It was me; I killed Eliza Beth with silver axe. 

She wasn’t well, so it wasn’t my fault. She would have died anyway. I tried employing all of these tactics, these scarcities, to her skull. 

It didn’t matter. 

And by skull, I am not speaking in abstraction. I really did keep it. It keeps well on the short walnut bookshelf, near my window. Eliza’s old ginger cat loves to lounge by it, basking in the sun. Yes, I kept the cat as well. 

I guess I felt bad because after the deed was done, and I was mopping up the remnants of the silver-charred blood, the cat came in from the bedroom. At first I thought, more help. The old Darwinistic tale, the semi-domesticated chewing on their owners remains. Really, I was not up to the task of violent murder. It was easy enough to hit and kill, but the mess afterwards, the fecal remains. Vacant eyes looking forward, as if they were dulled by only half-sleep. 

Eliza Beth was unwell, but not in a pitiable sense. She had depression or anxiety, that 21st-century malaise. I could hear her crying through our thin walls at night, which made me think for years that she was faking it for a miserable show. It was cold, wasn’t it, Eliza? It was cold in that converted complex, the shoddy in-law house chopped into two. The neck twain-rope slip. Her silver locket gleaming in the dark. 

I thought she was faking it, because people with real depression don’t cry so much. Their tears wear themselves out—after a while, you figure, no use. So perhaps I resented her for crying so much, and the kindest excuse was it had to be fake. Because otherwise she had infinite energy to mourn, night after night. Night after night. 

I kept the cat because it didn’t gnaw on her cheekbones, or start pulling flesh from untasked ankles. It curled up by her body, eyes shut, tail covering its nose. As if it wanted to sleep. 

I guess I felt bad for the cat, then. 

I didn’t feel bad for Eliza. Really. I used to complain to her—please stop making so much noise! I have work in the morning, I really have to sleep—but she’d always tell me: I’m sorry, I always forget. Eliza Beth was a crazy one. Always pacing the floor. Rambling to herself. Saying: I want to die, I want to die, I wish I was dead.

I would see her water the porch tulips in the morning. Eye bags heavy like bruises, a continual, self-inflicted harm. I used to accost her on those consistent occasions. 

“Please keep it down at night. I don’t want to call the cops.” And Eliza Beth was so solicitous, so apologetically kind. Every morning. 

And then she’d forget. 

After a while, I figured she was staging a show. Just for me. Just so I could hear, and see. 

I didn’t kill her to set her free. I’m under no aspersions about that. I didn’t even kill her over the noise—after a while, I got used to it. 

The last time I killed someone, he was a little boy, and he had the misfortune of following me over a half a mile through this grassy, parched, knoll of a field. I was crossing over a makeshift lumber bridge, reeds brushing against my dress, and he said: Stop! (You’re not supposed to be here.) 

Really, he was irritating, and I did not really kill him. The water did the trick. They found him a few days later, blue eyes open in mimetic surprise. The veins of his body like aquatic lace, the mouth wide open in final horror. 

It wasn’t the first time I killed, but it was one of the few times I saw how pretty it could be. How it almost approached art. I’ve always wanted to be an artist. But I’m a lousy painter, a lousy sculptor, a lousy writer. People say such a talent requires practice, but I know what I am. What I’m capable of. And I’m not capable of being or doing more than what I already am. 

I had hallucinogenic visions of that child: snowdrops in his clenched fist. The stench of wild onion flowers radiating from his corpse. Him laying on his dead back in the middle of the road. I-80 deserted, the ghostly mirage of trucks streaming by. 

I thought Eliza Beth would be a good candidate for murder because she was pretty, and she was a woman. The classic symptoms of a muse. And plus, she wanted to die. I could hear it, streaming clear as sunlight through our walls. 

When she died, nothing romantic occurred. Not like that little boy. The blood pumped everywhere, but it was not crimson like rubies on vampiric throats or anything like that. It was mess. Scrubbing her linoleum floor, I felt like a woman. The blood rusting and caking underneath my fingernails. The stench clawing its way up my knees. Blood. 

Nothing is really like it. And of course, she didn’t die prettily. Her bowels loosened themselves, leaving brown putty to mingle with the red salt. I struck her intestines, of course I did, and they spilled out of her heavy stomach like a coiled hose. The cat was no help. I had to wash it after—a fate worse than capture. I still have scars from that bath. One on my right arm. A few slashing up my thighs. 

It was strange though, because as I was scrubbing in that late afternoon light, all I could think of was the boy’s final words: Are you my mother? Are you my mother, indeed. He had followed me for so long, faint apparition of white in his distance, just to ask that final question. Are you my mother. 

And in the news, I saw that the boy didn’t have a continual mother; she was in and out of his life. Staying in a rehabilitative clinic in Fresno. Fentanyl stoppered to her skull. She died after he died. They brought her, sober and thin and sad, to identify the small body. It wasn’t the drugs that killed her. A later article said she tore her own eyes out. Pulled them, like stretching taffy. 

It struck me as madness; to strike yourself like that, over a doily of a body. 

I kept Eliza Beth in her apartment for the longest time. I waited. I wanted to see if some distant family member or clever detective would appear. Another apparition, to liven up our tulip-laden porch. A month passed. Six. The landlord didn’t even bother to show up. According to her mail, (which I read), she had everything on autopay. No one needed to come and see her at all. 

And I thought of how I never saw Eliza Beth with anybody really. She didn’t go to work. She didn’t leave the house except to go to the pharmacy. Her therapist was virtual, attendance supervised over some Zoom-adjacent application. She just slept, and ate, and paced, and cried. 

Eventually, I did bury the last bits of Eliza Beth. I suppose I am catching the madness; maybe I want to get caught. I buried her right outside our home. There was a rose garden I was trying to get up and started, but I never had the energy. If she wasn’t pretty dying, she could be pretty decomposing, I hoped. Me and the orange cat, in broad daylight, shoveled all the brain bits and indelicate limbs into a large soiled hole. Then I covered it up, topping her pieces with gaudy overgrown bushes. Red and white and sweet orange. The scent is so killing in the afternoon, I can nearly taste the richness in the air. 

I keep thinking: someday, somebody is going to stop me. Or: I will get caught. But I suppose I don’t go outside enough, or maybe I just don’t go to the right places. I water Eliza Beth’s tulips now. I tell her stories. Not that there are that many. 

Sometimes out of boredom, I wander her house. Ikea furniture and Target appliances. Not the fixtures of someone who has rent paid on loop, who has no job, no visible desperation for excess income. Someone who had a cat and could feed it well. Friskies and Fancy Feast. I’m still using the cans from her pantry. Her bathroom cupboard is stocked full of toilet paper. 

Nothing is wrong here. 

Sometimes I dust, or wipe the counters down. I look out the window. I believe somebody is coming. 

But there never is anyone there.