,” the cop said. “Curfew.” He climbed back into the car. With another blare of the siren, the lights still flashing, it drove off.

“You’re a pathological liar,” the woman said as they limped up the stairs to his second floor apartment.

“No,” Michael said. “Just a good one. And cops don’t scare me.”

“They should,” she said. “I hate cops.”

“Why?” he asked.

She didn’t respond. They reached his front door.

“So, before I invite you in, are you a cold blooded killer?”

“Yes.”

Michael only nodded, ignoring the chills that the single word had sent down his spine, and he let them into his apartment. She had said Yes the same way she had first asked him, If I fuck you, will you kill me? Flat, unemotional, unyielding.

They didn’t talk as he helped her to the small bathroom and left her there to take a shower.

He washed out the cut on his cheek using the kitchen sink, applying two adhesive bandages to pull the cut together. Then he checked his waist and found five crescent-shaped welts. Two of them showed broken skin, so he cleaned those. His tooth still hurt, but it seemed to be settling back into its proper place.

The groceries waited on the counter where he had left them, but he sat down in one of the two chairs under his wooden table and thought of Chennie. Was she still out there? Still looking for her father? Still looking for someone to hate her?

“Hey, Galahad,” the woman called from the bathroom. “Can you help me with this?”

She sat on the toilet with the lid closed, naked except for white panties, her body lean and hard, breasts firm, with scars visible on her chest and abdomen, her wet hair poking out in all directions. She held her legs apart so that Michael could see the ugly cut across her thigh. A tattoo with six curved claws had been cut through, deep. “Do you have any bandages?” she asked.

“Shit,” he said. “Bandages? You need a doctor, and a lot of stitches.”

The woman took his chin in her left hand and made him look her in the eyes. “I haven’t changed my mind about being killed,” she said.

“Then why do you need a bandage?” he asked. “Just let that open up again.”

“Would you do that for me?”

Michael tried to pull his face away, but her grip held him.

“Would you?” she asked him again, her eyes holding his as tightly as her fingers held his chin.

“No,” he said. Then again, because he didn’t want her to ask another time. “No.”

The determination in her face wavered, showed a hint of pain. “Why not?”

“Because I–” he said, and stopped.

For a second he had seen Chennie’s face, looking at him from behind the green eyes. And he had been about to tell her, to tell Chennie, why. But it was too late to tell Chennie anything.

Why won’t you hate me? Chennie had asked him, time and time again. He had never told her, had never known how to tell her. So he had only helped her get back on her feet, physically and emotionally, over and over again.

Chennie shut him out. She sent him away. She attacked him. She yelled at him, told him she how much she hated him. When she told him to leave for his own good, he stayed. When she told him he shouldn’t love her, he did anyway. When she demanded that he hate her, he couldn’t. In the end she left him, gone one morning, leaving him the clothes he had bought her and a token she had given him, to watch over him, to remember her by. But if she came back, if he saw her, he would do it all over again.

The woman let go of him and Michael took a step back.

“So do you have any bandages?” the woman asked.

Michael nodded. “I’ll get them,” he said.

He helped her wrap up her leg, then got her some of Chennie’s old clothes to wear while hers were washed.

“You stock women’s clothing?” the woman asked as she limped out of the bathroom in faded sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt. She pulled out one of the chairs at the table and sat down. “And why is there a teddy bear on the TV?”

“A … friend … used to live with me,” Michael said, finally preparing the macaroni and cheese dinner he had bought.

“A girlfriend, I suppose?”

Michael only nodded. Chennie had never accepted that title, though, had refused even that much emotional intimacy, even after they were physically intimate. But he didn’t want to explain that. So he just nodded.

“And she left her clothes and her teddy bear?”

“She’s a gundy,” Michael said. “The teddy bear,” he added, answering the woman’s unspoken question. “She’s a gundy. A cocoagundy to be precise. Her name is …” He paused, feeling embarrassed. “Sonata,” he continued. “And, yes, she left a lot of her stuff here.” Except for Sonata, who she had been clutching the night Michael first met her, what she had left was everything he had given her.

“Why did she leave?”

Michael didn’t answer right away. He didn’t tell her that Chennie had given him Sonata, to look after him. And that she had left the next day. After a minute, he asked, “Why do you want to die?”

“I don’t want to die, Galahad,” the woman said. “I want to be killed.”

Why won’t you hate me? Michael heard the question again, but still had no answer for that.

The silence stretched out and continued even as they ate. He watched her, trying not to see so much of Chennie in how she pushed the food around her plate, in how she would occassionaly meet his eye and give him either a dark look or a knowing smile. She’s not Chennie. He knew that.

After he had put the dishes in the sink, he took some blankets out of a closet. “You can have my bed,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“No,” she said. “You’ll sleep with me. In your bed.”

Michael looked at her, involuntarily remembering her nakedness before. “I won’t … I won’t kill you,” he said. He almost added Chennie.

The woman smiled. “I know, Galahad. Which is why I said sleep. Not fuck.”

They laid in the dark, back to back on the narrow bed, facing away from each other, sharing opposite ends of Michael’s pillow.

“Do you know why I killed those men?” the woman asked.

Her question pulled Michael back from the edge of sleep. Her warmth against his back disoriented him, and he almost turned over to put his arms around her, hold her close, before he remembered she wasn’t Chennie.

“No,” he said. Then, “Because they wouldn’t kill you?”

The woman laughed, a dark, husky sound that shook the bed. “No. Because they tried to.”

“I thought you wanted–”

The woman laughed again, softer this time.

“Would you have … killed me,” Michael asked. “If I had cut your leg open?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. No,” she repeated. “I would have held your hand steady for you, and kissed you as I died.”

“Why?”

“Shh,” she said, and patted his hip with one hand. “Go to sleep, Galahad.”

The woman was gone when he woke up. In her place on the bed beside him sat Sonata, the cocoagundy, watching over him. Still.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.