My Murder

by Katie Williams

This was Silas. This has always been Silas. When we’re late, he’ll announce each of his preparations as he makes them. He becomes a ticking clock of toiletry, my husband.

This was her hair.

“It’s her hair,”

“Your first wife’s. What an animal she must have been! Did she even own a brush?”

I was in my body. I was my body. I was alive.

“All the things we’ve been doing every night since my murder, you mean?”

Silas winced. “My murder”—this was the other thing he hated for me to say.

I’d been murdered, but now I was alive.

Stockings: a choking hazard. And I’d given them to her. I should’ve been thinking, watching, alert.

Babies cry, everyone said. Except Nova hadn’t. Until I’d disappeared on her,

Louise he left with bare feet. Louise he left with bare feet.

conversation. I didn’t tell them about the tug of a catheter being pulled from between my legs; the mole on the doctor’s chin, a blot showing through her powder like an eclipsed sun; Silas’s voice saying, “Can she—?” and the distant realization that “she” was me. Can she what?

I was, in truth, a copy of that woman, the first and original Louise.

“Short-term memories don’t survive the process,”

“He told the detectives that he’d staked out my running route,”

“He said that he’d followed me for days, that he’d made notes about me in a small notebook reserved specifically for this purpose.”

“He said he was waiting in the trees, that he’d memorized the sound of my sneakers, that after I ran past, he stepped out onto the path behind me, grabbed me by the ponytail, and twisted it around his hand.”

The serial killer survivors’ group met on Tuesday afternoons.

There were the five of us in the survivors’ group: Angela, Jasmine, Lacey, Fern, and myself. The name was a lie. None of us had survived.

Angela had been the first of us. She’d been found on a park bench by some dawn jogger or dog walker, her throat slit, her sandals lined up next to her bare feet.

cudgel

contrarian;

Lacey had been discovered on an elementary schoolyard merry-go-round, one leg dangling off the side,

That meant after he’d put her on the ride, he’d spun her around.

Jazz was the oldest of us by nearly a decade, late thirties or early forties,

Jazz had been found in an intersection, lying flat on her back in the middle of the road.

Gert was not one of us, was not a murder victim, not a clone. Gert was a professional, specially trained.

She’d come from the replication commission,

“Riveting,”

Telling myself that I was okay seemed like nothing but evidence that I wasn’t.

Fern was the second victim, three before me, who was the last. Fern had been found at the edge of the Lansing Mall parking lot, tucked into a shopping cart,

“It’s like she expects us to be grateful, like she brought us back herself.”

Smyth, Pineda, and Associates, the law firm that had defended Edward Early.

So then why did she want to talk to him of all people?

He was no man. He was any man. He was a man in a world that hated women.

His name, we eventually learned, was Edward Early.

And that’s when I’d done it. I’d grabbed onto his wrists. Hard.

He declined video, something he’d started doing only since my murder.

She didn’t know what I knew, what it was like to almost lose everything.

“I did something bad. At work.”

“Si?”

“What?”

“Can you be serious for ...

“I can be serious for ten...

“Really? Because you’re still talking in the po...

“Sorry. I’m serious now. See? Reg...

He looked up from our hands, and I saw that he was crying.

“Let me amend that. I’m glad you’re here.”

The truth was that Silas and I met because he was dating my roommate.

Jessup was my roommate’s name, not short for Jessica, and don’t call her Jess, either.