Page 9 of Serial Killer Games

“Arguably my favorite serial killer—”

“…SECRET SANTA! If you’ve been with us for any amount of time, you know that approximately fifty percent of our inside jokes revolve around killer mall Santas. Today we discuss the original killer mall Santa—”

“Theoriginalone, guys—not the copycat acts from the nineties—”

“Ugh, no. The nineties were not good for killer mall Santas—”

“The one who would hack up his victims and wrap them in Christmas paper, then leave the packages around town. And that’s totally not a spoiler. The story gets so much better.”

“I told you before we started recording, but I’m going to repeat it now—”

“Absolutely. Do it.”

“I looked up the photos in evidence—”

“You always do this—”

“And the wrapping paper this guy used for his victims…is the SAME green wrapping paper my grandma used for, like, three Christmases in a row!”

I sit with my chin in my hand as I run my script, once again completing this week’s work in a matter of minutes, and I watch Dolores through her window, wondering who she spends Christmas with, who she buys presents for, who will buyhera present.

That evening after work, I don’t board the SkyTrain. I wander the bustling downtown sidewalks, peering in shop windows, not sure where to find what I’m looking for. Clothing stores. Shoe stores. Stores that identify as “lifestyle stores.” I’m swept into a downtown mall on a current of shoppers, andthere—

I walk into the toy store. I’m used to feeling out of place, but now I feel more out of place than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. The proprietor smiles at me, and I grimace back, and in the back, on a shelf laden with pink Mattel boxes, I find Dolores’s gift.

—

I watch her out ofthe corner of my eye when she walks in the next morning. She deposits her purse, hangs her coat, swivels toface her desk, and it’s not until she reaches to tap her keyboard that she notices it: my gift.

It’s a small package, about the length of her pinkie, wrapped up in shiny green wrapping paper with a tiny filament of gold ribbon. It was too small to tie into a bow, so I dragged the blade of a sharp knife across the ends to make them curl.

She would never lower herself by raising her head to look at me right now. I sit there, watching her out of the corner of my eye, and I know she watches me out of the corner of her eye, too. Two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity.

She slides the loop of ribbon off the package, plucks carefully at the tape, then parts the freed edges of the paper to reveal the thing lying in her palm: a smooth, beige plastic leg, severed neatly at the knee. She touches the toes with one finger and rotates it in her palm.

She’s silent and still for a long moment, but then she raises her head and looks right at me—and she doesn’t smile, but Iknowfrom her face that this is the best Christmas gift she’s ever been given. A doll for Dolly. And an invitation to play.

—

I stage the twelve daysof Christmas for her in November. Every day, a new gift awaits in a new spot: A severed hand in her coffee mug. A dismembered foot in her paper clip tray. An upper and lower torso, sawed neatly in half, in the print tray and the filing cabinet, respectively. All with the same shiny green paper and gold ribbon.

All except the head. The original killer mall Santa did something fun with the head.

6

Not Like Other Girls

Dolores

My life is like this:

Being a card-carrying adult, I wake at an hour that leaves me with such a number of minutes to be at work that every single one is accounted for and there is no room for error. Morning is a blur of ablutions and makeup and hair and dressing and packing and a last-minute search for shoes. If I could mainline caffeine into my veins, I would. If I could get my hands on something stronger, I would.

Some people live to work; others work to live. I don’t do either. I exist. I keep my lower lip just above the water as I tread, a slave-driving sense of duty keeping me going. I’m spurred forward by mundane procedures that would not be completed if I didn’t take care of them: Car maintenance. Home maintenance. Cat maintenance—just the bare minimum is what it feels like. I’ll get no awards there. She’d been a selfish impulse in a difficult moment of my life, a drastic decision to stave off loneliness. A warm, breathing thing to love and cuddle and play with—something to bring purpose intomy life. But instead, she makes me feel like a stranger in my own home. I walk in the door, and she watches me with skeptical eyes and scampers off to be by herself.

Every day there must be a breakfast, lunch, and dinner—three problems I get to solve all over again every single day, my personal Groundhog Day, my private ring of hell. Every day I must scrape messes off surfaces anew—or not. If I don’t, they sprout and grow legs and become their own ecosystem. Every day, there is a pile of laundry, self-generating, bottomless, gradually gaining sentience, studying me, plotting to destroy me. And the bills. Oh, the bills.

There’s no satisfaction in any of it. No sense of a job well done. Only the persistent feeling that I’m doing it wrong, doing not enough, that I’m bailing out a sinking ship.

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