waiting for the light to change

Roasting in the swampy heat of summer, quarter after 9 pm on a Saturday, with the driver’s side window down and pizza-for-one sitting beside me in the passenger seat, the damn traffic light refuses to change. In my sideview mirror, the tall streetlight flickers, then flashes a spotlight as a bright blue tandem bike’s dim headlamp bounces up and down with each pavement crack. Father and son (the boy has his father’s dark complexion, has the same dimple in his chin), riding towards me, hugging the newly paved bike lane that stole a piece of this once-familiar street. Pedals in sync, smiles on their faces when I decide to run them down.

They try to swerve when they sense me coming, but it doesn’t make a difference. Candy red front bumper hammering that thick-treaded bike tire, spokes snapping, metal whining, and both riders flying like cartoon characters. The father’s arms high above his head, as if reaching for a god only he can see; his son’s arms flailing too, but not as wild, almost rhythmic, like he’s trying to swim against the current of our thick summer air. Neither of them screams, it’s as if they don’t have the time, their bodies and minds anxious only to regain control.

I’ll tell the paramedics that cruelty happens in slow motion, that this was no exception. I’ll tell them that my right foot hit the gas as my left foot, trying but failing to intervene, reached for the brake. I’ll tell them that the moment to cede power was there, and then it was gone, or rather, the moment became something else once their bodies hit the pavement. When the boy slid across the concrete like a schizophrenic bowling pin and the father landed like a crack of thunder, I’ll explain, I felt in control. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive. I’ll tell them that I’d seen these two riders grinning, getting ahead, maybe even gloating and I knew that if I didn’t stop them, I’d have to wonder why I never had a chance to ride.

None of this is why I killed her.

Or maybe all of it is.

It’s true I’ve never really loved anyone, no one could ever really loved me. Maybe it’s because my parents didn’t know how to love, most likely were too afraid not to hate. Or maybe I was born this way—with a darkness coiling at my toes.

You’ll want to hear that it was some big blowup, you’ll want a thorny Netflix doc to explain why I pulled the trigger. You don’t want to hear that when she laughed at me—quiet and cruel—half of me wanted to die, and the other half wanted her to.

It was a lyric from an old Bruce Springsteen song—something about meanness in the world—that filled the room once she stopped twitching. It’s on the record most people think was written by someone else, somebody other than the man who wore high-waisted jeans in a video about dancing in the dark and told us that with just one look we could have our pick of all the blushing girls who were begging to be chosen. But no, the man singing about meanness lived amongst us in the darkness, sounded like he had been born with a seeping, pus-filled hole just behind his sternum. Maybe we’re all born knowing that these two men are one and the same, that it makes perfect sense that they would be. Maybe it’s this that explains why I did it or, at the very least, how I could.

There was wine and beer and greasy takeout. I’d been telling her about my father, about those moods, about how his swings made me wish I was a ghost. I was telling her that a leather belt on your back feels different than one made of cloth (unless it has one of those shiny stainless steel buckles with tiny teeth), that the welts aren’t the worst part, that the worst part is the room in your mind where you’re forced to escape – little more than a crawlspace, really, where cobwebs line your lips and thirty-legged beasts gnaw at the corners of your eyes.

Maybe Mia wasn’t really listening, maybe she was and didn’t care, but after a long silence, she sort of chuckled, pointed to the fucking cat. “It’s weird, isn’t it? When she rolls onto her back and shows her belly?” And I knew then that she was talking to me, talking about me, talking down to me. And then there was blood and bone, pieces of her spilling into the soupy cashew chicken.

Then again, maybe it was the silence that destroyed us both. I think we both felt the shotgun blast before we heard it.