THE BEGINNING IS THE END

Klaudia Bara

published in Three Crow Press ezine's August 09 issue

And in the end, it turned out that he knew even less about himself than he did Jane. For example, he'd never have believed he could kill another human being. But there she lies on the floor at his feet, body ripped apart. Just like Jane. Like Lucy.

A month ago Jane and Lucy were alive. He remembers Lucy's baby fine hair dancing around her face in the wind, her skin so smooth and young. He remembers her high laugh, and her arms flinging around his neck when he came home in the evening after work.

And he remembers Jane. Her dark hair, dark eyes. Full of secrets. He spent six years trying to learn every part of her-not only the smiles, what she showed the world, but her dark corners. He was so in love, convinced that they should know everything about each other, and so sure that they could.

He understands now that he never could have learned all there was to know about her. Jane knew that. No one ever knows another person completely, but she never stopped him from trying. In return he gave her everything he could give her of himself.

It didn't save her. He didn't. And in the end, it turned out that he knew even less about himself than he did Jane. He'd never have believed he could kill another human being. But there she lies on the floor at his feet, body ripped apart. Just like Jane. Like Lucy.

Her name was Kristy.

He looks at what is left of her, but he doesn't see her. He sees Jane. Her smile, lips parting slow, eyes going dark, long beautiful body tensing against his, calling out his name. Remembers how her breasts felt cupped in his hands, nipples stiff against his palms. How it felt to be inside her, moving in heat, wetness, her breath at his neck, fingers curved into his back, digging into his skin.

I love you, she'd said, so many times. He always wanted more, all of her, everything, believing he could have it.

He hangs his head. Don't. Fuck, just don't. His hand shakes against his thigh.

The memories always come back. Their faces, voices, their past and present together, all of it his life until the day he came home to find their blood spewed over the living room, his mind refusing to comprehend the great looping gouts of red over neat white walls, bloody demarcations separating them forever. Their bodies on the floor, pieces of the puzzles they were. Jane's eyes, seeing nothing. Jane, who'd understood his intensity, how he wanted to know everything about her. He'd never loved anyone like that. And Lucy. Mouth open grotesquely wide, scream of pain no child should ever know or feel. Dead blue skin. Dead. He fell to the floor on his knees and touched them, tried to hold them, screaming inside his head or maybe screaming out loud, he didn't know which.

He remembered a sound approaching from behind, low and rasping. Panting in his ear. It didn't matter. He stared down at his red hands and tried to understand. Looked like he dipped them in paint. Something hit him and his brain exploded in white noise. He fell face down into their shredded bodies, their cooling blood. Tasted like iron. He raised his head and made some crazy sound, keening, but it seemed far away, like someone else did it.

Something dragged his body over the carpet, worried at his arm. The taste of blood in his mouth spread like a thin stain, wouldn't go away. Didn't know if it was Jane's or Lucy's blood. His grief sharpened into something hot and hard and huge, uncontrollable. He drove his elbow back, felt something snap and give way beneath it. Heard a yelp as sirens approached outside.

He was told the paramedics pulled him away from the remains of his family, but he didn't remember that part.

After a few days he was discharged from the hospital. The first weeks after, he didn't shave or sleep much, didn't bathe, just waited at his parents' house. The police talked to him a lot, he remembered that. Then he was finally allowed to go home.

He opened the door and stared in shock. The walls were white and blank again, the carpet new. He tried to see the blood beneath the paint, angry that Jane and Lucy had been so efficiently erased. His parents had arranged that. Wiped out all that was left of them.

He still had his memories, though. He learned never to turn them aside, not even with their tattered bodies and cold blood stamped over them all like a watermark from the last time he saw them. They were all he had.

Southerners like open caskets. They have viewings-visitation before the funeral, come sign the book. That's the way they're raised. The way he was raised. He's never thought about it before, but those waxy faces, souls so clearly departed, do the same thing. Superimpose themselves over the living memories. Taint them.

Doesn't matter, really. His wife and daughter could never have had open caskets.

The gun wobbles in his grip. He raises it, watches his hand grow slowly still. Blood drips off it.

He went back to work for the first time on a Monday, pretended to earn his pay and be functional so that his mother and father would stop looking at him with their wounded eyes, like they'd been the ones that had been hurt. So they'd leave him in peace. So to speak.

