DANIEL REISS, William Gay Memorial Prize Winner
Originally from East Tennessee, Daniel Reiss’s work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and Willow Springs Magazine, among other publications. Additionally, he’s been named a runner-up for AWP’s Intro to Journals Project and has received support from Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Community of Writers. He is currently based in Spokane, Washington
The Princess Motel
Winner of the William Gay Memorial Prize in Short Story, 2025
Jack would crouch in the deer stand for an hour or so before work, staring through trees and branches into the neighborhood on the other side of the woods. The red brick house with green shutters and holly bushes out front. He’d smoke a joint and tell himself he wasn’t crazy. That he wasn’t the bad guy.
She was.
Kaytlyn was.
He’d sit there, twelve feet up, and stare through binoculars until the kid strutted out the front door, backpack slung over his shoulder. He’d watch the boy run his fingers through his shaggy blonde hair as he backed out of the driveway in his white Jeep on his way to high school. Sometimes, Jack snapped pictures of him, but only if he liked what the kid was wearing. Sometimes, he cocked an imaginary rifle and aimed it at the back of the boy’s head. He told himself he wasn’t crazy.
It’d been going on over a month now: every morning up in the deer stand before work. His world crumbling around him. Stalking a teenager from a tree. Getting wasted to numb the rage running through his extension cord. Wondering if he should just end it already. Tired of finding reasons not to.
~~~~~~~~~~
Jack walked into the shop a few minutes late, and his coworkers got quiet.
“Fellas,” Jack said, hanging his bag in his locker. The men looked stunned to see him, as though he’d been lost at sea and presumed dead. They were still getting used to his bleach blonde hair, his nose ring.
Most days, Jack liked his job at Prestige Carpet Cleaning & Restoration because cleaning carpets was simple. It didn’t require him to think, and his 28-year-old mind could surrender, a barren tundra filled with crickets riding tumbleweeds. He could go to work drunk or tripping acid. He could go to work with stitches under his eye, coffee burns on his neck, and not have to worry about people asking questions. He could go to work immediately after staking out a teenager’s house, the same morning his wife’s mugshot was published on the front page of the local paper.
His coworkers were sitting in a circle on benches made from refurbished car seats. They all wore dark blue jumpsuits with red Prestige patches on their chests, boots with steel toes. There were six of them, excluding their boss, Old Terry. Bad-breathed white dudes rocking tasteless, scruffy facial hair. They were men who’d started cleaning carpets during troubled times in their lives and never stopped. Jack liked them for the most part, although after five years working as a carpet technician, he’d grown weary of their lowbrow stories, their subtle racism. He was the only Prestige employee with a college degree (albeit a theater degree from Tennessee Tech.) His coworkers used to tease him and call him Frat Star before the gossip about Kaytlyn started circulating. But once word of her felonious transgressions trickled out, no one teased him anymore. No one said a word, to his face, about the rumors they’d heard. No one questioned his masculinity when he showed up to work a few days ago with bleached hair and a pierced septum. They were never anything but awkward and nice to him.
Jack wished the fellas would talk shit again.
Travis Swafford shoved the newspaper he was holding behind his back, but Jack could still see a sliver of Kaytlyn’s face, her brown eyes, crinkled in Travis’s hand. He hadn’t read the front-page headline yet, but he’d been warned it was coming.
“I see you boys decided to start reading the paper,” Jack said, sitting in an empty seat and crossing his legs. His voice was calm. “I’ll go ahead and let y’all know I’m getting a divorce. Other than that, I’d rather not talk about it while I’m at work. That sound good to everyone?”
Everyone nodded. Travis balled up the newspaper and threw it in the trash. He pulled Jack aside and said, “I respect the hell out of you for showing up today. We all do.”
Jack tried not to think about the things being said behind his back.
A few minutes later, Old Terry called him into his office. “Just a check in,” Terry said. “A catch-up.” Even sitting down, the bull-necked proprietor was big as a fridge. His nipples spiked through his tight, collared shirt. At first, he struggled to look Jack in the eyes. Three years earlier, he’d given them a vacuum as a wedding gift. It was one of the things Kaytlyn took with her when she moved out.
