No Exit

by Taylor Adams

It made tonight some sort of grim anniversary. It felt strangely personal, like one of her gravestone rubbings.

She would later look back on this mindless decision many times, and wonder how differently her night might’ve played out if she’d merely retraced Ashley’s footprints instead.

He just felt false to her, his social engagements carefully managed, the way a store clerk puts on a cheery face for customers but talks shit about them in the break room.

Lars kept quietly watching them, and what frightened Darby most was the deep, dumb calm in his eyes. A criminal with any sense of self-preservation would have his gun out by now. But Lars was chillingly uninterested, untroubled, his vapid little eyes regarding her like she was nothing more urgent, or dangerous, than a spill on the floor that needed to be mopped up in the next hour or so. That was all.

You want to know the secret to ruining your life? It’s never one big black-and-white decision. It’s dozens of little ones, that you make every single day. It’s excuses, mostly, in my case. Excuses are poison.

The fun, as always, was deciding how. He’d been through dozens of Lars’s pets—turtles, fish, two dogs, more shelter-rescue cats than he could count—and whether it was bleach, bullets, fire, or the meaty click of a knife striking bone, there was no dignity in death. Every living creature dies afraid.

But Ashley Garver loved the nailer, he supposed, for all the things that made it a deeply impractical man-killing weapon. He loved it because it was heavy, cumbersome, inaccurate, scary, and gruesome.

You’re the sum of every trait I’ve ever hated in a human being. You’re smug, you’re irritating, you talk too much, you’re not half as clever as you think you are, and under it all? You’re pure evil.”

You lost your mom. I lost my baby brother. There was an intoxicating symmetry to their suffering tonight. Two wounded souls, each reeling from loss, each nursing damaged hands, joined by the rawest pain— This is our dance, you and I.

Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be. Even when they don’t know it.