Everybody at the office looked at him in the same way-quick looks that glanced off the surface of him, returned, bounced away again. Curious, uneasy. Looking but not wanting him to see them gawk, like fucking bystanders at the scene of an accident. They didn't know what to say so they said nothing. Preservation instinct, he thought. He didn't know what he'd say or do if someone actually said Jane's or Lucy's name aloud to him. As if they meant anything to anyone there. They didn't have the right.

The hours stretched on at work. He quit pretending to get any work done. His skin itched and prickled and his bones ached like when he was ten and had growing pains. He alternated staring fixedly at his PC with pacing up and down the office. He stayed late, reclaiming his right to be there though he didn't really want to be there.

He stopped at the liquor store on the way home, bought the biggest, cheapest bottle of vodka they had. For a minute after he opened the front door he expected they'd be there, the years of coming home to them still imprinted on his brain. He unscrewed the cap, threw it off and drank the vodka warm and straight out of the bottle. It burned raw in his throat. Tasted like shit. He stared at the white white walls, thinking about the taste of blood in his mouth.

No hangover when he woke the next day, though he'd expected it and wouldn't have cared if he had.

He went into work every day for the rest of the week. He was on time and he always stayed late. He got nothing done. No one bothered him about it.

The police hadn't made an arrest. He thought maybe they never would. It made him crazy to think about it.

On Saturday he did nothing much. He picked up the phone the three times it rang because it was too much trouble not to answer, though in the end he didn't think he made anyone feel better by doing so. By five in the afternoon he was out of the house again, headed for the liquor store.

The branches of the trees were bare and black against the low gray sky. A frigid drizzle fell. It looked like it might turn to snow. He supposed it was cold but he didn't feel it, even without a jacket.

A woman in the same aisle at the liquor store wrinkled her nose at him when he picked a bottle up off the shelf. "Ugh, you really drink that?"

He stared at her. She was short and slim, curvaceous. Her hair was long and wavy, brown with gold highlights, some of it still tucked into the neck of her brown leather coat, a piece of it tucked behind her ear. He smiled back slowly, feeling it on his face, though it didn't feel as if it was something he meant to do. She flushed, her skin going a pretty pink, and suddenly he was rigid, aroused.

"I drink whatever gets the job done." His voice was low and ragged. It should have made her run. It didn't.

"Going somewhere?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Home. You have someplace to be?" He listened to the words as they came out of his mouth, not pushing them away. His dick throbbed in his jeans. Part of him was horrified.

"Maybe I do now," she said. "I'm Kristy."

He stared at her again. "Where were you when I was in college?"

She laughed and moved closer, tucking her hand in his. She looked up at him. "Where's your coat?"

***

He wasn't able to touch her in the living room where they died, so he watched her from the kitchen chair, pulling steadily on the vodka bottle. He felt warm. Blurry. All the jagged edges were a little more bearable. But something rose fast behind the warmth, something he tried not to feel.

I'm not that. I won't be.

She pulled off her shirt and sank to her knees between his spread thighs. Her breasts were full, nipples pale dusky pink. She looked at him for a moment like he might turn away from her, whatever façade she wanted him to see slipping to show a terrifying need. He didn't understand it. He didn't know her. Maybe she needed someone, but not him. Nobody needed him anymore. He wanted to tell her but didn't.

She reached out, touched his face. He was tall, well muscled from a workout routine he'd followed once upon a time before his family died. She was tiny compared to him.

"You look so . . . hurt," she said, her voice soft.

He wrenched his face away, closed his eyes. She put a hand to the back of his neck, pulled him forward and nuzzled his throat, scattered kisses over his face. "You don't have to tell me. You don't have to say anything. Kiss me. Don't you want to?" she whispered. She licked his cheekbone, light flick of wet warmth. He turned his head a little closer into her. Didn't want or mean to do it. She smelled like rain and musk. She pressed her body closer, warm, promising something he didn't want and needed more than anything. He ground against her before he could stop.

"I saw you," she breathed against his ear, "and I just . . . I wanted you to let me . . . "

His hands moved to both sides of her head, yanking her forward. His hands dwarfed her face. His mouth slammed over hers. She made a tiny, needy sound in her throat that went straight to his dick. He pulled her legs up and around him in a single swift motion, and she scrabbled them around his waist, pushing her body up so that her face was above his. Her eyes were all pupil, her lips soft and swollen. Open, waiting for him.

