“Writing…” she had said just as she had begun to enjoy him
fumbling with the buttons of her shirt, “you should be writing this all down”
and so it was all that he had imagined, if that were indeed possible, his imagining
the image stuck in his mind: he HAD imagined most of it, a nag at his ear: “you did,
you did it, didn’t you?”
she had told him in his sleeping that it wasn’t quite fair for him to have her
and he had told her, “shut up, shut up, don’t ruin this”
but she kept talking as he was kissing her, turning her head away,
saying how decent it was of him to not take her clothes off
as he was rutting against her thigh.
he thought of the safest way to prevent her and then, in dreaming, he remembered
the twisting slow motion of the knife tip as he stuck it into Arthur’s ribs,
and being terrified of it: the terrifying notion that he had been enjoying this
but Arthur suddenly respected him and that was what mattered.
“And what do you know about it?” he asked, biting into it. he wanted to tear himself
into her, to tear everything that had kept them, to remake her into something that tore
his clothes off and raked his skin and he would do anything to feel that again,
that velocity, that angle.
but he kept remembering and the remembering brought it centermost
and he was watching himself twist her arm when it had been Arthur’s and snapping it,
feeling so sad for himself and all the things he couldn’t tell anymore.
but that would bring up a whole host of complications.
“So much bullshit”, she said, “for a two minute event”
he knew he could satisfy some precaution of etiquette, just as soon as he could see
himself standing in the lobby, where she didn’t know who she was or why he had to drive her home.
it was later, at work, that the cook had told him
that she was now considering to be a lesbian.
he wanted to call her and patch things up, because of course now she was absolutely safe
and maybe that was what the dream was about: nothing to do with her
but about how he went out of his mind to murder someone he barely knew.