It’s harder to get murdered than Goldie thought it would be. Based on the hundreds of true crime podcasts she has listened to, documentaries she has watched, and books she has read, if a woman is out alone after dark (or alone in a park, alone on a train, alone in the rain; the options become Seussical quickly) she’s practically obligated to get murdered. At the very least, kidnapped or assaulted or threatened in some significant way.
What else is a poor, defenseless woman to do?
She waits outside the club, the bass of the dancefloor techno rumbling almost in time with the spazzy fritz of the streetlight across the way. She picked this spot because she’d read that club kids kept turning up dead in the nearby canal. Drug-addled slasher? Sadistic opportunist? Whatever, it works for her.
Is she the bait or is she the fish? She’s lost track of the analogy. She shimmies her bodycon mini dress an inch further up her thighs. She’s wearing a thong for the first time in her twenty-six years and her fingers itch to yank it from her butt crack. Beyond uncomfortable. She blames the patriarchy for this and for just about everything else. But panty lines are supposed to be a turn-off, at least according to the issues of Teen Vogue she used to lift from Barnes & Noble. Also: What Kind of Kisser Are You? What’s Your Crop Top Personality? Can You Tell if a Guy is Into You, or if He’s Just Looking for His Next Victim?
In retrospect, that last one actually would’ve been super helpful.
She leans against the grimy brick wall and sticks out her chest while slumping one shoulder, assuming the position she thinks of as Alluring #3. When two men pass by without giving her a second look, she adopts an innocent lost expression (Fuckable Bambi). She has practiced these in the mirror until she’s nailed them.
Suicidal? Yeah, maybe. But it’s not like she wants to kill herself. Sooner or later, one of these deviant jackoffs will surely do it for her.
Six men and one potential lesbian later, Goldie calls it quits. Her body aches from all the contortions, and she’s so cold she can feel her leg hair growing back. She orders an Uber, brightening at the possibility. The Bayou Butcher selected his victims while working as a rideshare driver. She doesn’t really think she’ll be lucky enough to land a serial killer, but hope doesn’t cost extra.
While she waits, she composes headlines for her imminent death: Woman Dead of Blunt Force Trauma. Woman Fatally Shot, Body Dumped Downtown. Another Dismembered Female Corpse Found, Does Anyone Care?
The car pulls up a few minutes later. Needle jab of fear in her heart, like her future murderer has chosen intracardiac euthanasia as his weapon of choice.
The driver rolls down the window. "Mike" according to the app, but there’s no way it’s his real name. “Goldie?” he says. He’s kind of handsome, in a generic way. Like Ted Bundy in his prime.
She opts for Alluring #4, which is a toothy Julia Roberts-inspired grin. Approachable and warm, with just a hint of hooker. “You’re cuter IRL than in your driver pic,” she says. Let him think he has a chance, then snatch it away. Nothing pisses a guy off more.
Ted Bundy #2 laughs. Is it unkind, that laugh? Mocking? Hungry? She can’t tell. She reaches for the door handle.
“I’m surprised you’re going home alone,” he says. “Girl like you? Looking like that?”
Panic like an electric shock courses through her. She freezes in place, a deer in headlights. Unfuckable Bambi.
“I don’t get paid by the minute, sweetheart,” he says.
This is it.
She forces her fingers to move, to grasp the handle, pull it open, and resigns herself to her fate. When she collapses into the backseat, it isn’t fear she feels.
It’s relief.
Goldie has lived in heart-pounding, stomach-clenching fear for the past decade, but all her fears are totally reasonable. It’s obvious that the country is about to descend into complete anarchy, that things are just one blink away from the Purge, or——worse——a tradwife-focused pseudo-fascist Supreme Court-mandated theocracy. And she just can’t pull off tradwife; she doesn’t have the ankles for those dowdy floral dresses. Which is just one of the reasons she never married. Another is that she was afraid her husband might turn out to be the kind of guy who kept a secret family chained in the basement or filmed torture porn in a rented cabin on the weekend. Normal fears.
