(My site was down last night due to a server error, so two posts today!)

        They thought that she didn’t know but she had seen it in their eyes long before they had acknowledged it. She could have predicted the whole tawdry thing. The pretense at trying to avoid each other, the attempts not to touch, the plan to keep it platonic, the ‘accidental’ progression, the one thing leading to another. It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. Sad and painful.

It was painful for her anyway, but she was pretty sure that she was only a minor player in the drama that they were living. She was the wife who didn’t understand, or perhaps she was cast as a woman too involved with her children, or maybe one who had ‘let herself go’. She recognized that they had to choose to see her that way so they could live with themselves. If she were the misunderstood one then their story wouldn’t work, they would be the bad ones. If she was the problem then Zach’s behaviour made sense, no one would fault him for it. A man whose wife doesn’t understand him must naturally seek comfort elsewhere. And if that comfort is to be found with her good friend, the person she had confided in when she first felt the tendrils of Zach’s heart shrink away from hers, then who could blame him. It was logical that he would turn to someone already close to him. There was no version of this in which she was not the problem, in which their greed and selfishness was the issue. There was no alternate scenario in which Zach was behaving immaturely and got pissed off when he was called out on it. That version didn’t play out in their world.

She assumed she was supposed to sit by and let the whole thing run its course, she was supposed to just carry on as if she didn’t know and then, when he tearfully confessed after it had ended, she was supposed to forgive and forget. She imagined that she might be able to forgive, but she would never, ever forget, and that is what would chew at her from the inside. There was no way she would be able to live like that, carrying on blissfully as if nothing had every gone wrong. As if she had never been wronged.

That’s why she had planned this dinner. They thought that it was another example of her willful ignorance of their behaviour, but it was anything but.

She set the table with flowers, took out the good china and dressed in his favourite outfit. She had made her specialty, fresh bread, a green salad, slow cooked chili – extra hot, and a lemon meringue pie. She had painted in the inside of each dish, plate and cup with a solution made with rat poison. She would sit them both down, then suddenly remember an urgent errand in town before rushing off in the car that he and Ginny had arrived in. Then, with her gone, they would share their last lovers’ meal.

Hathor didn’t understand why she couldn’t attract men the way she used to.

There was a time, only a few short years ago, when she could attract any man of any age with just a glance, she was positively hypnotic. Even infant boys would stare and reach out towards her. She could command attention from older gents chatting in the park, from teenaged boys loitering outside of schools, from fathers chasing toddlers through the supermarket. She was a living example of a pin-up girl, full of va-voom and intoxicating charm, with curves in all the places that a man dreamed of putting his hands.

That time was past though. She wasn’t sure why or how it happened. And she couldn’t even pinpoint when. She still had the charm and the va-voom, she was still intoxicating – or at least that’s what the mirror told her. Sure, her university classes (even timeless goddesses could get bored, you know) told her she wasn’t supposed to need a man’s approval to make her way in the world. Her life coach told her that she needed to keep the focus on things she could control. Her hairdresser, manicurist and her massage therapist all told her that she was a great looking woman and that the problem was just that men were ridiculous.

She couldn’t argue with any of it. She didn’t really need approval – but she did like it. She did want to focus on the things she could control – even men weren’t among the things she could control any more. And her beauty team were totally right -men were ridiculous.

Ridiculous didn’t begin to cover it, really. The men would all be much happier if they followed her around like ducklings the way they used to. What could possibly be bad about feeling like they were in love with her and that they were the most important creatures on earth. Sure, if you stopped to think about it, every man couldn’t be the most important creature on earth, that didn’t make sense, but she used to make them feel as if each of them were. It didn’t make sense that that had lost its appeal.

She looked the same, she acted the same, she smelled the same, she smiled the same. The problem had to be the men. It was enough to make her wish that she hadn’t outlived all the people of her homeland. A goddess with no worshipers was hardly a goddess at all, she might as well be an ordinary woman – at least then she could have had an ordinary husband and children.

Hathor sighed and swung her legs out of the car. Her red stilettos had barely touched the pavement when she heard a long, low whistle from the car behind. She stood up and smoothed her skirt, preening a little before she turned to see her admirer. The woman sitting behind the wheel of the lipstick-red Miata convertible had her sunglasses on top of her head, and was grinning in a way Hathor hadn’t seen in a while.

This was something she hadn’t considered. Perhaps all was not lost.

(I’m sleepy today and I’m reluctant to write, so I decided to just pick something silly to start with. Potatoes are silly, yes?)

Day 1 – I put the potato on his doorstep as I was instructed. A single potato, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand. I’m not sure why I was supposed to put it there, right in the middle of the step, exactly in the center of the doormat, but I was told it was important so I did it. I slouched in the front seat of my car across the street and watched him come out to grab the paper out of the mailbox and go back in. I thought he hadn’t noticed the potato but as soon as the door closed, it opened again and he stuck his head out and slowly looked down. He shook his head as if trying to clear his vision. The potato didn’t disappear, so he reached down, picked it up and slid it into the pocket of his bathrobe.

