Free The Dishonored Dead by Robert Swartwood Page B

the door and rush down here and find her attempting to retrieve the same very thing that had now cost her her existence.
    She felt around the space some more, knowing that it was there, that it had to be, and when her hand touched the folder, her fingers pinched it and pulled it out.
    Denise paused, waiting for the cops to bust in, but the house remained silent. There was only faint dripping coming from one of the pipes, and nothing else.
    She took the folder over to the basement stairs and lowered herself to the second to last step. She sat there and placed the folder on her lap, staring at the plain glossy cover, knowing just what kind of trouble it held.
    When she did finally open it, she did so slowly, carefully, as if the pages inside were asleep and she didn’t want to wake them. But once she saw the first page—one of her more recent poems—she knew she was being silly, that these pages were even deader than she.
    Denise paged through the papers—there were maybe thirty in all, written over the past decade, what she considered her best—until she came to the one page that was crumpled up. She took this out, set it aside, and closed the folder. She stared at the folder again, thinking about the words inside, about how all those different words by themselves had no meaning, were just words, but how those words put together, in a certain sequence, could get you expired.
    She’d almost told Conrad the truth last night. Not how she sometimes thought about writing more poetry, but how she sometimes actually did it. How she’d sit at the kitchen table, a paper and pencil in front of her, and while the sunlight crept at an imperceptible pace across the room she would attempt imagination.
    Now she took the crumpled poem, one of her very first, and held it up. She read through it twice—both times silently—and then she closed her eyes, shaking her head.
    The water in the pipes continued dripping, and with her eyes still closed she thought about what her existence could have been. How if she hadn’t taken Jess out to the bar that night, if they had gone someplace else, she never would have met Conrad. And if she hadn’t gone up to him, danced with him, kissed him in the parking lot beneath that buzzing neon sign, she might not be sitting on this basement step right now. She might be a nurse as she had planned, maybe even a doctor, but no, here she was a Hunter’s wife, would always be a Hunter’s wife.
    Denise opened her eyes again, stared down at the words. She tried remembering what she was thinking back then, why she would make such a stupid, stupid mistake.
    Yes, at that point she and Conrad had been together six months, and yes, she did like him a lot, was even falling in love with him. But the truth was she hardly knew him at all. Every time she asked questions about his existence he would always change the subject. She didn’t know where he went to school, who his father was, what he did for work. The only thing Conrad did tell her was he never knew his mother, the woman having expired giving animation to him, and this was said in passing, an almost afterthought, at once forgotten.
    And when the truth did come out—about his attending Artemis, about becoming a Hunter—he said he was sorry for having lied to her, but that he loved her and didn’t want to lie to her anymore. He then even gave her the chance to break up with him, saying that he would understand, but she hadn’t, and even now she didn’t know why.
    But no, that was wrong; she did know why.
    The poem—it all came down to the poem. It had inevitably determined what could have been, what might have been, the different paths her existence would have traveled. Had she not shown Conrad her poem, she could have broken up with him with no fear of retribution. But she had worried what he might do to her then, how he might take back his promise and turn her in after all.
    Of course, she knew that he never would have turned her in. That even now, if