“You need some time off?” Terry asked. The ceiling light reflected off his bald spot. “No,” said Jack. “That’s the last thing I need.”
“You sure?” Terry’s voice simultaneously gruff and gracious. “I’ll pay you for it.” “I’m sure.”
Terry scratched his chinbeard. “How’s things going at that housefire over by the elementary school?”
“Shit’s a mess,” Jack said. “Gonna take Travis and me a week at least to get them floors gutted.”
Terry packed a Skoal can between two fingers. “You think Travis’ll be okay without you a couple days?”
“Already told you, Boss. I don’t need time off for this bullshit.”
“I ain’t asking you to take time off,” Terry said. “There’s a job come up I need your help with.”
“What job?” Even clinically depressed, violently hungover, Jack was fond of responsibility.
“A cleanup,” Terry said. “Over off Highway 411 at The Princess Motel.” Jack’s blue eyes widened. “The Princess Motel?”
“That’s right.”
“Where ole girl got stabbed last week?”
“The one and only.”
“And we’re cleaning up—”
“The mess,” said Terry. xJack had been closely following the recent murder of 26-year-old Maeleah Cash at The
Princess Motel. One of those gruesome crimes that wasn’t supposed to happen in small, suburban, Bible Belt towns like Maryville, Tennessee. According to reports, Maeleah’s boyfriend had stabbed her over fifty times with a shard of broken glass, methed out of his mind, convinced she’d been having an affair with one of her clients. Then he drove down the street and blew his own brains out in the Taco Bell parking lot where he worked. If there was any silver lining to the brutality, the news of the murder had, for a few days at least, helped Jack forget that everyone in town was whispering about him.
~~~~~~~~~~
Kaytlyn confessed to him a few weeks after their third wedding anniversary. It was a Tuesday in February: a month before the criminal investigation concluded and her mugshot was published. She came home early from school, where she taught English to juniors and seniors, without her phone or her laptop. Jack was confused when she told him they’d been confiscated. “By who?” he asked. Her face was pale, puffy, her makeup smeared. She asked him to sit down at the kitchen table.
“Sit down,” she said. “Stop touching me. Please, just sit.”
“Kaytlyn, why are your hands shaking? Baby, what’s wrong?”
She tried, at first, to make it seem as though she’d done nothing wrong; that it was all just a big misunderstanding; that the school’s administration was out to get her.
He tried, at first, to believe her. He tried so hard to believe her.
“All I did was help one kid with private tutoring after school,” she said. “That’s it.” “Private tutoring?” Jack said. “When did you start doing that?”
“It’s my new side-hustle. A lot of teachers do it.”
But the more Kaytlyn talked, the more it became obvious there were things she wasn’t telling him. No answer for why she hadn’t accepted payment for the tutoring sessions. No answer for why she hadn’t told him about her new side-hustle before.
After a while, tired of the question-dodging, Jack slammed a fist on the kitchen table. “Sixteen years old,” he said, as she sobbed. “A fucking child!”
“Stop,” she begged. “Stop,” and he did stop. He stopped yelling. The house shuddered with her pitiful moans. They both knew what happened to people like her. Jack loved his wife so much he’d do anything she asked of him, even then. Suddenly he was on a beach under a full moon in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Pink magic in the salty air, the sand soft and white between his toes. He was about to sink on one knee. He was about to experience gravity. Waves rolling over their ankles, he took the diamond out of his pocket and promised Kaytlyn it meant forever.
“Oh, Jack,” she’d said. “It’s a little big, don’t you think?”
He looked down at the same ring now in the kitchen. It was dull. It didn’t even resemble a diamond anymore. It had devolved. “Just hold me,” she said. He squeezed her shoulders as she trembled, unwilling to believe that—after all those years together—this was how it would end.
~~~~~~~~~~
Jack pulled his work truck around the back of the shop to wait for Terry. Dozens of dusty carpets stacked against the building’s metal siding, ready to be shipped off to any sucker dumb enough to buy used carpet on the internet. The blue truck had a bulbous tank attached to the bed that transported filthy carpet water. A yellow skull-and-crossbones painted on its side. Toxic waste. At the end of a long workweek, when Jack emptied the tank down the grates behind the shop, he had to cover his nose for the smell. The chemical fumes stung his eyes.
