by R.M. Sayan
“Are you ready to tell me what you did with the arms?”
Detective Olivia Chen didn’t let the harsh words reflect in her tone of voice—after all, Mallory had been much more responsive to a sympathetic approach, and from her specifically—but he still flinched as if he’d been struck. Bony brown fingers dusted with charcoal began to pick at his nails on the metal table. “Did you get my sketchbook?” he said meekly.
She nodded and took out an evidence bag from her case. He’d already confessed to third-degree murder, and he had the chance to claim self-defense as a mitigating factor, but the way he disposed of the body could potentially ruin a good impression on the jury. Not that a corpse chopped up beyond recognition was preferable, but it was more expected. The body was relatively well-preserved by the cold harbor waters, albeit bloated, but the arms had been severed postmortem. Early investigation suspected it had something to do with the tattoos; there were hints of a sleeve at the shoulders and upper back, so they’d speculated that they continued into something about a cause or ideology that the suspect didn’t agree with. But once they zeroed in on Mallory and actually met him, that theory fell through.
Mallory looked like someone’s wise and well-mannered uncle, if not on the nervous side. Pushing fifty, but in good shape for it—just a few white curls dotted his otherwise pitch-black temples. The school where he worked had said he’d quit recently, and all the belongings in his house were packed up like he’d been planning to run, but he didn’t put up a fight when they arrested him. He’d been scared to death and compliant to a fault, except with telling them how he disposed of the body and why. So that was the deal: his sketchbook for the rest of the confession.
She slid the bag across the table, and he emptied it—out fell a tiny piece of charcoal, eraser putty, and a pocket-sized sketchbook, all found on his person when he was arrested. She’d have to put it all back later, but the forensics team had already gotten through with it, so it wasn’t too difficult to borrow it for a moment.
He flipped through the pages. She knew what was in them; studies of buildings and streets, figure drawing practice, and most notably, many portraits of an unknown man rendered in loving detail. She’d wondered about those—Mallory wore a golden band on his ring finger, but he was single and lived alone. It was suspicious, of course, but there was no record of him having a current partner, and none of his connections had any clue who a wedding band or engagement ring could belong to, or who the man in the drawings was.
But he wasn’t looking for those drawings, although she did see a flinch cross his brow as the pages flicked past. He arrived at one of the last pages, where the drawings of buildings were more concentrated, and turned the sketchbook around to show her. “This… This place is what you’re looking for.”
She had seen it before, like the rest of the contents of the sketchbook, but had ultimately decided it wasn't useful to the investigation—some of the places he drew matched locations that she recognized, coffee shops, parks, places where he could sit down and draw, which was normal for a middle-aged art teacher. Maybe if they had found the sketchbook first and the man was missing, it might've held some value for the investigation. Now, she looked at the page he showed her and frowned.
It wasn't a place that she recognized. It wasn't particularly pretty, either—the drawing itself was masterfully done, but if she had seen the place that inspired it, her first thought wouldn't have been ‘oh, this would be a great painting or photograph’. It was a standard-looking store front, with a glass display window and door that looked lackluster compared to the decorative molding, though it wasn't an uncommon mix for some of the more historical districts. The store didn't have a name, and it didn't look like he'd forgotten to draw it—it simply wasn't a part of the facade. A wide variety of items was displayed through the glass—an old bicycle, power tools, camping equipment, novelty decorations, all piled up haphazardly in front of the window and the glass door as well. At first glance, and in such a medium, she didn't see how you'd be able to walk in, though there was no lock and the sign at the door read that it was open. The number beside it read 108.
"What am I looking at?" she asked.
He looked lost, like the picture should speak for itself. “It’s where— You asked me where the arms are.”
Detective Chen gave him a patient nod. “Where is this?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. His fingertips pressed pale against the sketchbook. “Where… Wherever you need it to be, I believe.”
She sighed, seeing that this was getting nowhere, and leaned back. “Okay, let’s step back a bit. Why just the arms?”
He didn’t seem like he followed, and took a moment to formulate an answer. “It’s all that he asked for,” he said, voice beginning to break.
