Sex and Murder Magazine

By Josh Olsen

I caught Tonya with James again.

And, once again, she feigned innocence.

“He’s just a friend,” she said. “You have nothing to worry about.”

But my ego wouldn’t allow me to believe her.

James was everything I wasn’t.

Thin, cute, blond, athletic.

Why wouldn’t she fuck him?

And combined with the recent discovery that Tonya was pregnant again, I couldn’t help but think that James was the father.

I pulled into Tonya’s driveway in my grandfather’s jeep, blocking her exit.

Tonya, James, and Tonya’s roommate, Christina, were unloading groceries from the trunk of James’ car.

I rolled down the window and the July heat hit me in the face.

“Get over here!” I demanded, and Tonya walked over to the driver’s side of the jeep.
She was smiling.

I wanted to knock out her teeth.

“Come here,” I said.

“I am here,” she replied.

“Get in the car,” I said, and she walked around to the passenger side of the jeep, opened the door, and stood in the driveway with one hand on the door, the other on her hip.

“Get in the car,” I repeated, and she tentatively obeyed.

“Close the door,” I said.

“What the fuck do you want?” Tonya said with a huff.

“Close the—”

“Fuck you!” she interrupted, and I reached over her lap, grabbed the passenger door handle, and pulled the door shut.

Tonya tried to reopen the door, but I grabbed her wrist and twisted until I heard a pop.
She yelped in pain.

“You fucking asshole!” she cried, and I quickly locked the doors, threw the jeep in reverse, pulled out into the street, and sped away from Tonya’s house.

I looked into the rearview mirror and saw James and Christina standing in the middle of the street.

Christina had a cordless phone to her ear and was frantically speaking to someone on the other end.

Tonya was silent.

She held her wrist tenderly.

I told myself that I hadn’t twisted hard enough to break anything, but the flesh had already begun to swell.

“Fucking bitch.” I said, but Tonya ignored me, and there was nothing that made me angrier than being ignored.

I wanted to hit her.

“I should break your fucking nose,” I threatened, to no avail, and spit in her face.

“What do you want?” she wept.

I hated her face when she was crying, and I made her cry a lot, which meant that I hated her a lot.

“I want you to fucking die,” I said, and jerked my grandfather’s jeep into oncoming traffic, which swerved out of my way.

“Please, take me home,” Tonya pleaded, so I drove even further into nowhere.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked. “Take me home.”

“You have to get an abortion,” I stated, and I swore that I heard Tonya laugh.

“I’m not getting another fucking abortion,” she responded, wiping tears and mascara from her face.

This was the second time in less than ten months that Tonya had gotten pregnant.

The first time she had an abortion three months into the pregnancy.

The doctor told her that if she had waited any longer that he wouldn’t have been able to operate.

I was out of school and in between jobs.

I barely had money for gas, let alone 350 dollars for an abortion.

So, I went around to my small circle of friends, hand extended, begging for help.

Corey gave me a hundred dollars.

Matt, the thirteen year-old younger brother of my friend Chris, gave me another hundred.
It was his birthday money, he told me.

From his grandmother.

Tonya came up with the rest of the cash.


We drove to Madison in my 1988 Ford Tempo, which hemorrhaged oil the entire way.

Once at the clinic, I sat in the waiting room while Tonya had the fetus sucked and scraped from her uterus.

Afterwards, she vomited into a small beige plastic pan as a middle-aged Hmong woman joyfully stuffed her face with wafer cookies.

“How many times can I come back?” the Hmong woman asked an attending nurse.

“Well,” the nurse responded tentatively, “you can come as often as you choose, but it’s no substitute for birth control.”

The Hmong woman was not listening.

She absently nodded her head while wrapping several cookies in a paper napkin before placing them in her purse.

During the two and a half hour ride back home, I ran out of gas.

The cashier at the gas station refused to take an out of town check, but settled, in trade, for the contents of my trunk.

Somewhere between fifteen to twenty CDs I had planned on pawning and an unopened set of jumper cables.

“I’m keeping the baby this time,” Tonya declared.

Her persistence enraged me.

“If you don’t have a fucking abortion, I’m going to kill you and the baby.” I cried.

She laughed at me.

She knew I was helpless.

I truly had no say in the matter.

“And then I’m going to kill myself.”

I hoped that this final, pathetic plea would suddenly change her mind, but the look on her face read complete and utter disgust.

And that was when my decision was finalized.

I was going to kill her.

I could see myself choking her.

My fingers digging into the soft flesh around her neck.

The capillaries in her eyes bursting one by one.

The hot tears spilling down her cheeks, over my hands.

No more difficult than the night I had suffocated and killed her pet cat.

Granted, the cat had been an accident, but was surprisingly easy.

It happened not long after the first time Tonya had gotten pregnant.

Initially, she had refused to get an abortion that time, as well, and my frustration built to a fever pitch.

One night, while Tonya was out with her roommate, Christina, I vented my anger on her cat.

Actually, it was a kitten.

One of two.

Sisters.

One was Tonya’s and the other was Christina’s.

Tonya’s was the smaller of the two.

Weaker.

Sickly.

While I watched TV, the kitten playfully pounced on my lap and I backhanded it off.

But it came back for more.

Time and time again, the kitten pounced into my lap and time and time again, I knocked it off.

At first with an open hand but eventually with a fist.

The last time it pounced, I grabbed it by its throat, placed it under a couch cushion, and lay down upon it with all of my weight.

Through the cushion, I heard the kitten’s muffled cries.

Panicked at first, and sharp, but quickly fading and then silence.

I lifted up the cushion to find the small black kitten dead, for the most part, and convulsing.

I broke into a cold, panicked sweat and did my best, almost comically so, to resuscitate the kitten, but it was too little too late.

It was dead.

So, I posed the kitten’s small, limp body as though she were sleeping and placed her at the foot of Tonya’s bed, where she would be discovered when Tonya returned home with Christina.

I did my best to comfort Tonya after she found her dead kitten.

I assured her that she must have died naturally, in her sleep.

After all, she was the weak one.

Sickly.

I was convinced that she believed me, or at least that was what she had said, but it was the very next day that she made an appointment in Madison, and very soon after she had her first abortion.

“What did I do to deserve this?” I pondered aloud in my grandfather’s jeep. In my mind, it was me who was the victim.

And, because of this, I wept loudly.

But Tonya remained silent.

She took no pity on me, her boyfriend turn tormentor, yet I felt, oddly enough, that I deserved her sympathy.

And still, I was determined to drive her to the Mississippi River, where I would kill her, the baby, and ultimately myself; however, at the very same time, there was little else I desired other than her touch.

I wanted her to hold me and tell me that everything would be alright.

I wanted her to whisper in my ear that everything would work out.

But, in the end, it wouldn’t.

Relationships like ours never did.

Red and blue lights began to flicker inside the jeep.

A spotlight in the rearview mirror obstructed my sight.

Christina, Tonya’s roommate, had called the police.

Tonya began to shake with emotion.

Great, heavy sobs.

Full of relief.

I was filled with both fury and immense sadness.

At first, I considered running.

Considered driving my grandfather’s jeep, full speed, into the river or head-on into a telephone pole.

I drove two, three, four blocks without stopping or slowing.

In the rearview mirror, I saw at least three squad cars eagerly tailing behind, waiting for me to step on the gas.

Waiting for me to make my move.

But after the fifth or sixth block, I resigned.

I flicked on the blinker, parked my grandfather’s jeep, and removed the keys from the ignition.

The ride was over.