“Your tires are low,” Terry grunted, as he climbed in. “Stop at a gas station to fill ‘em up.”
“Yessir, bossman.”
In the five years he’d worked for him, Jack had never gone on a job with Terry. It was rare the old man got his hands dirty anymore. He preferred to sit behind his desk and cook the books while listening to true crime podcasts. It took something exciting, like a homicide, to lure him out of the shop.
“You ever done a murder cleanup before?” Jack asked. “Oh, yeah.” Terry smiled. “Done a couple.”
“How long since the last one?”
“Must’ve been 2011.”
“The year I graduated high school,” said Jack. He accelerated to catch a white Jeep two cars ahead of them, but the license plate didn’t match the kid who fucked his wife. He slowed down, fixing his blonde hair in the mirror, wishing it were longer and shaggier. Wishing he looked more like Chris. That was the kid’s name: Chris.
He adjusted his nose ring. Kids these days.
“You remember that crankhead,” Terry said, “who broke in his mamaw’s house and beat her to death with a fire poker, stole her pills?”
Jack nodded. “Sounds familiar.”
“Well, between you and me, there was some stains on her carpet that didn’t come up.”
“What else?”
“Shit.” Terry scratched his neck. “There’s this double homicide over in Eagleton back in the early nineties. An older couple. Hodge was their name. Jim and Lisa. Anyhow, both of ‘em turned up shot dead one summer, but it was weeks before anyone found the bodies. By the time they did, that house was stinking, son. I ain’t never smelled something so sinister. Damn bodies turned to soup.”
Jack pulled into a gas station and parked by the air pump, squatted on his knees to fill the tires while Terry went in for coffee. The hose hissed in his hand. He kept looking over his shoulder, up in the trees, like someone was watching him.
Once the old man was out of sight, Jack dropped the hose and reached for his wallet. He took out a square piece of tinfoil, unwrapped it, and swallowed the tiny tab of acid inside.
He’d started microdosing long before Kaytlyn’s dismissal from school: advice taken from a Reddit thread for depressed, married men. Psychedelics sucked him out of reality, usually in a good way. For a few hours he could forget, or at least ignore, the sledgehammer of feelings, the betrayal, the pain. A smooth stone skipping across an unrippled body of water. On a small dose of acid, he almost felt normal again.
Over the past month, he’d been taking larger and larger doses. It seemed like a wise thing to do. A mental-healthy thing. Until now, he’d been keeping his composure in public. Until now, cleaning carpets had never been so fun.
~~~~~~~~~~
For three-and-a-half weeks, while the investigation into Kaytlyn was still ongoing, she and Jack remained living under the same roof—a married couple. They tiptoed around the small condo they rented from his mom, avoiding each other, talking only when necessary, behaving as enemies. Jack slept on the living room couch. Kaytlyn holed up in the bedroom. It was the same sleeping arrangement they opted for some nights even before the affair was exposed. A twenty-foot distance they’d never really talked about. In those three-and-a-half weeks, she hardly ever left the house, and when she did, he grew suspicious. Once, he thought he heard her sneaking out the bedroom window late at night, but when he bolted outside, waving a gun, all he found was a couple raccoons rooting through the trash.
After Kaytlyn’s suspension, they tried to keep her crime secret from their families, their friends. But Maryville was a small town, a gossipy town. Only one public high school, which Kaytlyn and Jack had both attended. Word seeped out that a teacher had an affair with a student. It didn’t take long for most of their friends to cut ties with her. Even some of her family began refusing her calls, blocking her on Facebook.
On Valentine’s Day, Kaytlyn entered the living room around midnight and woke Jack up. She was wearing one of his old Nashville Predators t-shirts, underwear, and at first, high and groggy, he thought she wanted to fuck. But she just wanted to talk—about deer hunting of all things—and as much as Jack wanted to tell her to leave, he couldn’t do it. He obliged her. He answered her questions about his rifles. He told her which ones were his favorites. “Are they easy to load?” she asked, rubbing his feet.
“Pretty easy,” he said. “Any idiot could figure it out by watching a YouTube video.”
