So instead of executing me, they blindfold me, tie my hands behind my back, and drive me miles outside of town. There they leave me to my fate. To prove they aren’t entirely heartless, that they’re Christians after all and better than me, they shove eight dollars into my dirty palm. “Good luck, baby!” I hear one of them yell, laughing, as they drive rattling off in the pick-up.
Naturally, it immediately begins to rain. I stumble around aimlessly in the mud for a while. The soaked blindfold slips down. The binding on my wrists loosens. Eventually I come upon a farmer who has a thing for half-bound barefoot girls with no future. He takes me in. He warms me by his fire. He fucks me silly.
Sometimes at the very height of intimacy, he puts his big calloused hands on my throat. I don’t even flinch. “Go ahead and kill me if you like,” I say. “I don’t even give a fucking damn!” I mean it, too. If you don’t mean it, the spell won’t work. He howls like a wild beast and comes inside me, shouting obscenities like a French poet. Then he covers me with kisses as if he’s hiding a crime under white roses.
One day, I’m boiling peas and it hits me, “Wow, I really am in love.” No one could be more surprised than I am. Meanwhile, he acts so nonchalant, self-satisfied, as if he planned it all along.
—
Meeah Williams’s work has appeared in Otoliths, Phantom Drift, Uut, The Conium Review, The Ginger Collect, Anti-Heroin Chic and lots of other places, more places than you’d expect for someone seemingly uninterested in communicating with the world outside herself as she so often appears to be. She lives in Seattle and tweets from @pussy_nagasaki.
