• "Cuter Sleeping"
    S. N. Woolsey


    "Why did you do it , Claire?" A stranger stood before me but I knew exactly who she was. I'd seen her too many times on TV before. She was the typical cop that tried to push you into admitting to your crime. You could tell everything about them by looking in their eyes. But she didn't need to push me. I had no problem admitting to what I did. They'd found me at the scene of it anyway. But that didn't mean I wouldn't play with her a little.
    "Do what?" I said, keeping my cool. I was stronger than her and I needed her to know that.
    "You know very well what." I was wondering how long it would take her to crack.
    I looked down at my hand. I held it up so she could see it, too.
    "Red's never been my color." The caked on dried blood covering my hands - just about all of me, actually - was no longer the bright red it was just a few hours before. "I know it looks like I did it, but I didn't."
    "Than who did?" She tried to show no emotion but I could read her like a book anyway. She didn't know what to do with me. Here I was, a fifteen-year-old, 'ideal child', sitting in someone else's blood from head to toe. She couldn't have been doing this for a long time. Not if she was confused and intimidated by me. I decided to have a little fun with this one.
    I looked around the room, purposely disregarding her question. The room was gray with small hints of metallic, like the clock, the only thing on the wall. I thought it was fun to act bored and look at the clock longingly and impatiently as if I had somewhere to go.
    I'd known that there was a one way window behind the woman interrogating me. I didn't want to look at it before. I glared at it now. Who stood behind it, watching me? Security? A higher authority? My parents? My mother, crying. How could her baby girl do this? My father, yelling about how stupid I was. Cussing me out behind my back or a sheet of glass that only showed me, my blood drenched reflection. The newly found ice in my eyes.
    "If you didn't do it," she asked again, "Who did?"
    "He did." I tore my eyes away from where I knew my father stood and let them fall on the woman. She raised an eyebrow, egging me on. She finally realized I wasn't going to say anymore.
    "Are you saying that he committed suicide?" She pushed a few Polaroids at me of the dead body.
    "No." I said simply.
    "Then what are you saying?"
    I picked up a picture that was pushed towards me. A tall boy was dead on the ground, exactly where I left him. His hair was dirty blonde and fell just short of his shoulder, slightly shorter in front, curving in towards his face, falling on his cheek bones.
    The boldest asset to his face was his nose but his slightly chapped lips were warm, tender and inviting, even if they were lifeless.
    He had a hard, manly chest. You could still tell even if it did have a huge incision in the middle of it. My eyes followed the line of his broad shoulder down his arm to his soft hand. There, sitting next to his half curled fingers, was his heart. I would have said it was still beating if I hadn't felt it stop in my hands.
    I smiled at my work.
    "He always was cuter sleeping."
    "Why did you do it?"
    "I already told you." I still looked at the picture as I set it back on the cold metal table, in line with the other two. "I didn't. He did."
    "What do you mean by that?" The woman was getting annoyed, I could tell. "He couldn't have cut out his own heart with his body in that position and his hands clean. It’s physically impossibly to cut your own heart out to begin with."
    "Of course he couldn't." I said. "That's common knowledge. He brought it upon himself."
    "Are you admitting to killing him?"
    "He was already dead." I said. "I just decided to play with him."
    "So you're saying he was dead before you got to him?"
    "Yes." I said calmly, like everything else. "Dead among the living."
    "A zombie?" She looked scared of me now.
    "A boy." I said. "Perfect on the outside. Perfect on the inside."
    "Then why did you kill him?"
    "He didn't love me." I said. "I gave him my heart and he returned it in pieces. I wanted to show him what it was like having your heart ripped out."