"Here's the thing," she says, eyes rolled up behind blue-veined eyelids smeared in yesterday's hues and tomorrow's misfortunes. As she brings her cigarette up to purple-tinted lips, it's with the crooked smile of shared secrets under neon lights. "You, baby, are not god."

 

       She's a showgirl fallen, clumsy when flat-footed but bare-teeth confident in six-inch pumps. One of them street-folk, your father would hiss.

       Except, standing there in the drying blood of your father's insides, wearing the same snarl and heaving chest as he did thirty minutes ago, she's both right and divine. You aren't god, and you aren't trying to be.

       Inky black hair pools around her waist, glimmering with the iridescent sheen of rightfulness you've felt in greedy, greedy excess — since your hands closed around the length of thin silver chain still wrapped around your fist. You wonder if, like the chain, holding a fistful of that rightfulness would fix you.

       Because she's as inside your head as you are your father's, she scoffs. The smoke billows out, filling the street-side with the heavy scent of nicotine. It does nothing to cover the roadkill smell of you, but it's something as it mixes your rot, the deli on the corner closing down for the night, and a hundred other night smells of murderers and showgirls and angels and failures.

       "You wanna get away with this?" she asks, gesturing to the length of chain.

       The evidence is beginning to coagulate, aching to crawl under your waiting tendons. The chain is no longer the pure silver that originally wrapped your knuckles with. Her stare, at the sticky chain, makes you squeeze it harder.

       She doesn't mean just the patricide.

       Your hands are numb.

       You shake your head. There's nothing you've wanted that you haven't had, now, beast-like and still-greedy and hungry and even she couldn't de-fang you if she tried right now. A bead of sweat curls into your ear and tries to croon forgiveness.

       "Down the street," she says, your non-answer permeating through the gravel, under your bare feet and through the incessant patter of her flat-heeled beat. "There's a witch. Maybe she can make you whole again, love."

       You spit on the ground by her feet. It's the barest motion, and it rolls your stomach to the point of bile piling up in the hollow of your throat. "I don't need forgiveness."

​

       She winks. She's got as much faith in you as your grand-mama back home still wondering when her angel's gonna call. "That ain't what she offers," she says. The smoke hails an omen of truth in the halo around her head.

       In that omen, you stare at each other. Long enough that her cigarette burns down to the filter. She doesn't drop it for a long while, enough to burn her finger tips before the ash floats to the ground. Already itching to reach for the empty pack in her pocket — you toss her yours, crumpled but full, from your jeans pockets.

       Bright, bold, and blaring come the lights, followed by the sirens you can't quite hear yet, but they're coming. The boulevard starts half a mile down and the light glints off the convenience store you bought a lighter and a bottle of tequila at three weeks ago, when you first should've done this.

       You shake your head, not responding to anything anymore, still wet and sticky. She doesn't seem to mind the drop of blood making a home in the curve of her dimple as the droplets fly.

       "Go home," you tell her, lip twitching with the cruel side you meant to kill when you were in the mood for it earlier.

       "When you can find it," she says with a smile, "I'll do just that."

       The two of you part ways when the first echo accompanies red-and-blue-and-red. You find a witch, and she might find salvation, if it comes in the form of handcuffs and charges. It seems she never bothered to wipe your father's blood off.

       She never asked for your name — she can't give it when the cops hound her. You never asked hers — you can't give back something that someone else took, long before you.

       Neither of you make it home for a very long time.