The woods sing about her. The dirt is thirsty where it could have swallowed her blood. Broken branches would have held her, sky sheltered her, the leaves kept her warm. When he takes his long walks he entertains the idea of her skeleton slowly freeing itself from her skin, her hair tangled over her collarbones, her ribcage holding more air than her lungs ever could. It’s a cold daydream and it isn’t even his; it’s something she gave him on a whim, this idea, this image, and for now it stands in for her, a way to shape the space she left behind, her absence the only real murder the woods have ever seen.
*
He’s not sure if he can fuck. His masturbation is frequent, intense, his coming against the sheets or into the toilet explosive. But he doesn’t get hard around women. He’ll go to a bar and watch a girl until she says or does something sloppy, ugly, and the body that had elicited so much blood from him becomes garbage. It is unavoidable, sad. It’s not her fault. He knows his own flesh is as eventually hopeless, essentially repulsive. Maybe more so. It isn’t pride that keeps him from women. How to get pleasure from smiling, or laughing, or good weather, or food, or this fucking he’s heard so much about, is a mystery. The closest he comes to wanting it is wanting to want it.
*
There were so many things he wanted her to stop doing: slap around in her shoes, slump in her seat, eat with her fingers, talk with her mouth full. He told her so. Don’t tell me what to do, she replied. He made concessions: you can put your dirty foot on the couch, okay, but. But don’t do anything else. Don’t breathe or talk or look at me. She was always trying to see how far she could get away with something. Which wasn’t very far.
*
If he can’t come he cuts himself instead. He sits in his kitchen and places a razorblade in the crook of his elbow and flexes. Blood squeezes down to the table. He cleans up so carefully afterward, wraps the blades up in their paper towels, slides them under the silverware tray.
*
The noise of the woods is constant; cracking branches, thrashing animals, leaf rustle, water drip. But the larger silence, the absence of human noise, is relentless. He remembers the sound she made pissing in the toilet, rummaging in the refrigerator, combing her hair with her hands. He remembers hearing her sleep. He could not wait for her to leave. He couldn’t come or bleed with her in the house. When she got in his car he thought he might be able to do those things, to fuck her and fuck her and fuck her. But he didn’t even get close. Instead they played card games. He made rules. He left her alone and didn’t tell her why or where he was going or when he’d be back. There was that one bath, washing her hair, giving her his towel to dry herself, all of it in front of him, her sterling body.
Why him? Because he didn’t act in a hurry to lift her skirt? Or something else? That mystery her gift to him, a box he had, and has, no way of opening.
*
It was like being a child and making a stupid mistake, wanting to take a tadpole home or carry a firefly into the house in a jar: you’re not thinking, what will I do with this. How can it survive or make me happy. You just want. And then he had her and had to find ways to keep having her, with him, in the house, in the truck, to himself, knowing it was stupid, that it wouldn’t help her live any better or him live any better either. It was a mess in his head every minute, one voice saying Keep her keep her, and at the same time another voice saying You can’t, you fucking bastard, you can’t.
*
The way she ate bread, propped between thumb and forefinger, all the other fingers curled in the air, like a lady drinking tea. Jam on her mouth but still that pert unconscious hint of better blood. She was waiting for something good to happen to her and in reserve were these finer feelings, mannerisms, charms, come from where, who knows, not the trashy magazines or junk television she was so hungry for. Grace a trace element, wired in her marrow, to be sucked to the surface by some future circumstance worthy of it: not him.
*
Sitting in traffic in town and someone not knowing how to drive, someone else acting like a fool on the sidewalk, makes him want to crawl out of his skin. He doesn’t like loud noises, he doesn’t like tight spaces. He goes to those bars—rarely, but he goes—partly for his kind of sex, partly to punish himself, to remind himself why the dryness, the indifference of the house in the woods is the only real option. Even alcohol fails him. Withdrawing after a half hour, an hour max, to hook a new air freshener over his review mirror, to slam the truck’s engine awake in the parking lot. He can’t relax, it’s true, he never could.
*
He is a master custodian of the loneliness: he keeps it pristine. Himself, his house, his truck, he wants to leave nothing behind in those places. No information. Not like the girl, who left all kinds of things behind, crumbs and hair and her toothbrush. Underwear, clothing, picked-off nail polish on the kitchen table. He sees her legs, where they touched things. Her ass. Her arms. In her way she’d fucked everything he owned just by looking at it.
*
He couldn’t tell her that he didn’t know what to do with her. She thought he was tight-fisted, a jerk, a weirdo, nuts. Witholding. She didn’t know how to do that: hold back. He never slept while she was in that house. Even now he doesn’t think about her when he comes. He never thinks about a person. It’s only the feeling of his own body. Not the memory of her, touching him, his arm, his hip, putting her chin on his shoulder, afraid but doing it anyway; when he put his fingers in her mouth he could only keep them in there for a second. The little things, he couldn’t stand them: her ankle cut by the strap of her sandal. Her lip stuck to the tip of a Chapstick. How could he inflict on her this enormous sensitivity, so inextricable from loneliness, from the state of being alone, a quality that is really a species of violence, one that maybe, toward the end, she had begun to understand.
*
He went to a strip club, when he was young, younger, sitting at a table in the back where the pink lights couldn’t touch him, his one drink drunk in a second. He didn’t look at the stage, instead at a fat man getting a lap dance from a woman with a green G-string and acne on the small of her back. Meat on meat. If he ever saw the girl in a place like that he would break her neck. Why not do it now, get it over with, no fate good enough for her anyway. The woods a place where nothing could touch her. But he’d left her there in the trees instead, alive, alone, to make her way back to that shit town, to that horde of hungry laps.
*
It’s not that he realized it was too late, but that it was never possible. Will never be. She imagined him breaking down in some ritual of passion that would consume her, annihilate them both, approximate or play at or shiver against death. She thought he wanted to hold her arm behind her back, hold her down. She thought if she pretended to give herself up he would give himself up for real, for keeps. In her dumb uneducated way she had a handle on psychology.
*
Watching her back as she ran, that hair a dark shiny smear on the screen of night: he only opened up then. The same feeling as with the razor: the double cut, the hard flex of muscle, the release, the warmth, the dripping out, only a little, a little, and then he had to clean up. Leaving her there, beneath the cradle of branches, her body so briefly beneath his, straining—even as he let her go, oh, all the way home, in the dark, he could still feel her holding on.
Maryse Meijer is the author of Heartbreaker (FSG Originals). Her work has appeared in Joyland, The Conium Review, The Collagist, Meridian, Portland Review, 580 Split, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.