#libby.

up and at ‘em, baby day. it reads like a headline out of a 90′s newspaper from when my story was the only thing people talked about -- when my story was what made leather-faced women with rollers curled tight in their hair take long, solemn puffs of their cigarettes and, in their finest, most-sincere plastic voices utter that poor baby without the hint of remorse, like it was another true crime podcast thought up by two college dudes that stank of cheese puffs and b.o. recording in one of their mom’s basements.

the headlines dry up over time, and so does the money, and no one tells you that until it’s too late, and you spend your days in the cyclical rhythm of staring at the halogen bulbs you flicked on in every corner of your apartment, and closing your eyes to the sound of metal hacking through flesh with the squelch-thump-squelch-thump of a slaughter house up in the pines. blinking light. squelch-thump. blinking light. squelch-thump.

i’m jealous of these girls in the paper. wild, unruly things that are all hair and teeth, and the shocking discovery of little girl murders seem to have somehow slicked back the wispy shreds of hair and filled in the gaps between the teeth. the gofundme’s are rife. the parents grieve and exit stage left. i have five hundred bucks to my name and that’s... it. that’s the last of the Iibby day fund. 

wind gap is a three hour drive and i’ve spent the last hour of it swilling warm vodka around my gums. ann nash’s baby face stares back at me from the paper slung across the passenger’s seat, and it makes me want the ground to fucking swallow me. who’s jealous of this kind of attention? what kind of piece of shit does that? up and at ‘em, baby day.

Elijah was one of the younger professors on campus which had both its pros and cons. The students enjoyed that he understood how to use a computer properly and they paid attention to him, but the older teachers always scolded and belittled him whenever they could. And that is exactly why, he wasn’t in the best mood today. The religious department that he worked in was full of older set-minded people that made him want to claw his eyes out. Pulling up his lesson on the board, his class was already full at the sight of Libby he could feel himself calm down a plus he noticed since they started dating. Clapping his hands together with the little excitement he had, “Alright class today we are talking about...” and then continued to speak about the lesson.

i am and always have been an inherently selfish person. i have to figure this out, not because i want to see my big brother out from behind bars, with his blood-red scalp dripping down his shoulders (hair, long, and bright) or his two-tone jumpsuit sawing him in half like a fucking magic trick (for my next trick, i’ll hack your sister’s dying carcass with an axe twenty four times and decapitate your mom!). i have to figure it out because i’ve done more in the past few days than i’ve done in the last seventeen years, ever the waif walking the tightrope between barely surviving and staring at the halogen bulb in my ceiling. 

wind gap sounds like a bullet-point on a map that’s home to six of the US’s Most F***** Up Serial Killers (We Were Surprised, Too!), as ranked by a small-town-moved-big-city buzzfeed intern that lolls around trendy cafés and spends eight dollars a day on shitty coffee. it sounds like a footnote in a horror film, with missing posters smothering older missing posters like a bandaid on a severed artery. i thought nothing could get under my skin, and then the small midwest slapped me in the face with lot lizards and half-finished tarmac with a few dozen cigarette butts poking out from the black mulch and it feels like the run-down country lanes of dust and animal shit that smell like home. the slaughterhouse is up the road. sometimes i wonder how the pigs feel when they hear the heavy boots and the bolt gun.

women don’t stab. they connive. they plan. they ruminate over and over and by the clair of the moon and by the red in their panties because every woman’s driven totally fucking insane by their period. sometimes, i think about how i would’ve done it -- what would’ve had to have happened to drive me to that, with seven full years and bloody knuckles that try and drag the helm of an axe head across the wobbly wooden floorboards that mom kept saying she’d fix but never did. how many swings would i be able to make before making so much as a dent in debby’s flesh, or how much it’d take to go from a water pistol that michelle had jammed and cried about for the next four hours to a loaded, cold, metal colt that runner’d kept in his busted old truck. i’d be the worst fucking serial killer out there, but maybe i’d have all my fingers left.

           “i don’t know much about stabbing.”   it was an axe. and a gun. and -- demonic chants that had all but rang in my ears. (THEY’RE ALL DEAD, AUNT DIANE, ALL OF THEM, THEY’RE ALL DEAD!) but camille keeps talking and i keep picking at my fries. the salt shaker’s made its way into my pocket -- one thing people should never pay for -- and my eyes are focused on the chipped plastic of the pepper.