She’s been out every night for the past week, seeking increasingly dangerous scenarios, getting more desperate the closer she gets to the anniversary. Not a single person has tried to knife her yet. What is she doing wrong? She went to a club where she left her drink unattended, practically begging for someone to roofie her like that fucker in Memphis did before he gutted that girl; no one did. She’d retraced that missing cheerleader’s footsteps in the seediest part of town and bought some suspicious-looking cocaine from a guy in an alleyway, but he’d watched her go without even one sexually depraved comment. Was she not dressed slutty enough?
She had even mimicked that dead young mother in Asheville and gone jogging before dawn without her pepper spray, her knife, without a single reflective garment, and the only man she passed gave her a jaunty thumbs up. What the hell?
She isn’t as young as she used to be, but in her experience, a murderer didn’t ask for ID before killing a person. Besides, she’s always been careful to apply sunscreen.
Why isn’t anyone interested in killing her?
Goldie lives and other women die. Eleven over the past week, according to CNN.
As Ted Bundy #2 drives, Goldie takes a deep breath, battling her instincts. Just the idea of being in a confined space with a strange man is usually enough to give her hormonal sweats, but she feels oddly calm now, knowing that the end is so near.
She catches Ted Bundy #2’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She can’t see his mouth, but she can tell he’s smiling by the way his eyes crinkle. A sinister smile, no doubt. He’s probably picturing her headless corpse in a cornfield. Never mind that there aren’t any cornfields within a hundred miles of here.
“Goldie,” he says.
It shocks her, the sound of her name on his tongue. The intimacy of it. And now she’s picturing his tongue, pink and plush, and the way it moves, could move, as it licks its way down her body. Goosebumps prick her arms and dread——or is it desire?——curls her belly.
“You must be cold,” he says.
“Yes,” she says. “No. I was before, you know, outside. Because of the skirt and… now I’m okay. Thanks.” Why is she babbling like Nervous Virgin on Prom Night? This isn’t one of her personas.
His eyes shift in the mirror. Move down her bare legs. Her skin feels too soft and his eyes mold her body like it’s clay. She can practically feel his thumbprints in her flesh.
“Goldie,” he says again. “What an interesting name.”
Any minute now, he’ll take the wrong turn. He’ll pull off the road by a darkened overpass. He’ll leap upon her like a ravening wolf. He’ll flay her alive. Death roll her like an alligator. She’ll be a rag doll, a broken and bloody thing, finally getting what she desires.
She closes her eyes. Woman Strangled, No Suspects. Woman Found Filleted Like a Fish, See Photos on Page 7.
The car slows. Stops.
Ted Bundy #2 turns to look at her. “Should I take off my pants?” he says.
Goldie is afraid all the time. She’s been afraid since she was a teenager. In the years since, she pushed all her friends and family away, attended college online, got a job as a remote worker, a socially acceptable shut-in, obsessed with stories of dead women, because of her deepest, darkest secret.
Which is this:
She was sixteen when she should have been murdered.
But she got away.
And her killer killed another girl instead.
She was supposed to be a cautionary tale. A headline. Local Teen Found Dead of Multiple Stab Wounds.
She’s been obsessed with death ever since. She’s spent the past decade afraid it’ll happen again. Back then, she was too young, too dumb to realize that the guy with the crew cut and the dark sunglasses outside McKinley Mall wasn’t flirting with her. She was flattered by the attention, was halfway to following the stranger into the woods that skirted the parking lot when her mother pulled up in their shameful Taurus with its peeling paint and the huge dent in the back bumper. The one that screamed they were poor. Her mother honked the horn long and loud, rolled down the window to shout for her daughter. Goldie’s skin aflame with the embarrassment that only a sixteen-year-old girl was capable of feeling. She’d left the stranger. Climbed into the Taurus. And refused to speak to her mother for an entire week.
She’s been afraid, all this time, that she’ll miss the signs again. That this time, she’ll be the victim.But last week, on her 26th birthday, she received exactly no calls, no texts, no Facebook posts. Not even a coupon for a free coffee from Starbucks or an e-card from her dentist. In her mania to keep herself safe, she made herself an island. Her fear has twisted into a new shape: by living this way for this long, she’s ceased to matter to anyone but herself.Now the only way left for her to show she ever lived is to die.
