Based on the song "Life on Mars" by David Bowie...
Someone is killing girls in the little town of Nowhere, South Dakota and they all look like Fiona Mars.
Fiona has a secret she can't quite remember. A secret her father, the Sheriff, is trying hard...
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Busy Hutch was the first girl to die. And it was my fault, though no one knew and neither did I. Time stuck to itself sometimes and I couldn't pick apart one day from another because I chewed my nails. I don't remember hitting her with my car. I don't even remember it being on a Saturday. My weeks went Monday, Monday, Monday. Or Thursday, Thursday, Thursday depending on which square I glanced at on the calendar. Whatever was printed on the top, clogged my head and filled me passed the line.
Busy died instantly. Neck broken. I heard that posthumously. My car died slowly, degrading piece by piece, hidden in an impound lot with the VIN number scratched off.
Cops make good criminals. My dad, Sheriff of Nowhere, is top-notch with a paint scraper. His second, Deputy James Bithell—now there's a man who'd committed a crime. He looked at everything like he might get off immolating it. His inner anger made mine fidget; I'd have fucked him in his cruiser had he asked, just to see if we'd combust mid-action.
Busy was my fault.
The other girls were not.
One night, in the beginning, my dad came home with a file. It was late. I couldn't sleep. Busy was in my dreams again; she had horns and a white tail that flashed in my headlights.
I waited for the shower head to explode. I waited till I was alone, and I crept down the stairs.
Fried eggs smelled like stank vag. The lights were off in the kitchen. I snooped, pushing papers around on the plastic table cloth, bending down to read labels in the moonlight from the window above the sink. I gathered what I could and stole it away to a safe space.
Cross-legged in my ankle socks and an oversized tee shirt, I spread the autopsy photos on the cream carpet. My desk lamp cut around me. My shadow reached for a corner, wanting to be held. Dad had been absent. More absent than was normal without Mom. I knew about Anna from the newspapers crammed inside the racks on the street corners, pressing their noses to the box windows, hoping to be freed by a quarter. She was missing. Waitressed until seven o'clock and vanished by eight. What I snuck into my bedroom told a different story.
An everyday-kitten, soft and easy to handle. Her short dark hair loved her ears, slicked back behind them, still damp from her invasive scrub. Her skin was bright white like Busy's in my dream, made brighter by the gunmetal morgue tray.
Anna was the second girl to die, they said.
But really she was the first.
Counting Busy, there were six by the end. But I didn't count Busy. She wasn't the first, not how they thought, so really, there were only five.
"I look like them," I said, sitting in the front seat of a vehicle that didn't know my body yet and couldn't hold me right.
"Like who?" asked Lucky. He was driving.
"The dead girls."
"Well shit."
I'd only just met him, but I figured that meant he agreed.
