Serpent Heart [PUBLISHED]

ii. humour

Catherine can say that blood is, perhaps, her least favorite part of murder.

That's something they say, something about poison being the choice of weapon for women, that firearms and knives and blood are hallmarks of masculine violence. Catherine hates the sound of gunfire and thinks shooting a man is perhaps both the fastest way to kill and the fastest way to be caught. Guns and gun powder leave traces, presence, registration and serial numbers, and she once heard a lab tech brag about lifting a partial print from a spent slug buried in a man's sternum. Sheer luck it wasn't destroyed. Sheer luck brought the perpetrator in.

A knife is in many ways better and worse: better in its anonymity, in its banal traces, worse in its closeness, in its intimacy. The penetration of metal through flesh, breath mingling, eyes meeting, is the most intimate act two strangers can enact with one another. No sweaty tumble in the sheets can compare, though Catherine can admit her revulsion of all the blood.

When she sees it on her hands, she's forcibly reminded of the antiquated studies of humours. Blood is the humour of passion, of lust, a symbol of the unsound mind and the loss of inhibition. The mere sight of it is said to have sent men and women into a frenzy. Catherine thinks about Shakespeare, about Lady Macbeth, about a madwoman walking the night and furiously scrubbing her hands, unable to wash the blood from her palms and fingers. Blood, that symbol of guilt and impassioned foolery.

Catherine doesn't feel much of anything when she washes her red hands and the water runs pink around the drain. Maybe there's a sense annoyance at the gummy substance clinging to grooves of her skin, somebody else's lifeblood filling those lines of fortune carved across her palms. She doesn't smile, doesn't panic. She lathers an astringent soap until her skin is pale, pink, and unblemished once more.

The ghost of her newest victim always stands behind her when Catherine looks into the mirror above the sink. A ghost, but not in truth—not a haunting soul, but rather a lingering impression, a remnant stitched together in memory, the worst pieces of the dead like fingertips in her mind that clamp down and bruise. It is the shadow of a person, featureless, nebulous, a thousand stars spangled where the void pretends to be flesh and the cosmos meet in a spinning dance of color, of nothingness. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

She stares and never gives apologies because apologizing would mean nothing, would only negate the necessity of their death. The dead cannot be revived with a simple sorry. Better for the end to be certain. Better for the end to be desired.

Catherine stares into the nothingness assuming a human shape and does not apologize. She washes her hands.

x X x

Next to her, the ghost leans a hip on the desk's edge. Words come despite the lack of a mouth.

Do you think yourself clever enough to evade the FBI?

Catherine's eyes glance from her computer to the black shape, narrowing, but she doesn't respond. She's not mad. Not truly. Not yet.

Sightless eyes watch her, constellations roving across its adopted form as the imagined creature brushes its fingertips across her brow, over her eyes. You knew the FBI would be called in if you weren't careful. You weren't careful. Overzealous, overzealous.

She continues answering her emails. A number of the missives come from the detectives too overworked to look up menial information, such as the weather and traffic patterns and addresses, references for information, or frivolous requests for her to send flowers to their aggravated wives. Catherine thinks she's bought a bouquet for every wife on the force at some point.