Kaytlyn kissed down his chest before returning to the bedroom, leaving him erect on the couch, where he masturbated to fantasies of being cucked by a teenager. His wife’s voice begged the boy’s name. In her classroom, in a hotel shower, in his own bed. Until Jack moaned, “Blast off,” and wiped himself on the stiff rag he hid under the couch.
The next morning, hunting his old yearbooks in the garage, he noticed the gun safe cracked open. He looked inside. At first glance, everything seemed in place, accounted for. The stacks of ammo boxes were full. The pistols in their cases. A few of the shotguns, however, tilted the wrong direction, as if someone had taken them out and fiddled with them. Jack slammed the safe, locked it, then looked for the instruction manual. He couldn’t remember how to change the combination code from their anniversary date.
~~~~~~~~~~
Jack never found the instruction manual for the safe. Instead, he gathered all but one shotgun and drove them to his mom’s house in South Knoxville. He found his mom in the kitchen, brewing tea, watching a talk show with women drinking wine. Holding his hunting rifles, Jack told her, “I’m worried Kaytlyn is going to kill herself if I keep these at my house.”
Without a word, his mom hugged him. She hadn’t uttered a bad thing about Kaytlyn since Jack broke down and told her what’d happened. He knew she still loved her daughter-in- law. They’d been close. They used to do things together, just the two of them. Pedicures. Hot stone massages. Barre classes. Cookbook club. They’d walk into a room, catch each other’s eye, and giggle without speaking.
“Has she heard any news?” Jack’s mom asked.
“What do you mean?”
“About what’s gonna happen to her.”
“Mom.” Jack leaned his guns against the sofa. “What do you think is gonna happen to her?”
~~~~~~~~~~
The Princess Motel was on the outskirts of town, right off the two-lane highway. A single-story, L-shaped building rising out of a treeless brown field. Green, slanted roof. Pink, peeling walls. Yellow caution tape wrapped around the outdoor pool like bandages on a fractured skull. Thirty- five bucks a night, plus tax, for a queen-bed and HBO.
The acid hadn’t kicked. Jack rubbed the scar under his eye as he parked the truck. There was only one other car in the lot, and it rode four donuts. The tall, rusty sign in front of the motel said: CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.
As a kid, his mom would drive him past The Princess Motel every week on the way to football practice. “Momma,” he asked once, “what kind of person stays at a place like that?”
“Trash,” she’d said.
Another time, while engaged to Kaytlyn, a few months before their wedding, Jack cracked a drunken joke about staying at The Princess Motel for their honeymoon. He claimed the all-inclusive resort in Jamaica was out of their budget. Kaytlyn had not found the joke (nor the eight-ball of coke that fell out of his pocket while she was folding his laundry) funny. In fact, she found it so unfunny—and was so frustrated he wouldn’t quit laughing—that she flung an Xbox controller at Jack when he wasn’t looking. The controller connected beneath his eye, cut a moon into his cheek, made him bleed. And although she immediately apologized—immediately hugged him and kissed him and ran to the kitchen for Band-Aids and ice—for the rest of the engagement, Jack couldn’t help but wonder if he was making a mistake.
The Band-Aids didn’t stop the bleeding. Jack had to go to the emergency room for stitches. When the doctor asked how he got the injury, he said, “I told my fiancé I was taking her to The Princess Motel for our honeymoon,” and the doctor laughed as though it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.
~~~~~~~~~~
Surrounded by blood-splattered walls, Jack began to relax. Fluids bubbling brain, hot wax dribbling down sternum, a heartbeat in his fingers.
“You sure there was only one person got killed here?” Terry asked the motel manager as they inspected the crime scene. The room reeked of stale smoke and bleach.
“Y’all think it’ll come up?” said the manager. A squeaky man with a thin, yellow mustache who looked like he’d bite someone in a fight. His nametag read: Dennis. “This is a small family business,” Dennis said. “We cain’t really afford to replace the carpet.”
“I never make promises with blood,” said Terry, “but I think me and my man here can get the job done—right, Jack?”
But Jack wasn’t listening. He’d left the room, stumbled out toward the truck, his vision becoming clearer, seeing veins on leaves from fifty feet away. Trees pulsed like capillaries feeding green blood into the giant blue sky. The tiny yellow flowers in the grass suddenly opened their eyes and yawned. Such handsome faces. He tried ignoring the fact they all had shaggy blonde hair. Nose rings.
