“Things just didn’t work out, and that was nobody’s fault.

None but his.

Ollie wrinkled her nose and brow, deeming my PG answer entirely unsuitable. She was the kind of eight year old who still split apart her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and consumed the sides separately–the sort who would want to know exactly how I killed her father down to the second, so that she could be prepared for her debut as my accomplice.

Sitting among the ladybugs and meadows, I forgot my life wasn’t normal. I was thirty already, having a picnic with a child by my former professor–A child I had half a mind to name Oliver after Dickens’ character.

“We commit crimes, and we don’t judge, Papa,” Ollie reminded me with her father’s eyes.

***

The expression on their faces–on his face–reminded me I had always been entirely alone.

“Did you really think Dr. Thomas wouldn’t know his own work?” The dean looked at me as if I were stupid. I was, but not for the reason she thought. Luci often said to steal good ideas. Even the greats get them from somewhere else. So, I got mine from his work twenty-odd years ago, repurposing them in my project rather than letting them rot as unfinished research.

“I thought he would understand,” was my careful response.

“Understand plagiarism?” she scoffed with an eye roll. “As a scholar?”

I attempted to test my luck, “If I could start again next semester—”

“Your time here has come to an end, Mr. Mint. You are hereby expelled.”

I nodded curtly, stood, and left, not sparing a look at Luci on the way out. It angered him or triggered his guilt–a feeling he was woefully unaccustomed to. Whatever the reason, after conversing with his colleagues on the board, he chased after me, excusing himself to the bathroom. That was our code for meeting up in the study.

He gently shut the door, “I couldn’t risk them finding out. Better one of us than both.”

“No, better me than you,” I retorted, my fingers tightening around the pocket knife concealed behind my back.

“Why would you tell me to use it?”

“Andy, you were running out of time—”

“No, you distracted me,” I barked, “What the hell am I supposed to do, Lucifer?”

“I’ll handle it, sweetheart,” Luci murmured, advancing toward my place upon his desk.

“Trust me.”

“Trust you? I loved you,” the sharpened metal in my hand begged me to make use of it, to let them rest together eternally.

“Just trust me,” he repeated, his hand rising to cup my cheek.

His lips brushed against mine. My fingers relaxed, and the knife slid from my grasp, mirroring the way Alice’s soul ascended from her eyes.

***

She was a lovely woman: smart, cheerful, and smartly dressed like a cutout from Chanel or some other magazine. (Fashion isn’t my forte, but outdated subscriptions often floated down my way when I lived underground.) They were a lovely couple: Mr. and Mrs. Alice Thomas. Luci took her last name since his was Liddle, and Alice preferred not to be associated with a storybook character. Her degrees were far above that.

I was a lonely young man: eighteen and a runaway under the guise of “going away for college”. I intended to remain anonymous–one last name in a sea of a hundred—as I had done throughout my life prior. It would have been easy, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to stop feeding into more delusions about my superiority—that somehow I was too intelligent, too special to be infected by outside minds. I just wanted to feel.

Invigorated by this epiphany, I figured the first step was choosing a target: The guy from the coffee shop who only ordered a soulless cup of black coffee. (Yes, your father, Dr. Lucifer Thomas.)

I had been watching him for some time before we were formally introduced in Architecture Through the Ages in my senior year. When I learned about Alice, I knew she'd have to go gently into that good night. Luci would need time to grieve before he could consider letting his mind wander, and her trail would need to go cold. I studied the couple’s whereabouts and the regular irregularities in their schedule. I followed them home one evening, then stayed up in the library, searching late into the night for the schematics of their house. I drafted a plan, tested a break in when they were both working in the afternoon, and executed the execution.

Slitting Alice’s throat in her post-intercourse sleep proved to be quite difficult with a butterknife. (She had it coming, Ollie. She was in a six-month affair with the head librarian.) But transporting her to the graveyard was a greater ordeal with the wheelbarrow– Practice makes perfect. The police report was filed. There was a funeral. Luci took a leave of absence. Sorrows and prayers for him; Success for me. I spent the next three years in anonymity, a careful student of both Luci and the ghostly Mrs. Thomas, in preparation for the emergence of an opportunity.

