Page 41 of Caution Tape

The dream of the house resurfaces. They need to pull up the floorboards of my life, my career, and find bodies, twisted and mangled. Michael will be in the basement. Michael in the foundations. Michael in neat little pieces, stuffed under the staircase.

He’s heavier than I expected. I drag him easily through the kitchen, his flesh gliding smoothly across the gleaming tile floor. I prop the door to the garage open with a blue bag of rock salt, and pull him down the small staircase, his head clunking and lolling around as it jostles down each step.

Keys.

I lean him against the back bumper of his car. His eyes flutter and his mouth twitches. I flick his nose, and he startles awake.

“Wha—?”

“Where are your keys?”

“Why would I tell you?”

I squeeze his face between my fingers. “I’m going to eat your fucking liver.”

I stomp back into the kitchen, back through the living room. No keys. Where does he keep them? I circle the house before finally going into the bedroom.

Cora had been exhausted after our fun in front of Michael and fell asleep on his bed. She lay on her stomach, her naked shoulders uncovered.

The keys are on the bedside table. I grab them and am about to turn to leave when I stop and cover her up with the blanket.

The old shipping yard is a sea of jagged, rusted metal, stuck into the muddy earth like crooked teeth embedded into rotting gums. A twisting labyrinth of dead locomotive cars, shipping containers and tankers, discarded and left to degrade. There’d been a river flowing through, maybe ten years ago, but it had dried up to a shallow creek. The paper factories dried up too, leaving behind acres of dead metal.

It creaks and groans in the wind as I drag Michael out of the car, the sheets of metal warbling with each gust.

It’s a shame I won’t be able to keep using this lovely blue container. I find it soothing; opening its clanging door, hearing the chains rattle and clunk as I unlock it. I feel like a monster returning to its cave; a vampire slipping into its coffin.

It is an entire world of my design.

Grunting, I hoist him onto the table. His hair is matted to his skull; his lips have turned an ashy white. The blood has clotted where Cora stabbed him, and there’s a swirling, disconnected moment as I stare at it.

In the grocery store I’d see the meat packaged and sealed. The plastic pressing against the flesh, and, on some of the steaks, a thin residue of blood. I’d stare at that blood, tantalized by it, hungry for it.

Michael’s chest looks like meat; like multiple shades of crimson pressed together like paint mixing on an easel.

I’m a kid with a new friend over and I have to show him all my new toys.

Quickly, I tape him to the table. He struggles, but is weak, and I have to keep slapping him to keep him awake.

“You’re gonna miss it! You’re gonna miss it!”

Tape, tape, tape. Around and around and around. One runs dry, the adhesive pulling all the way down to the cardboard roll. I unwrap another, then another. The shipping container is a cacophony of noise; every breath, footstep, and crackle of plastic echoes flatly off the walls, returned to me in tinny accusation. It’s as if I’m on a stage, an audience before me, gasping at my actions.

Michael is secured on the table, his head rolling back and forth. I wander around him, pulling my gloves fully onto my hands.

“Remember, I had a pair of pliers picked out for this, but then Cora went and stabbed you so…,” I shrug. “The best laid plans, you know.”

On one of the stacked plastic totes lies a collection of utensils, neatly in a row like filed teeth, ready to shred him. I pick up a scalpel; I scavenged it from a biology class, years ago, and never had the joy of using it.

I hold his head tightly with one hand, pressing down on his forehead, wrinkling the skin.

“Please,” he croaks. His eyes tilt upward, looking into mine. My hair hangs over him; I must look like a homicidal caricature, frenzied and delighted.

“You don’t understand what you mean to me,” I tell him.

I delicately pluck at one of his eyelids, hearing a lightpucksound as it unsticks from his eye.

“I’m building a house, you see. Metaphorical and wonderful.”

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