~~~~~~~~~~
No matter how much drugs he ate, Jack couldn’t stop thinking about Chris Owens.
The boy had visited Kaytlyn’s office in private seeking an essay extension, mental health reasons, after his brother was sentenced to prison for armed robbery. It was Kaytlyn, Chris confessed to investigators, who first suggested private tutoring. He said she offered him extra credit to meet one-on-one. He was only sixteen years old, born in Two-Thousand-and-Fucking- Six. A short and muscular country boy with big hands and long feet. A spitting image of teenage Jack.
Beyond the deer stand, Jack found other ways to monitor his prey. Sometimes he’d drive by the boy’s house late at night and park his car down the street. He’d camp out in the holly bushes, peep through the darkened windows. The cracks between the bricks were perfect footholds. Jack was a good climber. He’d drop off the roof and onto the back deck like a spider. He’d leave notes in dust on the grill cover. Small piles of his own fingernail clippings. Tufts of pubic hair. Viscous fluids. The stalking started naturally, an impulse he couldn’t deny.
He was high on Percocets when he decided to dye his hair blonde.
Ketamine when he pierced his nose.
A week or so before Kaytlyn moved out, Jack cornered her in the kitchen as she brewed coffee. Feeling spiteful.
“Don’t you think you should block the little piece of shit on Instagram?” he said. “I see he’s still liking your posts. How you think that’s gonna look in court?”
Kaytlyn’s big brown eyes were hollow and twitchy. Sometimes, he would creep up to the bedroom after midnight and press his ear against the door. He’d hear her shuffling around in there, pacing anxious circles around the room. He’d hear her crying. “You’re right,” she said, taking her coffee mug and walking back to the bedroom in her sweatpants. She’d been unable to find a job, even serving tables, since being suspended.
“You act like I’m trying to shame you.”
“What is it,” she said, “you think you’re doing when you bring him up? Helping me?”
“I just want to know what your boy has that I don’t.”
“Don’t make me do that.” She smiled. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” Jack almost howled, but he laughed. “Hurt me?” The words sounded insane.
He said, “You stupid bitch.”
That’s what did it, that’s what popped her off.
First, the hot coffee: splashed in his face.
Then the words: which burned even worse.
In a span of minutes, Kaytlyn listed everything Jack had done wrong in the past eight
years. She listed so many things he couldn’t keep up with a single one. Only later, once she was gone, would it all come roaring back: the lack of intimacy, the debilitating porn addiction, the drugs, the alcohol, the faces he made when she brought up children, the fights over money, the conversationless dinners, the wincing when they touched, the way things had gotten so boring between them.
She cut him off every time he tried to talk over her. And when she was done, before she left him standing shellshocked in the kitchen, she snarled, “So that’s why I haven’t even apologized to you—because I’m not even sorry.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Terry helped Jack roll the massive WetVac into the murder room. All the furniture had been removed. Tattooed on the ground were imprints of two twin beds, a nightstand, a dresser. Bloody fingers streaked the carpet. Maeleah’s body had been found in the bathtub, the drain clogged with a towel, water running. Local police concluded their investigation within a week. “It was a cut and dry case,” Sheriff Borring told reporters. “And we’re thankful the murderer is off the streets.”
“What you reckon drives someone to kill like this?” Jack asked, as they surveyed the carnage. His words sounded underwater. He was beginning to worry he might’ve taken too large a dose.
Terry looked at him like it might be a trick question. “Well,” he said, “in this case I’d say it was drugs.”
“Not betrayal?”
“I’m sure her shystyness had something to do with it,” said Terry. “But I don’t think the young man would have killed her if he wasn’t hopped up.”
Jack said, “Me neither.” He was staring at the only painting in the room. A teenage boy walking down a beach, a group of older women watching him, laughing.
“I did hear a rumor from my cousin in the sheriff’s office that ole girl was selling her body to make a living. Dancing over at The Emerald Club. Not that her occupation matters.”
But Terry’s tone indicated it did, in fact, matter.