“Who?”
“The—” He tapped the sketchbook page. “The man in the store.”
“But where is this store?”
“I don’t know!” he said, increasingly desperate. “It just showed up! First it was in our street, then it was by the harbor, and it’s not there anymore!”
Detective Chen was beginning to think his legal team might go for an insanity plea. She leaned forward and looked him in the eyes. "Mr. Mallory, I'm going to need you to walk me through that night again. This time in whole."
His eyes flickered away. He put down the sketchbook and picked at his nails, biting at his lips. “…Alright.”
#
“My money’s on an insanity plea.”
Chen glared at her partner over the file she was browsing—she hated to agree. She was once again rereading the case file with a fresh set of eyes, parsing through old information with what she knew now—which, admittedly, wasn’t much more than what she knew before. “We don’t know who his legal team will be yet,” she said with a clenched jaw. “Just focus on closing the case.”
He was filling out the necessary paperwork to do exactly that, not even bothering to look up as he spoke. “Any defense attorney worth their salt would take a look at the case files and see a nutjob.”
She hummed in vague agreement, but her gut told her otherwise. The full confession checked out only in theory, but Mallory kept correcting himself from ‘we’ to ‘I’, which was obvious to everybody inside the room and behind the two-way mirror. They’d already exhausted that line of questioning in previous conversations, but she’d tried it one more time— “Who’s we?”
And he’d looked devastated when he finally broke and told her about his ‘husband’, who’d supposedly been the one who defended himself from the burglar in the exact same way Mallory first alleged he’d done. He was so convinced of it, that the real shock came was when they couldn’t find any record of anyone named Jean-Anthony Mallory in the entire state. And today, their mental health records request came back with a history of schizoaffective disorder.
So that all fell into place—in her partner’s eyes. But something still bothered her, and she found it in a copy of Mallory’s birth certificate, at the back of the file. Solomon Berry. Not Solomon Mallory.
Bingo. He could’ve changed his name upon marriage, proving that he wasn’t hallucinating—at least not in regards to having a husband, who was also involved in the murder. “Rogers, look at—”
Her phone buzzed once. During her work hours, it only allowed texts from one person, so she opened it to read the message.
Mariana: Got my new chemo schedule.
An entirely new set of thoughts replaced the case. She typed out a supportive response and waited for Mariana’s reply, but received nothing more. She was probably driving home.
Rogers’ shadow fell over her. “You wanted me to look at something?”
“Right.” She put away her phone and showed him the birth certificate. “You see?”
He looked at the birth certificate, but instead of the revelation dawning on his face like she expected, he gave her a blank look. “What?”
She couldn’t believe he was that stupid. “Look at the last name. Berry.”
“What about it?”
“It’s—!” She snapped the file shut to the overview page. Solomon Berry.
That… was impossible. She had just seen—just talked about him as Solomon Mallory, everyone working on the case knew him like that. When did the file change name?
Rogers gave her an unsympathetic look. “Chen, like you said, let’s focus on closing the case.”
“But—!”
Someone else slapped a file on her desk, and she jolted harshly. “Jesus, sorry Liv, you alright?” From the aisle, Silvio gave her a concerned look, half-leaning into her desk space—the medical examiner. “It’s just the final autopsy report.”
Rogers greeted him with a hearty handshake, and she tuned out whatever they talked about. She went through the papers in the file one by one, and every single one had the name Solomon Berry. She jolted again, though less violently, when she felt a strong but familiar hand on her shoulder.
Silvio was still giving her that look. “All good? How’s the wife?”
Once again, the case moved to the back of her mind. She gave him a half-smile and a shrug.
“I guess marriage troubles don’t discriminate,” Rogers chuckled, and Silvio look stunned for a moment before composing himself and laughing weakly along. It was fine—she didn’t disclose her personal life to most people at work. Rogers knew about her marriage, but that was it.
“We still on for the gym tonight?” Silvio asked her before leaving.
It depended on how much Mariana needed her. “I’ll let you know. Don’t wait up.”
