I pack ice around his member, and then I take his eyes. Super messy work. But I think it’s fair. Without eyes, he will no longer be able to see women or carry out a plan to hurt them. I take off his handcuffs before I leave and pat his belly. “Rot in hell, you sick fuck.”
I carry the cooler with me, on the Greyhound back to Miami. It sits in the cab of my rig until I throw it into the desert somewhere in New Mexico. I didn’t know I was going to allow him to live until he let me live; an eye for an eye. But he will not live the same life as he did before. Perhaps this one will be worse than death. Leroy Ashley has been brought to justice.
I WAS BORN SICK. As was my mother, and her mother before her. It’s in our marrow. The eating house calls to me one day, and, just like that, I pack up my things and go back to the Bone. I don’t even have to think about it. It’s just time to face who I am. I paint it red, for all the blood I’ve shed. Then trim the windows in the purest white. I hire a man to lay new wood floors, and replace the cabinets and countertops in the kitchen. By spring of my first year back, the eating house has new smells, a new glow. There is even a shower in the bathroom where the old, chipped blue tub once sat. It has shiny glass doors and sprays water from two directions. It’s still the same, scary house, but I fixed it up to serve a new purpose. Dr. Elgin calls me once a week for the first year I’m back, but then I stop hearing from her. I think she knows I’m okay now. Mo knocks on my door almost every afternoon during the winter. We drink hot chocolate in front of the fireplace, and he tells me about the girls he likes at school. In summer, the most I see him is when I drive by a field and watch him passing a football back and forth with his buddies. He lifts a hand to wave at me and goes back to what he’s doing. He still hardly ever smiles, but I’ve come to like that about him. If I’m lucky, he stops by with a basket of blackberries that he’s thought to pick for me. I grin and bear those summers, because Mo always comes back to me in winter. My father comes to see me once, when he hears that I’ve moved back to the Bone. He’s old; his skin hangs from his bones like it’s melting away. I sit him at my new kitchen table—black, in honor of Leroy—and make him tea. He wants to tell me he’s sorry. I take his apology because I know he’s just a fucked up human like the rest of us. Before he leaves he tells me where he buried the tiny coffin I found that day in the oven. I’m glad. I want to take my sibling flowers. He tells me it wasn’t his baby, but I don’t believe him. He might have apologized, but he’s still a lying scumbag. He dies two months later. I won’t be taking him flowers, but I’m glad he made his peace.
Delaney passes one August; she simply falls into the grass while she’s gardening and takes her last breath under the sun. It’s Mother Mary who finds her. Mother Mary, who is ninety-seven years old, and will probably outlive us all. She says she knew to go to Delaney’s that day because the week before she predicted her death. When his mother passes, Judah moves out of his apartment and into her house. He tries to convince me to sell the eating house and move in with him, but I’ll never let the eating house go, or maybe it won’t let me go. It doesn’t matter anymore. So we take turns visiting each other’s spaces—a night here, a night there. He uses Delaney’s life insurance money to outfit the kitchen, lowering all of the countertops and buying custom made appliances. He leaves one counter high enough for me to stand and cut things when we cook together. The sentiment makes me cry. I never do buy a TV. Judah makes me watch his.
We are sitting side by side on the couch one evening, a bucket of popcorn between us, when he turns on the news and leaves to use the bathroom. The news makes me anxious; whenever Judah puts it on, I leave the room, but this time I turn up the volume and lean toward the picture of a man with extraordinarily kind mazarine eyes.
“A man is at large tonight in Washington,” the reporter says. I glance at the bathroom door, and scoot forward ‘til my rear is barely on the couch. “Cult leader Muslim Black escaped his Minnesota compound last week when police arrived to arrest him. He is said to have fled to Spokane, where police are searching for him now. During Black’s twelve-year reign as leader of the Paradise Gate Group, he reportedly raped and kept more than three dozen women prisoner…”
I hear the knob on the bathroom door rattle, and quickly change the channel. Judah smiles at me when he settles back down, and for a moment his face is enough to cleanse me of the sinister rage that I am feeling. All of his open beauty, his effortless love, the boldness with which he embraces his wheelchair. I smile, too, but for different reasons. Underneath my skin and underneath the sinewy tendons of muscle, my bones are rattling.
Rrrrrra ta ta ta
My marrow cries out, reminding me of who I am. I am Margo Moon. I am a murderess. I believe in poetic vengeance. Muslim Black is at large. It’s time, it’s time, it’s time … to hunt.
I ONCE SAW A YOUTUBE VIDEO of a woman beating her baby. I was shocked by how calm she was. She wasn’t being forced; she wasn’t visibly angry or flustered. She sat with her back to the camera, punching, slapping and pinching—over and over while he screamed.