The silence in the car is deafening. Literally, Goldie can no longer hear anything above the frantic white noise her mind has conjured. Take off his pants?
Ted Bundy #2 is saying something to her, Goldie can see his lips moving, a flash of that tongue——that tongue——but she can’t hear a word. Is it permanent, this deafness? Does it matter?
“What?” she says.
Kidding, he mouths. Are you okay?
Okay? Why does he care? This Man. This Killer of Women. This Low Budget Monster. It’s all a joke, isn’t it? She scrabbles in her purse for her pepper spray, but is that a reflex? Or does she actually want to live now that death has come for her again? It doesn’t matter, she left it at home, what an idiot, what a fool for putting herself in danger again and again, what a lucky girl, to get exactly what she deserves. She leans back, braces herself.
“Just make it quick,” she says.
“Hey, buy a guy a drink first.” Ted Bundy #2 says. His eyes crinkle. Is he flirting with her?
“Just fucking do it already,” Goldie says, waiting for the moment when the gun goes off or the knife slashes through the air or the rope comes twisting around her neck. “Do it do it do it DO IT!” Her voice is a shriek by the end.
“Jesus Christ!” he says. “Get out of my car!”
Goldie unclenches her hands. “What?”
“Crazy bitch,” he says.
Goldie realizes they’re parked in front of her apartment complex. The lights blaze from every window of her unit. She always leaves them on, doesn’t want an intruder to think that the place is empty, that the four locks on the door might be worth testing.
“You’re not gonna hurt me?” she says. She knows better than to ask this, and yet, she does.
His expression is truly mystified. She sees it now. He has a nice face. He might be a little bit of a creep, sure, but still. How many nice faces has she missed over the past decade?
“Why the fuck would I hurt you?” he says.
She can think of a million reasons: for cash, for sport, misplaced rage, because someone she looks like once rejected him, because he’s sex-crazed, because he’s on drugs, because because because. It all boils down to the same thing, though.
“Because you can,” she says.
His expression sours, twists into the mask of condescension she’s always imagined on the face of the man that murders her. “Something seriously wrong with you,” he says. “Someone should teach you a lesson.”
She waits patiently, a good pupil.
He looks away.
Pathetic. No backbone.
“Just fucking go,” he says. “Please.”
Please? The audacity. The fucking outrage. How dare he bring her to this edge and not take her all the way. Go without getting what she needs? What she’s entitled to? Not a chance, buddy. She knows his type. He wants what every man wants, and that’s whatever he can take from her.
She draws the knife from her boot, her trusty Glock Fixed Field Knife #3, the one she keeps on her always, even on nights like this, when she’s determined to die.
“Lady?” he says. “The fuck?”
These men, they’re all the same.
He messes with his seatbelt, but it’s apparently stuck.
Lucky her.
“Don’t——” but that’s all he’s able to get out before she strikes.
Quick as an asp, she digs the knife into his shoulder, piercing through flesh and tendon, scraping bone. He screams, and at the first the sound hurts her ears, but then it becomes soothing. Harmonic. A nice bass to round out the altos and sopranos.
Local Man Found Stabbed. Local Woman Survives.
She leaves him there, screaming and bleeding. To death? Not her problem. She uses her keycard to enter her building’s main foyer. Stops by her mailbox. Then takes the elevator up to her apartment, where she lets herself in and doesn’t bother to lock the door behind her.
Kerri Brady Long grew up in Buffalo, New York, and is a product of the Buffalo Bills’ back-to-back (to-back-to-back) Super Bowl losses, which taught her an early appreciation for the value of the underdog story. Her fiction has appeared in The Coachella Review, Black Fork Review, Southland Alibi, Kelp Journal and LitAngels. She was a staff writer on Amazon’s Goliath, one-time employee of the month at Dodger Stadium, and to this day nurses a vendetta against Liz Sweeney for intentionally murdering her sea monkeys in 2001.