#
Mariana’s fingers were peeling at the edge of her nails. She’d always had a habit of biting at hangnails when she was nervous, and though the doctors had strongly advised her not to, the last few months were probably the most nervous she’d ever been. But she’d gotten better— now, she just squeezed her fingers one by one, then switched hands. Liv couldn’t help but notice that her wedding band was hanging loose nowadays.
When they’d first decided to get married, so many years ago when they first heard the news, it was Mariana who proposed the idea of a road trip to Canada to tie the knot. They’d planned for the whole week leading up to it, counted their sick days, and left one Friday afternoon. They let their circle of friends know that whoever could make it was welcome but not obliged by any means; only Mariana’s best friend from high school, her uncle who lived in Vancouver, and Silvio made it. Mariana was ecstatic anyways, and she spent the entirety of their brief honeymoon improvising dates and activities for them to do in town— hikes, restaurants, amusement parks, you name it. Mariana had always been spontaneous, cheeky, carefree. She hated to see her so defeated.
Liv drove her to work whenever she could, but ever since the initial diagnosis, she’d insisted on doing it every day. Mariana had joked at first that they had to spend every moment they could together before they couldn’t anymore—a terrible joke that Liv had lovingly chastised her about. Now, neither of them joked. They hadn’t spoken about anything of substance since the day before, and Liv knew it was eating them both alive.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, knuckles pressing white around the steering wheel so the tension wouldn’t show in her voice, even if Mariana could tell anyways. She could always tell.
Mariana didn’t answer right away, wringing away at her hands until they reached a red light. She’d been unresponsive since yesterday, but this morning she’d dropped a spoon during breakfast and she’d looked like the world had dropped under her feet. It was beginning to dawn on her.
“Still hopeful,” she said, voice brittle. “But, a little le—” The word got caught in her throat. She pressed her first against her mouth, inhaled deeply, held the breath. A sob wrenched its way out anyways.
Liv let go of the wheel and pulled her in. She sobbed violently into her chest, and hindered as they were from the console and the seatbelts, Liv held her tight. And though tears ran down her face too, she let them fall into Mariana’s headscarf and disappear.
A blaring horn from the car behind made them both jolt. Mariana tried to compose herself and Liv looked up to see the green light and—
Across the intersection, she saw a store. An old Victorian-style house with a modern display window and door, an assortment of junk cluttered up inside. The street number next to the door read 108.
“Liv?”
It was Mariana’s small voice that jerked her out of her trance, instead of the cacophony behind them. “Sorry,” she mumbled and drove onwards.
#
Silvio had been a boxer since before Liv met him. He had a scar across all four of his right knuckles that—he liked to joke—he got when he fought off a robber armed with a knife with just his bare fists. Liv knew that in reality, he’d scraped his knuckles on a loose nail when he’d been training in his old gym with the boxing bag too close to a half-built drywall, and it scarred way too noticeably for such a superficial wound.
“But you took down the intersection, right?” he grunted as Liv rained down on the Thai pads.
“Of course I did!” Jab, cross, hook, knee, last rep, and she took a step back, panting. “But it wasn’t there when I went back. And, by the way, that was the seventh block of Church street, not the first.”
Silvio handed her a water bottle. “Uh-huh.”
Liv glared at him as she drank, but knew that he meant no harm. He was just lending an ear, he didn’t really understand, and she couldn’t blame him. She had glossed over the details of what had happened inside the car right before that.
She brushed her hair out of her face—it was getting into her eyes, she was tempted to buzz it again—and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Not to mention that I could’ve sworn the suspect was named something else. It’s like the files changed while I wasn’t looking.”
Silvio nodded at her with a look of sympathy, no doubt wondering about her mental health. Wisely, he did not mention it. It was the last set anyways, so he took off the pads and began to stretch. “Are you gonna need a ride home?”
She usually jogged to the gym and walked the way back, since it wasn’t too far from home, but the concern wasn’t all gone from his face. “Sure,” she granted.
