My Murder

by Katie Williams

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

What was I then? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? The toddlerhood of adulthood.

began to play the hawk VR after Nova was born, in that time when it felt like I could touch nothing, but everything was always touching me. Nova’s mouth, Silas’s palms, the bedsheets, my clothes, the air, the minutes of the afternoon, all of them were rubbing up against me, pressing down the little hairs on my arms, smudging the outline that delineated me from the world around me.

We girls had been taught kindness from a young age; kindness had been stressed. But there was another lesson in that, one the adults hadn’t known they were teaching, how kindness could be expected of a girl, demanded of her really, and then levied against her. We girls didn’t talk about this, but we knew it was true—of course we knew it was true—and so we would dare each other to venture into the forbidden area past kindness, where, we hoped, toughness might exist.

It was something I’d noticed about her since that first time at Bar None, how she seemed to treat chaos as a form of common sense.