Free Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die by Charles Runyon

there in the grave that had once belonged to Mama, but it didn’t anymore. After that Debra would sometimes get a feeling, whenever certain things would happen, that Mama was there. I would look at Debra and she would be looking at me, and it was like when you step on a thistle, you get this sudden shot of electricity running through you. Or we’d see some kids blowing dandelion fluff and we’d look at each other and remember that Mama had told us that if you blew it all away you got your wish. Mama always did it, but she would never tell us what she wished …”
    Elizabeth turned off the tape player and strolled into her kitchen. She took a bottle of Smirnoff down from thetop cabinet and got a pitcher orange juice from the refrigerator. She mixed the drink and carried it back into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and lifted her feet onto the coffee table. She sipped the drink, her eyes fixed out of habit on the blank gray square of the tv screen, wondering why she was spending so much time on one patient. Others had worse problems, Wanda had gotten hold of a mop-handle and injured herself internally. Beatrice was accusing the hospital of stealing her two children. She’d forgotten the fire—again. And Chauncey de Pugh reported that he dreamed of cutting off her right breast.
Why the right one, Chauncey, and not the left?
    Possibly because Danny has not yet been destroyed. If
I can save only one
… but why this one? Boredom was at least a partial answer; with nothing else to do she had driven by his ward and picked up the tape. Jeff had been on vacation for two weeks and she missed his light touch, his love-play without commitment …
    Indifference?
A loaded word. Call it amnesia, he doesn’t see me when I’m not there. Like Danny and the girls who came to see him. Was it his indifference that turned them on? Possible. The things we want most are those we can’t have …
    She reached out and turned on the tape recorder.
    “… There was this game I used to play, Sigurd and his magic sword. I carved one out of wood and I used this old lamp that had a spearpoint on the end of it. I had my room across the hallway upstairs—this was after the church lady told my old man he’d have to make us stop sleeping together. We were, I dunno, about twelve. I used to go in my room and wrap this sheet over my shoulders, and put on boots, then I’d go to her room and throw open the door and charge in, like I was a viking come to rob and steal and rape and burn. She never liked the part she had to play in these. So every now and then she’d wear the spear and the cape, only it didn’t work out very well. She didn’t have the equipment for it. I just got a flash of something we used to do when we were aboutseven, eight, somewhere in there, I suddenly got the realization that we were different, you know. We didn’t know what sex was, she used to hang her ass over the manger and piss in the stall, and I could stand down below and see what was happening. I guess ever since then the toilet has been a sort of aphrodisiac for me, we grew up confusing shit with sex, don’t we? Well I guess it’s related somehow. Because our first scene was out there in the outdoor toilet behind the honeysuckle hedge. God, I always get that odor in my nose, honeysuckle and a kind of deep pungent odor of shit—not a sharp smell, not a stink if you take my meaning, but just a deep rich mouldy fragrance mixed with wood ashes, because the hired girl—or the housekeeper, whoever it happened to be—always put ashes down the hole to keep down the smell and the flies. Anyway you got it, shit, sex and honeysuckle. I was laying around the house reading books and she was, I dunno what. Anyway I hear Debra come out of her room and go down the stairs, and every footstep it’s like coming right down my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I knew what I was gonna do, I guess if we hadn’t got that load of sin laid on us a year ago when they had the church