Free Deanna Madden #1 The Girl in 6E by A.R. Torre Page B

footsteps continue, and by the shuffle of them and the speed at which they are by my door, I know that it is Simon. When his feet are flush with my door, I speak. Loudly, so he can hear me.
    “Your door’s not shut.”
    His footsteps stop, and I can tell from the light underneath my door that he has turned to face me. I also know, without getting up, that he is looking in my peephole, though he knows from every other experience that he can’t see anything inside.
    “You freak me out when you do that.” His words are muffled, almost too quiet, but my one sensitive ear easily picks up the phrase.
    “You’d hate it even more if someone went in and stole all of your crap.”
    “Yeah.” He turns, his footsteps retreating, and I hear the final click of his door being pulled tight. Then he’s back, and I can tell from his pace that he’s about to ask me something. “When are you…uh…getting…”
    “On the first. You know that. My order always comes on the first.”
    “Okay. I’m just a little low.”
    “Ration.”
    He pauses and then starts to move again.
    “Simon.”
    “Yeah?”
    “You were late last night.”
    “Yeah, I had, uh…some things—”
    “Simon…” I speak slowly and clearly, so there is no room for him to misunderstand. “If you are late again, I will stop the orders.”
    “Yeah, yeah. I won’t be. I promise. You know I won’t. Promise.”
    He waits for a moment, and I don’t respond, spooning a forkful of rice into my mouth. Then he moves, and I hear the plastic swoosh of my garbage as he picks up the bag and moves down the hall. Along with locking me in at night, Simon carries my trash and any outgoing mail downstairs. I leave it outside the door, and he takes it to the dumpster out back. I hear him at the elevator, hear the car as it starts upward toward him. Past the elevator, I can’t hear much of anything. As strong as my hearing is in my left ear, it doesn’t make up for the inability of my other. I am hard of hearing in my right ear. It is not a condition I was born with, but rather the sole result of an accident that happened several years ago. I’ve never told anyone about the defect, as it doesn’t seem to affect my daily life and certainly doesn’t seem worth a doctor’s visit or surgery to fix it. I almost like the additional quiet. It is another layer between the outside world and me.
    In the outside world, there is an entire community devoted to people like me. Not online prostitutes who fantasize about death, but those who want to kill, those who obsess over gore and screams. When I was in community college I found their forums, joined their Twitter groups, signed up for their creepy monthly newsletter. I quit that community pretty quickly. I had hoped for an AA-type group, one that would allow members to support one another in their dark moments, help them keep one another off the streets and safe from others. Instead, they fed off one another, sharing fantasies and realities, discussing along the open lines of the Internet how to properly slice a throat, fashion a garrote, or know if you have choked someone to death or just to the point of passing out. That’s something you never learn from the movies. That when someone is strangled, the eyes-closing, body-slumping image that you see in the movies—they aren’t dead. They are passing out from asphyxiation. In order to kill them, you need to keep squeezing, wait a good minute longer. Then they will be dead.
    Being on those forums, peeking into the minds of those even more depraved than me…it wasn’t good for my urges. Gave them too many ideas, gave them too much to feed off of. I closed my forum accounts, unsubscribed from the newsletter, got the hell off of Twitter. I switched to plan B: slowly starving my urges to death, cutting them off from contact with the outside world, refusing to give them food and nourishment in the form of indulgent fantasies. While Dr. Derek doesn’t necessarily believe in plan B,