My Murder

by Katie Williams

Sometimes I think of what it would be like to never see your child again, not for the rest of your life, though the both of you are still alive.

oh

That’s the thing about having a baby: they are a part of you that is outside of you, so you can love them in the way you can’t stand to love yourself.

Deep down, I didn’t know how Jessup could have all those opinions on all those many topics. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been taught to think; it was that I’d been taught to see a thing from this way and that way and another way still, until I had an entire crowd’s worth of perspectives in my head. To hold one position, I’d been taught, was unsubtle, lazy, even crude. But secretly, it seemed like it might feel glorious, like smacking people on their bottoms as they ran past you.

People were inscrutable and life was chaos; if I knew anything, I knew that.

It’s not nice to say this, but some people’s pleasure is annoying to behold, and for me, Angela was one of those.

It was easy to make fun of Angela. And if it was unkind, which of course it was, it was also a way to ask without asking, Am I like her? No, you’re not like her. Okay, phew, you’re not like her, either. I don’t need to tell you how many women’s friendships are built upon this firm foundation.

He didn’t even say yes, my husband, my love. He simply turned to the next page and continued in his warm, deep voice, about the bear and her cake and her troubles and her icing.

My new body felt so tired sometimes, but I guess it was probably me, inside my body, that was the weary one.

“I love you monstrously.” “You love me like a monster would?” “Yep. Fangs and claws.”

She was the only person in the world who had nestled against the inside of my ribs.

“But I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready,” I went on. “That’s how it is, right? Things just happen and then they’re happening.”

“Is this what people feel like? Bad? Guilty? And when they do the right thing, the virtuous thing, is it only to keep themselves from feeling like this? Is that what good is? What it means to be good?”

Do you ever think about how tears undo themselves as they run down your face, how that’s what crying is, tears unrolling themselves until they are nothing?

Everything that was mine was hers first, hers more.

“Everyone loves a dead woman,” Fern said. “As long as she’s the right kind of dead woman.”