Jack couldn’t stop staring at the painting, the teenage boy, his tiny bathing suit, wondering why he had to have blond hair. His nose ring was almost touching the frame.
“You good?” Terry asked. “You seem awful interested in that painting of the deer.”
Jack took a step back and rubbed his eyes. He squinted at a six-point buck, a grassy meadow, its flat teeth leering at him.
“I’m good,” he said, turning away from the painting.
“You sure?”
“I just wish I was out hunting that fucker in the woods right now.”
~~~~~~~~~~
A few days after their spat in the kitchen, Kaytlyn’s lawyer called and asked her to meet downtown at the lawyer’s office. Anytime Kaytlyn’s lawyer had asked her to come in before, it meant bad news.
After the meeting, Kaytlyn came home upset, her face dejected and bleary. Jack was eating a ham sandwich on the couch when she wilted in. Mustard on his fingers. Coffee blisters on his neck. The charges, she told him, were likely to be filed any day now. The district attorney’s office had found sufficient evidence for a trial. According to her lawyer, there would be no warning before the cops came with a warrant. They would kick down the door if they had to.
Jack looked Kaytlyn up and down as she said this. What did she expect him to do? She told him these things, these facts, as if she expected him to save her. The worst part was he still loved his wife. For eight years, she’d been his best friend, the landlord of his heart, the keeper of his secrets. He thought he was the keeper of hers.
But everything he’d built her up to be in his head had suddenly toppled over and crushed him like a bug.
Jack nodded and put the sandwich down, licked the mustard off his fingers. He said, “I think it’s time you pack your things.” He said, “I don’t want my fucking door kicked in.”
~~~~~~~~~~
The condo was hauntingly empty without Kaytlyn living there. She moved out the night Maeleah Cash was murdered. Moved across town to her mom’s trailer where she was staying, out on bail, until her trial date. The only things left in the condo were the couch, the television, a coffee table, a few pots and pans in the kitchen. His gun safe in the garage. A rusty lawnmower. The tool rack. A couple fishing rods he hadn’t baited in years.
All the clothes Kaytlyn had picked out for him over the years he’d burned in a bonfire the night she moved out. An entire can of gasoline. So inebriated that when he woke up, he thought he’d dreamed it: the giant heap of ashes smoldering in the backyard. His closet was practically empty.
Still drunk, reeking of smoke, he drove to the mall to revamp his wardrobe. He shopped in stores filled with teenagers and college kids. He zoomed in on pictures of Chris he’d taken from the deer stand, studying brand names. Everything was paid for on a credit card in Kaytlyn’s name.
On his way home, he stopped at a pharmacy and asked the one-eyed cashier which aisle hair dye was on. The woman smiled, adjusting her pirate patch. “Aisle seven, sweetheart,” she said. “With the feminine hygiene products.”
~~~~~~~~~~
The carpet was green beneath the bloodstains. Crusty with cigarette ash, decades of dead footskin. The WetVac pumped out soap, chemicals, and warm water. Its thick, white foam lathered the carpet, browning as it absorbed Maeleah Cash’s blood.
Terry lugged a long, rubber hose into the room, a wide mouth designed to suck up the liquids, pump them out to the tank on Jack’s truck. Terry worked the hose with a fat chaw in his lip which he kept spitting on the floor as they cleaned.
After Jack hit the shaggy carpet three times with the WetVac, it was still blotched with bloodstains.
“Told you it wouldn’t come up.” Terry rubbed his hands together in a financial gesture. “This is a gut job.”
Jack giggled, imagining guts. Imagining a boy in a bathing suit dogfucking his wife. Dick hard under his jumpsuit. Red streaks on his neck from scratching himself.
“I’m gonna go pick something up for lunch.” Terry stared at him with mild concern. “You okay if I leave you by yourself for a bit?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Jack scratched his neck. “I’ll be just fine.”
~~~~~~~~~~
The night before Kaytlyn moved out, the last night they ever lived together, Jack couldn’t sleep. He burned alive on the living room couch. A crucifixion of his psyche. Some deranged late-night cartoon flickered on the television. His acid guy had been out of everything except PCP, which Jack had never smoked before.
Stripped naked, he shivered in a pool of sweat.
One rifle remaining in the gun locker. One bullet.
