Nobody knows where he is.
And neither does he at the moment.
“What do you mean, we should always be together?” he manages to get out, before the wooziness overtakes him.
She doesn’t answer him. She’s everywhere at once, in front of him, behind him, inside of him. There’s a buzzing in his ears, and his head is throbbing like the polar vortex has moved from the outside and is now bouncing around inside of his head. The only constant is the bitter taste of her blood in his mouth.
“What have you done to me?” he gasps, as his legs fall beneath him.
She’s in front of him now, and he’s on the floor. Is it a floor? It’s writhing beneath him like an angry sea. He can’t read her. Is she angry? Or is her expression one of bemusement? He can’t tell.
“Always,” she whispers. She leans over towards him. She’s close enough to him that she can smell the sweat on his skin. And then the room goes dark.
He sits up, rubs his eyes, and finds that his hands are tied up. The floor is still moving, but with every breath, it feels a bit slower.
“You’re not as dumb as you look,” she says. “Biting me, that was smart. How did you know?”
He didn’t know. At least, not at first. But the strangeness of her smell when close, combined with the little things, her not drinking the wine, her not coming to pick up the storage unit until dark, it had all made sense when she’d started kissing him, for him to bite her mouth to prevent her from biting him. Sort of. But people like her don’t exist in real life. Just in movies. Maybe that’s what’s happening. He’s in a movie. Someone is going to pop out from under the bed and yell “cut!” and then everything will go back to normal. She’ll laugh and says she’s really a housewife from Omaha with three kids. A wannabe actress who agreed to participate in this farce. That she wasn’t really a…well, what is she really?
“So what now? Are you going to kill me? Like you did your fiancé?” He hopes he sounds as confident as he felt earlier, when she was just a strange blonde he was planning on banging in a hotel room, and that she doesn’t detect the slight bit of fear in his voice.
“I have no need to kill you, as long as you give me what I want,” she says. She taps her nails against the bed impatiently. He hadn’t noticed before, but they’re painted black too. Like her dress. Like her mood. “The talitha, of course.”
“What?” he asks, bewilderedly. “What’s taltha?”
“Tal-eee-tha,” she says, slowly and emphatically drawing out the syllable he’d missed.
“What’s talitha then?” he asks.
“It’s what I need. And you have it,” she says. “Somewhere in that mess of a storage unit.”
He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Is that the name she has given for the body? Something else?
She stares at him, her brow furrowing as she’s trying to sum him up. “So you don’t even know what it is,” she says quietly, almost as if she’s trying to convince herself. She’s still looking at him though, trying to determine whether he’s telling the truth.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady,” he says. The ropes are beginning to hurt. She’s tied his wrists pretty tight. Maybe she’s a pro at this. A black widow burglar. A burglar dominatrix. A nonhuman, black widow, dominatrix burglar.
“I’m not a lady, but then, I suppose you know that by now.” She smirks. It’s not becoming on her. “Since you don’t know, I suppose there’s no reason to tell you now, is there,” she says. “So, I’ll just take the key, I’ll get what I need, and I’ll be on my way.”