They met up at the exit after showering and getting dressed. He turned on the radio in his car but kept it at a low volume, which for him meant that he was opening the door to conversation. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel like discussing the other events of the day. “Is this the band you like?”
“What?” The radio was playing some kind of soft rock in Spanish. “Oh, no, this is Soda Stereo. They’re good, but the one I keep telling you about is...” He paused for a moment, gave her a sideways glance that she refused to meet, and then he took out a CD from under the radio and handed it to her. Los Saicos, some kind of old-timey band from his home country. She was grateful for the distraction, and for his perceptiveness.
She let him talk about the band for the rest of the ride, and even got to hear some of their songs before they arrived at her doorstep. As she stepped off the car, she noticed he wasn’t driving off right away—she turned around to look at him.
He was giving her that look. He was right—she could use some downtime. “A beer one of these days?” she proposed.
“On me,” he said. “Whenever you want.”
“Let’s hang out when I close this case,” she said, and despite herself, smiled. “Can’t wait to get it off my shoulders.”
He returned the smile and nodded. “Take care, yeah? And say hi from me. If you gals need anything, you know where to find me.”
He drove off and, like a curtain, his car moved out of the way to show a store that hadn’t been there when she left.
Liv stood still, nailed to the spot. The neighbors’ houses were still there—557 and 559 weren’t side by side anymore, but had a defiant 108 wedged between them. Crown moldings, glass window and door, ‘open’ sign—it was all there again, right across from her house on a silver platter.
She hesitated before crossing the street. This was insanity—an illusion, a waking dream brought on by stress. Solomon Berry was always named like that, nothing had changed, and it had been ages since Liv had left the house paying attention to her surroundings, so of course she wouldn’t have noticed someone set up shop out front if she was constantly on auto-pilot. Mariana would be back from work already, and she needed her.
She was standing at the glass door before she realized she’d crossed.
The door rang a bell as it opened, muted by the clutter. The entrance gave way to a hallway between aisles so densely packed that she got the distinct impression of being inside a hedge maze made of junk. “Coming!” came a muffled voice from the back, and the strikingly ordinary quality of it made her wince.
A man’s figure came into her sight at the end of the aisle. “How can I help?”
She remained still and stared. She wasn’t quite convinced this wasn’t a dream.
The man shrugged to himself and approached her. Funny, she’d thought he’d have trouble in the narrow aisle, but maybe she misjudged the size of it. “Got all kinds of stuff,” he said, and rummaged in the shelf for something. From among mallets, loose drillbits, and bundles of moldy firewood, he fished out a fireman’s axe and offered it to her. “I’m sure you’ll find what you need here.”
His arms were tattooed. From where he held the axe, she followed the tattoo sleeve up his arm, and realized—his complexion didn’t match. And— Something about the flickering fluorescent lights made it so that the more she tried to look at his face, the less she could tell how he actually looked.
The words came out automatically, relying on old instincts. “I’m with the police department,” she said, mouth dry. It felt like sound wasn’t the only thing the clutter absorbed. “I— just wanted to ask you to come with me for questioning.”
She could tell one thing among his features— a toothy grin. “And if I refuse?”
She felt a tugging at the edge of her pocket, something she tended to fiddle with when she was nervous but on the job. “Then I’m afraid I’ll have to place you under arrest.” She realized, then, that her left hand was still holding her water bottle, and her right, her gym bag.
What was grabbing at her?
“I hope you brought enough handcuffs, Detective Chen.”
Something yanked at her shoulders, arms, sides, legs, face, dragged her back into something that felt like all hands and fingers and flesh and the only thing she could still see was that grin among the million arms—
Next thing she knew, she was standing on her doorstep looking across the street, gym bag and bottle on the ground at either side of her. Across the street, 557 and 559 rested snugly together.
#
Solomon was less jittery the next time she saw him. His gait was more certain, but his look held something more detached. The medical staff had gotten his prescription and he was on medication now—back on medication, according to every medical professional involved and every paper trail on the case.
Technically, the case was wrapping up and Chen wasn’t supposed to be here, but she hadn’t shown her badge—sure enough, he seemed surprised to see her across the visiting room table.