One person—he’d felt for a while now—would not see this through.
He wobbled off the couch, kicking beer cans, wobbled down the dark hallway to the bedroom. He pressed his ear against the door. He heard the fuzzy drone of the television, but he couldn’t hear Kaytlyn. Earlier in the evening, he’d listened to the sounds of her packing things: boxes being taped shut, suitcases being zipped. She’d told him tomorrow was the day. He imagined her alone in bed, sleeping peacefully, still not sorry.
Jack tried to open the door, but it was locked. He jiggled the knob, he knocked. He told her they needed to talk. There was something he had to say.
Kaytlyn didn’t stir.
“Fine,” said Jack, hysterical. “Have it your way.”
He went to the garage and unlocked the safe. He took out the rifle. The bullet clicked in the chamber. He walked out to the backyard.
The condo stood at the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet, residential neighborhood, its backyard wedged against the narrow strip of woods dividing Jack’s neighborhood from Chris’s.
Naked, he climbed the ladder to his deer stand. Although it wasn’t legal to shoot the deer that wandered through the woods, Jack often watched the animals from above as they grazed on the corn he’d scattered, binoculars around his neck.
For several minutes, he sat erect in the deer stand, rifle in his hands. It was a few degrees above freezing, but he was sweating. Impervious to the cold. Possessed by Chris Owens. He swallowed the twin barrels, struck sober by the cool taste of metal, his finger tickling the trigger.
At first, the soft, throaty voice calling his name didn’t sound real. It sounded like a memory, like the static of a dream. Her feet crunching through the leaves, begging him to come down. He tried to ignore her, but he couldn’t. She’d followed him out there in her underwear.
~~~~~~~~~~
After Terry left for lunch, Jack kept working. He scrubbed the carpet time and again, the bloodstains fainter with each cycle. He switched back and forth from WetVac to the rubber hose, staring idly at the colors, the patterns and textures in the foam. Looking bored. Which wasn’t to say he didn’t derive satisfaction from his work. The process of restoring a filthy carpet—its transformation from dirty to clean—triggered an impulsive psychological delight in him. Like a big hit in football or a cumshot in porn.
After a few hours, Terry still wasn’t back. Long enough that Jack considered texting him, checking in, until he felt his pocket and realized he’d left his phone in the truck.
By mid-afternoon, the red splotches had been reduced to faint outlines on the carpet. The thick shag restored to a piney green. Jack stared at the popcorn ceiling, mouth open, counting.
Then he entered the bathroom.
Blood scabbed the yellowed tiles and bogged the bathtub. It splattered the walls and the toilet. He found a chipped tooth under the sink, a syringe. Jack was astounded by the amount of goop inside us. He wondered what went through Maeleah Cash’s mind as she watched it all spill out of her.
Because the WetVac didn’t work on hard surfaces, he had no tool with which to clean the mess. Shards of broken glass from the mirror peppered the ground. The same glass, Jack assumed, that was used in the stabbing, left for him to clean up. He picked up a few of the bigger pieces and put them in his pocket. A small cut opened on his finger. His own blood dripped onto Maeleah’s. He sucked at the wound. It tasted medicinal.
Sleuthing around, Jack found a large plastic bucket, a roll of paper towels, and several jugs of cleaning chemicals, in a maid’s closet. Back at the crime scene, he filled the bucket with warm water, added the chemicals. The water fizzed orange and hissed. Jack pulled an old rag out of his pocket, soaked it. Then, on hands and knees, he began scrubbing the bathroom floor. He scrubbed with all his strength. He scrubbed till his forearms burned, till sweatbeads dripped off his nose ring. He scrubbed till the viscera reliquefied, gummy puddles, soaking his knees and staining his fingernails red. He scrubbed till bloodwater swamped the bathroom with human juices. He scrubbed till the rag disintegrated in his hand. He scrubbed till he thought it looked clean.
When he ran out of paper towels, Jack mopped the floor with his sleeves, his chest, flopping around in his uniform like a fish speared through the gills. Rolling on his back. Making blood angels. Using his own body to absorb all that was left of Maeleah Cash.
