True Crime

by Samantha Kolesnik

Her calmness scared me. I preferred her when she was railing and going off the deep end about this or that. It was easier when she slammed things and yelled about how we didn’t love her. When she was calm, she liked to play games only she enjoyed.

God created me, he disliked his creation and turned off the part connecting me to him, like an artist who didn’t want to sign a bad painting.

It struck me then how much distance we put between ourselves and animals. Perhaps this was from design, to ensure the very thin line which kept us polite would seem thick and impenetrable. We were all murderers, after all. Some of us just hadn’t discovered it yet.

“You and your brother,” she continued. She’d given up the goat. Everyone called you sweet before they defiled you. A virgin was nothing if not ripe for the teeth.

All men did was rape, kill, eat, and fuck, as far as I could see, and it’s not like the fields knew any different. The world was just an echo chamber for man’s sin.

Every girl in the world was taught not to trust her gut. Every girl in the world knew she was the fool in the play.

In the hazy glow of our headlamps, she looked like a ghost in a low budget movie.

It was an odd sensation to watch a girl who was near to dying spend the little energy she had trying to scoot away from me. I

I looked at my hands. I traced the thin, intersecting lines with my eyes. Did they show something about me I didn’t know? I wondered where I could find my childhood in the palm of my hand. Was it predestined to be so short? The children on the billboards who were smiling and eating funnel cakes—would their palms show different lines than mine?

wondered how the world made its villains and why it never apologized for making them.

There was no evil in the world that was not man’s work.

And there was no man in the world that was not woman’s work.

was certain there was no worse feeling than having someone inside of you when you did not want it.

The world was all comprised of people just causing hurt.

“A train lets you be alone with your thoughts. It takes you along at the right speed. A plane—that’s a different matter. A plane wants to rush things. It jumbles your soul and makes everything come out much too fast. There’s no time to think on a plane. But on a train, you can actually have a thought that might matter in the end.”