KILLER by PHOEBE BRIDGERS. Story by Molly Jones.

 

Easter,  2023. Brisbane, Australia.

It’s Wednesday Chapel. I cannot bear to sit in the same room as him, so I listen from outside. My chaplain talks about culture and philosophy and how God loves us – we are all perfect. But I know that he is sitting in a pew at the front, and it doesn’t make any sense because he took my skin.  The world rolls like a dice and I am watching the numbers add up all wrong.

Say to myself, No, that’s not right. This isn’t what was supposed to happen. 

Out loud, I say, I want to go home.

I have to walk back through the library to collect my things. I don’t look to see who follows me out, I only chew on my cheeks and wait to tell them what I’m feeling. The time never comes, and nobody ever asks.

I call for my dad to come pick me up. I don’t remember the car ride home.

Here’s what I do remember:

I go to the police station in April. It’s Easter Sunday. I drive myself there with my mum in the passenger seat. I ate a chocolate egg for breakfast and wear long sleeves. I sit in the waiting room reading the plaques on the walls. An officer comes to greet me. She asks me what happened.

There’s nothing she can do. My witness is the cloudless sky, and I know he’ll lie about it. He never even said sorry. He never even told me why.

Maybe you’re just not ready for a relationship yet. Breathe deep, baby. It’ll all work out soon. Picking at the blood drying underneath my fingernails, I remember nothing was ever promised or belonged to me anyway. This is the story I get. Salt the earth behind me.

Back at school, I know what’s coming, and I know there will be no easy way to hear it. No slice of lime, no lemonade.

He talks about you on the internet. We believe him. We know you wouldn’t let him have what he wanted. We know he took it anyway. You opened your big mouth. You took this too far. 

No sugared rim, no tropical juice.

What do you want me to do about it? They’re defending their friend. It’s freedom of speech. It happened for a reason. 

No chaser for the burn.

I get home. I wait by the window, knuckles cracked and teeth grit, for someone to come by and tell me it didn’t happen for a reason, and God’s not real, and nothing really matters at the end of it all.

No one is coming, but I’m disease-ridden so I don’t believe it. Let it all pan out poetically. Once the ivy that’s strangled my house makes its way up my legs, say to myself, it didn’t happen for a reason; God’s not real, but everything matters all the same.

Rain brings rot to the framing, and I begin to cry; the world is still so beautiful. But there’s a big, gaping hole in the rear letting the outside in; he got in and took me out of it. I’m stuck here, by the window, watching the lives being lived beyond it. Half of them would pretend to not know me, if they only looked up. Bridger’s melancholic familiarity perpetually droning in the background; I must’ve played the song a thousand times over. I was a Killer before I knew my spree had begun.

The glass against my forehead leaves a mark. His life stretches out before him in all directions at once, while my limbs are severed by the shrapnel. Like a newborn lamb snapping its neck in the Northfield; a fox might survive the winter, but at what cost?

I can watch bitterly, clawing my nails into the earth and wailing to the sky, but the fox’s teeth stay buried in its shoulder, and the time on my watch won’t change. I live for the replay. I drag the lamb forward like deadweight, and my spine cracks under the pressure. I was assaulted at the age of 16 and it wasn’t fair by any means.

I don’t want to be buried, I told my dad when I was nine, on the way to swimming lessons. I want to be turned to an ash and shot up into space. I heard my older sister say the same thing once, so it must be the best way. She also taught me not to believe in heaven, but I have nowhere left to go.

 
 

Stereo Story #771

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