It was always a trick of yours to shift deadlines when no one was looking; in all the years I’ve known you, you have not been late once. I was the one sock left on at night by deliberate mistake, always lonely for the other stuffed like faux regret into that forbidden tight crease between mattress and sheet at the foot of your bed. During the grand tour of your new digs, you stuck that socked foot out for the world to see and made me smile with a shotgun to the back of my head, and your bare pinkie toe on the trigger was like some undersized thug egging me on from a soiled shadowy pile of carefully tossed throws, and European squares, and fluffed body pillows. In those days, the system of transference was nearly pitch perfect. With top hat and candy cane, I danced and warbled hello my baby hello my darling hello my ragtime gal while you stood in the wings and pumped me full of sun-warped scratchy lyrics and cracked yellowed teeth. From upstairs, the muffled low frequency of a kick drum was like your profile in a mugshot the media had yet to uncover. Booked. A proven danger to your community.

The secret hidden past with no chance for bail.

At night, I let you carve my lungs with a seething chisel, but in the morning light we looked and looked and found no sign of hammer. We picked cigarette butts off the street with the filed points of our fingernails and listened intently to an orchestra of empty beer bottles rolling down under movie seats in the dark. There are still bits of glass deeply embedded in the lining of my belly. There are still chord progressions that give the semblance of resolution, but if you pull the plugs of dried semen from your ears, you’ll hear me there in the background with my pathetic triangle striking the same pretentiously dissonant quarter tone over and over again. Ding. Ding. Ding. If I had to notate it, I would stretch one of your hands horizontally across my neck in a mock-choke and then slice my jugular so that the blood ran down over the pudgy staff of your fingers. Today you’ll spend hours cleaning the wood floor we all scuffed last night with our dancing shoes. It’s not quite the same as just walking on it a lot after all, is it. But I’m sure you already knew that, on some level. In any case don’t worry—I made sure to lie there in the most important spots and let the heels dig into me while I looked up all the girls’ skirts and outlined myself as usual in bright yellow chalk. A few less square feet for you to worry about.

In the background, I imagine a sound like real courage. It’s got these undertones. It’s someone in the next room weeping a confession to the village sage from a plush leather couch. It’s one of those privacy sound machines set permanently to Unbelievably Violent Car Crash in Extinct Rain Forest Waterfall. It hisses and loops over and over, until my face is buried under seventy-two layers of sedimentary rock and ice. In the future, archeologists will pry loose my horrified expression, and carbon-date me, and pinpoint the exact moment when I realized this was the best I could ever hope for. Later, their assistants will take their time filing me in some dusty government warehouse under Implements—Violence/Weapons/Hammers/Stilettos.

I am reduced to a series of slash and burns.