Day 2 – Carrots. That was my next mission. I laid them in the center of his mat and strolled away. I went all the way to the end of his street, turned around and walked back past his house just as he was coming out for the paper again. He looked right at the mat this time, sighed, and then picked up the vegetables.

Day 3 – Turnip and Onions. They were very roll-y so it was hard to keep them parked dead-center, but eventually I stood the turnip on its flat top and braced the onion against it. I didn’t want him to notice me so I didn’t stick around to watch him retrieve them.

Day 4 – Beef. I was concerned about the safety of putting meat out on someone’s step to await discovery, so I put the beef in ice in a pot – even though that wasn’t included in my instructions. I had no need to worry though, he was quick to come out to discover it. Too quick really, I was only part of the way down his driveway. I tried to look nonchalant, but he didn’t buy it.

‘Hey!’ His shout made me stand still. ‘Tell Mom that I’m not stewing, these things take time. Ally only left two weeks ago.’

I nodded and kept walking. I wasn’t sure if Marion would be happy that her elaborate message had been received or if she’d be annoyed that I’d been caught. Either way, she was doing her own dirty work next time – even if she was away on vacation.

        It was raining when she left, but since the cake was in a plastic cake box, she wasn’t worried. Most fifteen-year-old girls would have been a bit more worried about getting their hair wet or something, but that didn’t occur to her. That’s why I knew the mission wasn’t going to be a success. I had to let her go, despite that, because some things you just have to learn on your own and getting rejected by your crush is one of those things. It wouldn’t have mattered what I said, she would have seen me as the obstacle instead of him. So I had to watch her walk away in the rain, knowing it wasn’t going to end well. I had to just let it happen.

It was his birthday. She had already wished him Happy Birthday at school, she had sent him a card, and written something gushy on facebook. He hadn’t responded, so she decided that the only course of action was to start baking. It was a beautiful cake, chocolate with creamy vanilla icing, sprinkled with shaved chocolate. If he had been interested, the cake would have clinched the deal. He wasn’t though, nothing he had ever said or done should have given her any encouragement, but in that way of fifteen-year-old girls, she saw none of it. Her heart continued to beat his name.

He had moved in on the street next to ours at the end of the summer and took up all the available space in her world. Books, video games, swimming and episodes of Adventure Time fell by the wayside as her interests narrowed to where Scott was going to be next and whether he would finally notice her if she went there too. Even though I knew these types of all-consuming crushes were coming, and I remembered them myself, I had been hoping to avoid them for another while. I knew better than to fight her on it though, it was better to let a crush fall apart on its own. Ideally, she would have gotten disillusioned by some minor thing and he would have changed from prince to toad without her embarrassing herself, but that’s not the way this one was playing out.

I knew it would take her about five minutes to get to his place, and another five to get home. If I added in a few wrenching minutes in the middle for the heartbreak, I could expect her back in less than fifteen. And I suspected she would look a lot less than fifteen. I stood guard at the kitchen window for her return.

It took twelve and a half minutes. As she came back up the walkway to our house, her upper body heaved forward with each sob, the rain soaked her hair into flat ribbons on either side of her head, and she kept tripping in her grief. The cake box was still in her hands but it was tilted forward, the icing smeared against the rounded edge inside. She stood just inside the front door drawing every ounce of my sympathy, I stood by the steps leading upstairs and tried to think of the right thing to say.

Being the Mom of a teenager means walking the edge between what once worked and what you know they must learn for themselves, but in this case I stepped fully back in time. I took the cake from her and laid it on the landing, I gathered her into my arms and sat solidly on the steps, my biggest girl on my lap.

“Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry for how much this hurts.”

I kissed the top of her head and rocked her while she sobbed.

(This matches neither the theme nor the idea of Will Shetterly’s Splatter (one of the creepiest stories I have ever read) but for some reason, I thought of that story earlier and the idea for this story popped into my brain right after.)

Some of the girls say that you gotta dig the hole beforehand but I find that just a bit too impersonal. Sure, it’s a challenge to go breaking up the ground in an untested location, but it’s worth it to bury them nearby, you know? Not so much with the body dragging. I hate the body dragging. One guy, I actually kept alive until he was right where I wanted to bury him and then I just had to roll him into the hole I dug. That one was pretty cool. He made a lot of noise though, there at the end. I didn’t enjoy that.

I like to dig a hole that matches the size of the guy. Depends on what they’re like though, some of them I jam into the space, others have lots of room around them. Some of them are buried deep, some are pretty shallow. That matches the guy too, it’s not just dependent on how tired I am. Sometimes I start digging and then come back after if I’m too tired, but mostly I just tough it out.

They never tough it out, they all end up begging. It’s pathetic really. You’d think they’d have more guts. They’re all talk though, at least when I find them in the bars. They’re all full of big man talk, like modern day cavemen but bragging about the deals they’ve struck or their running time instead of the creatures they hunted. They zero in and try to impress me – buying into my vulnerable little woman act. I’ve never had one of my targets back away from me, or turn me down, they are so caught up in their own image that they forget to keep themselves safe.

Maybe if they were a little more aware of the world around them, and especially the women in it, they would still be walking around today. Instead though, I get the bank transfer, and they get covered in dirt.