As he worked, he daydreamed of his own wife, his own Maeleah Cash, the things he wanted to do to her. He daydreamed of that night in Gulf Shores under the silver moon. Gravity. In such headspace, his heart screamed its selfish desires. It was a tragic thing, a beautiful
thing, really—what happened in that bathroom. His brain strung up by its bootstraps, gagged with a rubber fist. That’s all we are, Jack thought, a brain and a heart, some lungs, constantly at war.
He didn’t hear the truck when Terry finally returned after a three-hour lunch, cold roast beef sandwiches in a greasy brown bag. He came in whistling a jaunty tune, then swiftly stopped. Old Terry looked like he might puke on the clean carpet when he saw what Jack’d done with the place. “What in the hell,” he said, “got into you?”
Jack, snapping out of rapture, looked down, almost startled by the state of his wet, stinking jumpsuit. A strange taste of meat on his tongue.
He said, “Bathroom is clean,” pointing at the sparkling tiles.
“No it ain’t!”
“Ain’t it?”
Jack turned around and gasped. Blood dripped from the ceiling, boot holes kicked in the walls, the sink spewing brown water.
“We was told specifically not to touch the bathroom!”
“Shit,” said Jack.
“What’d you use,” Terry said, “your clothes to mop the blood?”
Jack grinned. Something about this was funny, but he didn’t know what.
“The hell is wrong with you, son?” Terry said. “You know how nasty that is?”
Jack plucked a roast beef sandwich out of the paper bag, unwrapped it, took a bite. Terry
left the room, muttering in disbelief. For a moment, Jack forgot he was on drugs. He felt a warmth expanding, enveloping his body. Spiritual enlightenment, he presumed, something divine—until he looked down and saw the urine soaking into the carpet.
~~~~~~~~~~
As Jack loaded the WetVac into the truck, he fingered the broken glass in his damp pocket. Thrilled by its jagged edges. His brain smoother than a marble. What would happen, he wondered, if I saw wifey tonight? What would happen if I unzippered my heart and showed her its teeth?
Would she finally say sorry?
He was dreaming about a reunion, what it might look like, when Terry tossed him the keys and barked, “You drive back to the shop.”
“Sure thing, bossman.”
“And son?”
“Yessir?”
Terry handed him a folded scrap of paper.
“Here’s the name of a good therapist I want
you to call. Used her during my divorce. Woman helped me straighten out some of my demons.” “I appreciate it,” Jack said, “but I don’t think I’ll be needing a therapist anytime soon.” He steered them back ten miles-per-hour under the speed limit. Twice, Terry had to tell
him to go through green lights.
“You sure you’re all good?” he asked.
“I never been better.”
Jack dropped Terry off at the loading dock behind the shop. As the old man got out he swallowed, looked at Jack. He said, “My door is always open.” Jack nodded. “I know.”
“Go home and get you a shower,” Terry said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Bright and early. We’re going back to gut that motherfucker.” Then he went inside.
Jack drove around to the side of the shop, to the drainage grates, where he emptied the tank: Maeleah Cash’s frothy remains. He smelled mold growing in the cold, dark opening beneath his feet, the stink of sewage. He flipped a switch on the truck’s side panel. Watery, brown discharge spewed out of the hose, gurgled down the drain. It smelled awful, sanitized death, which to Jack meant everything behind him was less awful than he found it.
He remembered the glass in his pocket, the broken mirror, and suddenly he felt silly for bringing it with him. He took it out, a few pieces at a time, dropping them through the cracks in the grate. And as the glass tinkled against the steel bars, disappearing into the dark unknown, the abyss, Jack thought he saw a human eye blink at him from one of the larger shards. Too fast, even, to see the color of its iris.
He thought maybe it could’ve been Maeleah Cash’s eye, delivered from another realm, thanking him for his efforts to purify her of this earth. Or maybe it was his ex-wife’s eye, finally saying sorry, telling him she didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Didn’t mean to hurt him like this. Maybe it was his own eye he’d seen. His own baby blues, slipping back toward reality, coming down from the drugs. But he didn’t think so.
This, he believed, was an unfamiliar eye. An eye he’d never seen before, reaching out across space and time, searching for some special place, some special thing. Or maybe even, Jack thought, some special person—someone broken like him.