Ms. Scarlet in the Study

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11111111111111111111T S 111111111111 So stunned they stand in a semicircle around it, the body, as it decants into the floral rug and gives the study a surgical feel, that glint of knife and glove. There is no one whose throat fills with blood that has not, at some point, been loved. We’re careless with it, she thinks, just as we’re careless with this, our hate, as if each person, even the worst of us, wasn’t the handiwork of a thousand tendernesses, now all undone. Well, he was a jerk, this fresh cadaver, he gave us all a quiver of reasons and it was only a matter of logistics, the when, the how, not the why. But who? She looks around: there’s his father, a turnip-faced man with hands like canned hams, who hated him for being smarter. There’s his mother, a bouquet of raw nerves, who despised him since that week of nights when he would not, could not, sleep. He’s sleeping now, if death is rest, and not a long fall into a starless box. There’s his wife, weeping like a sprung dam, keening like a bowed saw. Convincing, if you’re the kind to find grief reliable. She’s not. She’s wept over commercials and turned stone for the death of beloveds. Anyway, the wife, more than anyone, had had enough. He was loathsome in the ways that are common: coward, bully, hypocrite. But he also cultivated rare orchids of cruelty, of spite. So this was the night all that ended. The daughter also sniffles, though that could just be allergies. The friend is mumbling something, maybe an elegy, or apology. 111111111111111111111

Corinna Schulenburg

Ms. Scarlet in the Study

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No, wait: they’re all turning to look at her. Why? Oh, the knife, the knife that’s in her hand, the one slick with more than blood. Well, that has nothing to do with this, she protests. I was trapped within some beast, she swears, some creature had swallowed me whole, sure as the wolf took grandma. It took me years to carve my way out. She looks down at the body, sees the cut from the nethers to the neck, how thin his skin, like a cheap costume. The wife nods, dries her eyes, refreshes drinks as father and friend drag the guts away. The wife offers her a gin martini, two olives, just the way she likes it. The mother talks about the weather. The daughter hands her a tissue to wipe the blade clean. 111111111111

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