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.

    Your mind plays tricks on you, but not as often as you’d think. A lot of the time you are seeing what you think you’re seeing but your mind sorts it so it can make sense of it. It doesn’t want you to feel distressed or upset, it just wants you to process the details and move on. Your conscious mind is all about moving on, about getting to the next thing. If we didn’t have our unconscious minds, I think we’d be like mental sharks, just swimming swimming, swimming until we die. But that misshapen lump hangs out in the back of our brain somewhere, coughing up forgotten details, registering facts, filing things away and we don’t even know it is happening.

I guess that’s why Emilia seemed so familiar when I first registered her presence. The fact was that I had been seeing her for months out of the corner of my eye or reflected in the glass but I hadn’t really accepted that she was there so I just glossed over her. My conscious mind didn’t want to accept that there was a ghost in my apartment, so it just overwrote her details. My unconscious mind was on the task though. Once I admitted that she did actually exist, that a decidedly modern looking ghost woman in jeans and a Buffy t-shirt, barefoot, with a bandanna pushed down over her forehead, was wandering around my place all hours of the day and night, my subconscious coughed up all the other times I had seen her. It created a context, a pattern of sightings that suddenly gave meaning to a lot of weird noises I had heard and to the way that my things kept showing up in unexpected places.

My subconscious can’t explain, however, why I know that the ghost’s name is Emilia, and that she died on the sidewalk in front of my place one night when she heard a loud bang and ran outside in her bare feet. I have no idea how I know that, but I do. I don’t know exactly how she died though, but I know it couldn’t have been good. A good death probably doesn’t leave a ghost. Or at least that’s my suspicion. I’m also in the dark about what she’s doing here. She hasn’t actually tried to speak to me or anything like that. She just seems to be hanging around, sitting on the end of my couch, looking out the window, strolling up and down the hall like she’s talking on the phone – waving her arm around like she is illustrating a point to someone on the other end of the line.

You’d think I’d be creeped out, but I’m totally not. She’s kind of a comfort really, kind of like an incredibly unintrusive roommate, but a roommate that has made me wary of strange noises outside. I don’t wear Buffy t-shirts or jeans, and I don’t own a bandanna but you still won’t catch me investigating outside after dark.

I’m a patient woman, you’ve gotta understand that. I don’t care if you’re late for dinner, I don’t care if you don’t pick up your socks, I don’t care if you keep forgetting to call me. I’ll just call you if I need you. But see, everyone has their limits, right? You can’t just let everything slide, that just doesn’t make any sense. That’s no way to live, you end up taking crap from everyone that way and I’ve got a crap limit. And last night, Gerard hit that limit.

We’ve been together almost three years now, and I’ve been picking up his socks and waiting while he finished phone calls so we could go to dinner. I didn’t care when he got my birthday mixed up with his ex-wife’s birthday – even though they are two months apart. I didn’t even do that passive aggressive thing where you pretend it doesn’t matter while you seethe. I just called him out on it, told him that he mixed my day up with Serena’s and so we were going to be going out to the movies on Saturday and here was a list of suggested birthday gifts. I’m straightforward, there are no games. I’m not playing around. I’m a grown up woman not some teenaged girl in a sit-com. I gotta mention the sit-com part because I don’t think any real teenaged girl is so wrapped in boys as the shows pretend they are and they are definitely not as over the top dramatic either. Anyway, so my point is, that most of the stuff that will bug people don’t even faze me. I’m not worried about them.

I won’t stand for being disrespected though. I’m having none of that. You can’t just toss me aside, or pretend that I’m not important. I know exactly how important I am, thank-you-very-much. And that’s why I was so put out last night. Gerard was talking to some ladies at a fancy party we were at for his work. We looked great, me in a cocktail dress and him in a suit so fancy it was almost a tuxedo and he’s talking about dancing. About how he loves to dance. It’s his favourite. And this a man who has refused to dance with me at weddings for the past three years. I’m a good dancer too, everyone wants to dance with me. Everyone except him.

But there he is going on and on about how much dancing is an important part of his life and how he wanted to be a dancer when he was a kid but it was impractical so he went into accounting instead. Then there was the big line, the one that snapped everything in two. That’s when he said that dancing was his first love.

Imagine. Not only is he some sort of secret dancer, so secret that his girlfriend doesn’t know about it, but dancing is his first LOVE? I am a patient woman but I cannot put up with that. He didn’t even make a joke about having other loves, it just him and dancing.

I walked out. It was the only thing to do.

I hope him and dancing are very happy together.

(15m writing, no editing (busy day!))

The italics in last line of this story were today’s Story a Day prompt. I like where this story is going, I’ll definitely come back to develop this one.

The gun was a last resort, of course. Everyone knows that. You don’t break out a weapon first thing, you start with words, or maybe even a dirty look.

In our case it had started with a note, which is technically words, but it’s a shitty way to deal with a roommate. Her first note said that I had better stop drinking her milk ‘or else’.

‘Or else?’ who says that in real life? Not grown-up human beings I tell you that. Of course, grown-up human beings would be smart enough to realize that their lactose intolerant roommates are the least likely culprit for drinking the milk and would instead ask their greasy, human flotsam of a boyfriend if he had drunk the milk. She didn’t think of that of course, and he probably liked the entertainment of stirring up drama.

So, yeah, that’s where it started, with some missing milk. It shouldn’t have gone on beyond that, but things unfolded in the way that things tend to do, and nothing got resolved about the milk. The whole situation soured after that. My food started disappearing out of the fridge, my laundry ended up with stains, one of my sneakers went missing, those were the relatively minor things. I could have maybe waited her out if that was as far as it went but I had vastly underestimated the nature of her cruelty and I had no idea that such a small thing could set someone off so throughly. There is no roommate test that could have predicted the trajectory.

I think my relative calmness about the small indignities threw her for a loop, she felt some sort of need to get me as riled up as she was. Her next campaign was subtle, I’ll give her that. There might have been a reasonable explanation for the basket at the top of the stairs that I tripped over. And the shard of glass might have gotten into the tub by accident – say if she had broken a water glass in the bathroom and the shard had gone flying.

There was no reasonable explanation, however, for the knife that I found buried to the hilt in my pillow or the hypodermic needle jammed point-outwards between the seats of my car. I called the police but they didn’t seem to think that they would be able to prove anything. My landlord didn’t even answer the phone.

If I had anywhere else to go, I would have left, but I didn’t, so I stayed.

I bought a gun.

And then I waited.

When I heard her and the greaseball come in, I clicked off the safety, swearing that if she showed her face here today, my room would be the last one she ever entered.

(15m writing, 2-3 editing)