We spent many nights, secluded in those four walls. Perhaps, it was the atmosphere that moved me to madness: warm lighting, a torch in a cave, or the books which lined the walls in order by color. Not their first letter, neither the author nor subject, but the covers, which bloomed into a rainbow when the moonlight shone through the windows. Maybe it was the scent of lavender and pine, an illusion of the outside–of escape. The green carpet was always clean, luxurious. Upon further reflection, it was a museum–his study, the room beside the lecture hall. I have it now: the cup, shaped like a unicorn, from couples’ pottery. Luci had disclosed that it was a gift from Alice. I laughed at his weakness, at his sentimentality over such a monstrosity. But the horrid thing proved a nuisance, reminding me that he still thought of her.

Our last meeting was at the coffee shop we frequented. I sat across from him, letting my to-go cup hit the table with a soft tap. Luci’s eyes glazed over me like some vivid apparition. The corner of his lips wrenching upward while I twirled a curl in the same way Alice would, in the same way he would drum his fingers on his cheek and stare at the object of his desire, in the same way– He turned his gaze to the fading white island in the murky waters,

“You’re looking well.”

“And you look even better,” I remarked, sweetening the jab with a grin.

“Your flavor isn’t bitter if I remember it correctly.”

A soft pink dusted my dark cheeks: a softening of the gaze, a twitch of the nose, and a tightening of my grip around the cup. Stay on script, I thought, clearing my throat before I broke the silence, “I heard about the robbery.” That was one of my better performances.

I fiddled with the emerald ring in my palm, smashing it against the concrete floor in a fit of rage and feeling a small satisfaction at its shattering. The reporters on the monitor were saying something about nothing because they knew nothing, yet had to say something. I left no traces of my fingerprints, nor my face. As for victims, the security guard, whom I put to sleep, will think of me only as a shadow.

When questioned by authorities, they might say they were on patrol, noticing nothing out of the ordinary as they strode through the dark halls. Then all of a sudden, slender fingers snaked around their neck. A prolonged squeeze, then a welcome into painless darkness. They would know nothing of how I slipped into their skin, neatly putting it back once I had collected the ring. Or how—one of the resident mice crawled across my feet, making my nerve endings tingle. I didn’t mind the dampness, critters, the rancid scent of shit and piss reeking from the river, or the echo which terrified me on the first night. The glow of the lamplight partnered with my computer screen—a gateway to the world above—made this wretched hovel a home. In hindsight, I should have returned to my birthplace, should have stayed there, should have never met him, should have–

A frown settled on his face, “Alice’s ring is a British national treasure. I’m sure someone just wanted to restore it to the homeland.”

“Isn’t it more likely to be some anglophilic crook?” my lips barely touched the opening as I drank, swallowed. “Or the average American, enamored with shiny things?”

His jaw tightened as I droned on, “I don’t like to think of her being so debased.”

“Well, if the affairs didn’t do that–”

“Who taught you to be such an asshole,” Luci snapped, staring into the grayed eyes of ice. My mocking grin turned to stone. “The teacher, the mentor, the lover. Take your pick.” Too impassioned. I closed my eyes, exhaled, relaxed, “I’ll grab you another coffee. My treat.”

* * *

“And I poisoned it with thallium serum,” I concluded, then quizzed her, “The effects being?”

Ollie replied, “Nausea, vomiting, insomnia, swiftly progressive neuropathy, and death.”

I beamed and high-fived her, “Impressive.”

“Can you tell me something,” she paused as she searched for the right word, settling for, “decent about him?”

Nearly every image of Luci was tainted to me now. For my daughter’s purposes, I told her about his strange fondness for doughnuts with pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles. While I spoke, my mind drifted to the cardboard box in my chest stamped FRAGILE with bright red ink.

***

Usually, we would work simultaneously on our respective laptops, but I decided to test my luck one night earlier than my timeline. I misplaced his charger in the afternoon, secretly unplugging the cord from the power strip and hiding it in the lowest drawer of his desk.

When the clock struck twelve, we were down to only my laptop. It started with the weight of his towering frame against my spine as he hovered over to edit my thesis. The scent of coffee on my neck, the kind of ick only a wearer of rose-tinted lenses could overlook as a small quirk.

I shifted slightly, resting my head back on his shoulder, and felt a pinpointed stab to my sacrum. He chuckled, chalked it up to him being tired rather than turned on. I told him it was alright, cleaning the frosting from the corner of his lip with a napkin.

He proceeded to kiss me, pulling back soon after, “I’m sorry. If you don’t want this—”

I turned to face him completely, scooting back on the desk, “There’s no one I want more.”

Wrinkled clothes strewn about, sweat beading on the skin, pupils blown wide, and our hearts beating the same. His copying mine, or mine, his.

Butter, knives, toast and all that.