“Would I?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, this time more firmly. A few moments later, the operator cut in, signaling their time was up.
“How would you kill someone and get away with it?” she asked Mark.
“What?” They were in the break room, eating sandwiches during lunch. He was sitting so close she felt the heat of his arm.
She repeated the question. He stared at her. “You’ve never thought about it?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I can honestly say I never have.” They lapsed into silence. The subject was all Chloe thought about. Killing and those who were capable of it. She wasn’t the only one fascinated. She couldn’t be. There were too many TV shows and movies and books all based around it. Too many fictional serial killers who were memorable in pop culture. But they couldn’t give her what Jon Allan Blue could. They were glamorized, flashy, unreal — pretty actors covered in corn syrup and red dye. They knew nothing about what it really felt like to take a life, what allowed you mentally to ascend to that ultimate assertion of power, erasing another person’s existence.
Mark bumped her shoulder with his and smiled. “What are you thinking about? The perfect crime?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“I think I’ve figured it out,” Jon said. It was early June, and Chloe was drinking a beer and sitting in front of her window air-conditioning unit, trying to dry the sweat that collected between and under her breasts.
“Figured what out?” she asked.
“The painting,” he said. “I think I understand what it means.” Jon told her Grant Wood lived in the attic of a funeral home’s carriage house and had replaced his front door with a coffin lid. He talked about the reaction to American Gothic — how one Iowan woman was so incensed by the painting, she threatened to bite Wood’s ear off. He started talking faster and faster, and Chloe struggled to follow what he was saying. He talked about all the black in the painting — the man’s black jacket, the woman’s black dress. He talked about the symbolism of the farmer’s pitchfork and of the plants on the doorstep — the geranium for melancholy.
“Look at the people in the painting,” he said. She had never heard him so agitated before. “Really look at them. These are people seething with repressed violence. These are people fixated on death.”
She pulled the painting up on her computer and stared at the expression on the man’s face. She studied how his bushy eyebrows came to points, how his long face and pinched mouth added to how sinister he looked. The woman, on the other hand, just looked lost. Chloe had read that originally Wood said the woman was the farmer’s wife, but after the age difference scandalized people, he began telling people she was the farmer’s daughter.
Despite what Jon said about it, Chloe saw something sad about the painting. Despite their severe expressions, the two figures looked powerless and defeated, like people who had felt small their whole lives, standing in front of a cheap farmhouse with fancy windows.
After five minutes, Chloe ended the conversation, much to her reluctance. The collect calls from the prison cost five dollars a minute. “It’s a racket,” Jon told her once. “And the prison gets a cut of the money.” After saying goodbye to Jon, she walked to the bar to meet Mark.
It was hot, and they were thirsty. Instead of pacing themselves with waters in between rounds, they both downed beers quickly, getting much drunker than usual.
After their fifth round, Mark leaned toward her. “I think you’re beautiful,” he said, and kissed her. She let him. She felt dizzy and light and took his bottom lip between her teeth and bit. At first he moaned as if he were aroused, but a second later, the moan changed to one of pain, and he pulled away from her. She tasted blood.
“What the fuck?” he demanded, dabbing his bloody lip with a cocktail napkin.
She stared at him. She liked the way he was looking at her — as if she were some fearsome creature he had never seen clearly until now.
He rose from his stool and threw some cash on the bar. “Look, we’re both drunk. I’m going to go.” She didn’t stop him.
She saw Frank, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, facing away from her, resting his arm on the edge of the pool table. The adrenaline flowing through her, coupled with the alcohol, made her feel like she took up all the space in the bar. She finished her beer and stood to grab a pool cue.
Jennifer McMahon
Hannah-Beast
from Dark Corners/Amazon Original Stories
Halloween 1982
Please, Hannah, please, come out with us tonight.
It won’t be like before, we promise.
Please, please, please, please, say you’ll be our friend again and come with us.
We’ll get candy. So much candy. Whole pillowcases stuffed full of KitKats, peanut butter cups, Mars bars.
So much sugar, we won’t sleep for a week.
Trust us, Hannah.
Come with us, Hannah.
It’ll be a night you won’t ever forget.
Halloween 2016
“There’s no way you’re leaving the house like that.” Amanda spoke in her flat, level I’m-the-mom-here tone, doing her best to hide the shaking in her voice. Really, she wanted to scream. Scream not in fury, but horror. She wanted to run from the kitchen and hide in her bedroom, slamming the door maybe, like she was the teenager. Her skin prickled with cold sweat. Her stomach churned. She worked to steady her breathing as she made herself look at her daughter, take in the whole grotesque costume.
It was like some hole had been ripped in time, and Amanda was twelve years old again, dressed in her lame cat burglar costume with a striped shirt and pillowcase money bag, handing her mask over so that Hannah-beast’s costume would be complete. Thanks, Manda Panda!
Erin’s face was painted blue with thick greasepaint. There was a black plastic eye mask held in place by elastic. A pink feather boa. A silver cape. Topping it all off was a rainbow clown wig.
Jesus, how many rainbow clown wigs did the drugstore in town sell each Halloween?
The costume was spot-on; a near-exact replica with the exception of the face paint — it was the wrong shade of blue and too thick. The real Hannah-beast had worn makeup that was thin, patchy, a dull pale blue that had made her look cyanotic.
“That is totally unfair,” Erin said.
“I thought you were going as a cat.”
“I’m a cat every fucking year, Mom.”
This was a new thing for Erin, the swearing all the time. She’d never done it back when Jim was here. He wouldn’t have stood for it. But Amanda had decided to ignore it. To ride it out and let Erin blow off steam by dropping a few f-bombs here and there.
Pick your battles, Amanda told herself. And besides, didn’t letting the swearing slide make her the cool mom as opposed to the uptight dad? The dad who had walked out on them four months ago, claiming Amanda was too distant, too walled off, and he couldn’t live his life with a woman he didn’t know how to reach.
“You know the rules,” Amanda said to her daughter. “You are not going out like that.”
“Your rules suck and make no sense,” Erin said with disgust. “They’re totally arbitrary.”
Erin always thought she could win an argument if she used big words. Jim had often let himself be distracted or amused. Not Amanda. Amanda said nothing.