almost okay

My back was aching from the effort of dismembering the body and my ribs and arm were still sore from the beating I had taken the night before, but I was fairly sure by then that nothing was broken and I’d be able to heal without a trip to the doctor. Things were definitely looking up.

After a half-hour break and a couple of beers, I dove back into my work with renewed gusto. I hacked through the head with a pruning saw, scooped out Jackie’s brains and flushed them, too. I then got to work cutting up all the bones as small as possible. The bolt cutter saved lots of time and worked wonders on everything from fingers and toes to the forearm and some of the spine, but I had to saw through everything else and it took a while.

I used the pliers to pull her teeth and flushed them down the toilet. The channel locks were also useful for breaking up the skull along suture joints, so that it was eventually just a bunch of bone chips.

By 9 p.m. I had it licked. I randomly put the pile of bone pieces into a couple dozen trash bags, being careful to keep them very light, maybe only two or three pounds in weight each. I then double-bagged the lot and put them into two cardboard boxes. The pile of flesh was divided into quart- and gallon-sized freezer bags, most of which I dropped into the dirty and dented chest freezer that had been left in the basement by previous tenants.

Once I had finished, I took a long hot shower and cleaned the bathroom thoroughly. I was surprised by how little blood I had got on surfaces outside the tub, just a smear or two on the tile and nothing in the grout. Even if the cops eventually did search the place, it would be hard to detect anything out of the ordinary. I then swept up the glass from the living room floor, put my books back on shelves and made sure that there were no tell-tale Jackie fingerprints by wiping down everything that she could possibly have touched. The last step was to fetch the shop vac from the garage, and I carefully covered every square inch of the sofa, the rug and the rest of the furniture with it to pick up any stray hairs that Jackie might have lost during our tussle.

It was the cleanest the house had been since I'd moved in.

The remainder of her flesh I put in the refrigerator while I read the manual for that food dehydrator. You see, once I had made up my mind that Jackie was at least as much responsible for this mess as I was, if not more so, I was determined that she should share in my guilt and my punishment. Did I come looking for her? No. Did I attack her with a bat? Hell no. So in order to make things right, make Jackie go on paying for what she had done, make her pay for the torture of memory she had saddled me with for the rest of my life, my fevered brain had reasoned that she would have to become a part of me. And I could only think of one way to do that.

I would eat her.

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