Sex and Murder Magazine

By Kevin Brown

Tossing and kicking next to his wife, a mane of sweat around his head, he dreams:

He’s the age when Sesame Street’s his favorite show, and his mom has run off for the fourth time this year, what he doesn’t know will be her last, and he’s under the covers thinking about her smell—her perfume and shampoo, the smell of wine always on her breath. In one hand he holds a lock of her hair made up of strands she’s left behind on the furniture, and with the other, his swollen eye from where his father had “sent him to bed.” He watches the usual blade of smoky light under the door from his dad’s drinking binge down the hall until he’s asleep, where he wakes up to something taking his breath and thinks of what his mother told him when he’d wanted a free kitten, that cat’s take the breaths of little boys. But it’s not a cat, it’s something large and dark and shaped like a monster, and he knows it’s his dad. He’s choked him before but this is harder, and he’s growling, whiskey-spit strung from the silhouette, and saying, “It’s your fault she’s gone, it’s your fault she’s gone.” He grabs his dad’s wrists, hairy and thick, but the grip only tightens, until the son’s hands fall away and his tongue is out, licking for a particle of air. The room lights up and it is his dad but he’s much younger, face cinched in the middle, and they’re both twitching—one in rage, the other in panic. The son’s eyes are wide and flickering and bubbled in tears, and through the blur he sees dark hair extend from his dad’s lip into a mustache, then sprout along the frame of his jaw and in patches over the cheeks. His skin morphs into the pocked and pitted look of an orange rind, and cracks away from the corners of his eyes. His hair goes white and recedes into a meander scar of hairline, before going back, then back, then gone. “I’ll kill you,” he says, his voice weaker. “It’s all your fault, all your fault,” he’s saying, and he’s crying, and as everything catches focus, the son sees it is no longer his dad above him, it is himself, not the child but the man, gripping his own throat and strangling, screaming, “All your fault! All your fault!” until the black edges of his vision begin to slide together, closing out the world like a curtain on a stage show, and as the edges touch, he hears a gasp—

—and he’s awake but not, and on top of his wife like a cat on a baby and he’s—

—squeezing her throat, growling, and shaking her. She stares up, grabbing his wrists, but he only clenches harder until her hands fall away. Her tongue is out, licking for a particle of air, and her eyes are wide and flickering and bubbled in tears until her body convulses several times and falls still, a single tear slipping over her cheek and down to the pillow. He lets go, breathing heavy and crying. Slowly aware of where he is, of what he’s done. He stares down at his wife, touches the face of the woman he swore to love forever, the woman who promised to love him until the last breath in her chest.