He pulled her down, swallowed her up, thrusting his tongue inside, fucking her. She moaned, thrashing her tongue over his. Her hands worked under his shirt, tugging at it, and he broke away long enough to rip it over his head and throw it aside. She was on him again before the shirt hit the floor, fingers smoothing over skin, stopping at a nipple, pinching hard. Her head ducked, sealing her lips over her fingers and his nipple, mouthing him greedily, teeth nipping, fingers rubbing. His blood roared in his head and through his body, his cock. He pushed her back and thrust a hand down her pants to the soft skin of her stomach, gliding down to her slit. His fingers dropped over her clit and rubbed, felt her hot and swollen. Dipped a finger lower and pushed into her, in and out, rough, then added another. She cried out, throwing her head back and rocking into his touch.

With his other hand he tried to unbutton and unzip her jeans. Her hand batted at his, impatient, taking over. She stood and backed up a couple of steps, pulled her jeans down, then a red wisp of underwear and she was naked in the dark kitchen, need written all over her, want and lust, shyness. He reached out and she climbed into his lap, poised over his cock, grasped him in her hand and positioned him, lowering over him. He groaned and his hips jerked, slamming up inside her. She moved with him in tandem, breasts jiggling.

So wet. Tight, slippery heat.

The something rose in him again. Adrenaline. Terrible strength. Hunger growing blacker, larger, overcoming everything else. His humanity. His grief. He didn't want to grieve anymore. Didn't want to feel. Live. But it didn't mean he had to take her with him.

He looked into her eyes. She smiled and touched his face again, then pressed her forehead to his. He felt her eyelashes brush his cheek. He held her by the waist, picked her up, pulled her back down onto his cock as if she weighed nothing. She gasped and panted, mouth open, breasts bobbing against the smooth line of her arm as she stroked her clit. His hands moved up to her shoulders and he pushed and pulled and clawed at her, fucked her.

"God, I'm gonna come, oh please," she nearly sobbed. Her body arched, then stiffened, jerking against him. He felt her pulse around his cock. She came down slowly, off a good high, face gleaming with sweat. Her eyes were soft, drowsy. She smiled.

"I know what this is," he said out of the blue. He still didn't feel connected to the words when he spoke. His cock felt unbearably hard inside her. He needed to come.

She rolled her hips against him. "Why'd you stop? Come for me." Her voice was low and lazy, satisfied. When he didn't answer she straightened up and focused her gaze on him. "What is it?"

"Something," he said, tapping himself on the chest, "in here."

"Not down there?" she teased, looking at where they were joined.

He ignored her. "It's beginning."

He'd had the bullets made, feeling both idiotic and terrified. It wasn't easy to make them, so he'd been told. Graphite mold, blow-torched to keep the metal from hardening before it was all poured in.

I knew what was happening to me. I just didn't want to believe.

He'd wanted all of Jane, and he wanted all of Kristy. It didn't feel all that different from before.

He smiled at her and started moving again, slow and sure. Felt so good. He pushed his fingers through her hair, cupped her cheek. She sighed, smiled and closed her eyes, riding him. She kept them closed, happy, relaxed until he got rough, until his body changed, grew larger, coarse, fingers in her hair tightening their grip, muscles humming with trapped energy that grew and grew until he saw and smelled and felt only her sex and her blood. He picked up her heartbeat through his skin, felt it pound faster and faster, threatening to burst. She screamed, kept screaming when he ripped her body with hands and mouth, drank her blood, ripped out her tongue with his teeth and swallowed it. Blood gargled down her throat until she couldn't breathe. He split her in two, guttural grunts and growls bouncing off the walls in the dark kitchen, and he came just like she had asked him to do.

***

Outside the moon bursts from the clouds and shows its wide white face, then goes back in hiding.

She's on the floor at his feet, the life and heat gone out of her. He looks down at the curve of her hip, the delicate hollow where the collarbone meets the throat. Her blood is black in the dark. He's covered with it, drying in a solid sheet over his chest. He thinks of it warm in his mouth, remembers her screams. He sits and watches her as the moon disappears from the sky and the sun begin to rise. Then he gets up and comes back, sitting down on the kitchen chair and giving her a last, long look.

He hefts the gun up under his chin like he's always heard it should be done, so that the bullet will go straight up into the brain instead of maybe ricocheting around his skull and not killing him.

Wouldn't that be something.

He keeps his eyes on what's left of her until he can't stand the drying blood and sightless eyes and then he pulls the trigger.

HOME