Bone Music (Burning Girl, #1)

by Christopher Rice

Imagine witnessing a murder before you know what death is.

a quick and painless death, but one that tore a hole in Charlotte so deep she could barely speak for weeks afterward.

When we hurt people just to punish them, Luanne used to say, we create a darkness that will live on long after our reasons for giving birth to it have faded.

They were just comments. Just words. But when you’re forced to hear the words almost every day, don’t they add up to something bigger? A sort of crime unto itself? Death by a thousand cuts, as some people like to say.

Forcing breath into her lungs, she slides into the passenger seat. She wants to meet Luke’s joke with one of her own, wants to look him in the eye and return his sheepish smile. But she can’t. She can’t because the world seems too small all of a sudden. Because her life, once again, has been reduced to a thin stream moving through a channel carved by psychopaths.

She has his full attention now, can feel his gaze heating up one side of her face. But if she looks him in the eyes, she’ll lose her nerve.

He sounds like someone holding in a belch with every muscle in his body.

There’s no telling which feature of his she focuses on first, but whichever one it is, it repels her. Maybe it’s his offensively long mouth, which despite its size still doesn’t manage to close entirely over his fat tongue. Together these attributes conspire to make him always look slightly winded, a cruel injustice given that he’s spent his entire adult life in peak physical condition. Maybe it’s his forehead, which rises like a wall toward the sudden flat top of his skull, too flat for his latest hair implants to distract from its startling angularity. And then there are his eyes. They crowd the bridge of his nose so closely, there’s no making them look evenly spaced, no matter how much he has his nose sanded down. And it’s been sanded down plenty, to the point that it now looks both perfect and perfectly out of place, like a piece of statue designed to plug a congenital hole in the center of his face. Maybe she sees only one or two of these things. Maybe she notices all of them at once. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she gives him the brusque, dismissive smile he’s come to expect from women all his life, then returns her attention to her shoe.

The light is fading, lacing the shade from the branches overhead with threads of true darkness.

Before she notices him inches behind her, he brings it down across the woman’s upper back with enough force to send her face-first into the dirt, her breath coming out of her in a desperate, ineffectual wheeze that sounds nothing like a scream.

It was the summer before her sophomore year at Yale, and when she returned to school a few months later, she brought with her a long, slender scar that snakes along her jugular vein to a spot an inch or two beneath her collarbone on her left side.

While everyone points the finger at Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the like, it’s companies like mine that actually shape the world, and we have this responsibility because people gave it to us.

I never anticipated that just kissing someone could be an event. With different stages and acts. The slow approach. The commitment. The taste. The smell. The withdrawal and then going back in for a second taste, a deeper one.