“I’m not here on official business,” she said first and foremost, leaning forward in urgency.
“…My attorney said I—”
“Shouldn’t talk to me without them, or wait until the trial, I know,” she said, exasperated. “I just— I need your help.”
Whether he was stunned into silence or cautiously skeptical, she couldn’t tell, but he hadn’t stood up and left yet.
“You said the store appeared on your street, and then by the harbor?” She was relying on memory for this one, because she didn’t trust that the interrogation tape would remain intact. “The junk shop you showed me. I’ve seen it.”
His brows furrowed. “No, it was a delusion.”
Not him, too. She shook her head. “No, because if it was, so was your husband.”
The corners of his lips twitched downwards, his eyes flitted to the ring around his finger with sorrow. “Yes, you’re right.”
“No!” she insisted, then caught herself and looked over her shoulder to make sure she hadn’t said that too loud—nothing that wasn’t covered under the hubbub of a busy visiting area. “No,” she repeated, and opened the papers she came in with—photocopied pages from his sketchbook. She showed him the portraits that had called her attention the first time. “This is your husband, isn’t it? Jean-Anthony Mallory.”
Recognition tugged at his brow more tentatively than she’d have liked it to. He took the papers in hand and inspected the pictures closely, as if trying to piece together a puzzle.
She grew impatient and decided to give him a nudge. “You took his name when you married, didn’t you? Solomon Mallory.”
She saw it click in the way his eyes cleared. His hands shook, and with them, the paper. “God— I—”
“They told you it was a hallucination, right? Someone’s trying to use your medical history to pin this on you. Is it him? Or the man in the store?”
His eyes glistened with tears, but he didn’t let them fall, and put the paper down. He took a slow breath in, and let a shaky breath out. “You said you are off the record?”
Chen nodded.
“I am,” he said, voice low and thick with grief, but more certain than she’d ever heard him.
She blinked, trying to comprehend what he meant and what it would entail. “So you’re—”
“Taking the blame for Jean,” he continued. “It really was an accident. The burglar came in while he was awake, in the bathroom. He panicked, and I promised I’d take care of the body and that nobody had to find out.”
She waited for him to continue—there was one more piece of the puzzle left.
“The shop showed up when I was putting the body in the car. I went in and the… man…? In the shop. He said I could get ‘anything I wanted’… At that moment, I think I just wanted Jean to be safe, and to never have to deal with any of this. He handed me a saw and asked for the— for the dead man’s arms, in exchange for that.”
Chen leaned back on the chair as the weight of the confession hit her—the full, unadulterated confession, without any of the fluff to save face. She’d never be able to use this for the case, it would be treated as delirium either way.
But— “And Jean-Anthony? Where is he?”
“When I returned back home from— from all that, he’d gotten an email from a job he’d applied to overseas. We thought it was lucky, but by the following week he was acting like he’d forgotten all about that night.” He paused, and though his eyes finished welling up and his hands still shook, his resolve was steady. “When he left, he didn’t mention it at all. I was supposed to wrap things up here and join him. Then the body washed ashore.”
And the investigation began, and the street cams were checked, and it was all traced back to Solomon with no sign of Jean-Anthony having been involved. “He kept his part of the deal, then,” she muttered, half to herself.
“You’d do the same,” he said in half a breath, barely discernible over the murmur around them, and then again, looking pointedly at her ring finger. “You’d do the same for her, if it meant keeping her safe, right?”
It made sense then, why he’d trusted her more since the start of the case—he’d recognized a kindred soul from day one.
She didn’t know how much she wanted the parallels to continue. “I need to go.”
“Wait,” he yelped as she stood up. She obliged. “Please, come back once in a while. Nobody else remembers him. I don’t want to forget him again.”
Chen hesitated, unsure if she could make that promise honestly. “You can keep that,” she decided, nodding towards the portraits on the table, and walked away.
#
Liv was able to drop Mariana off at her next appointment, because that was the day she was barred from the case. Solomon’s attorney had found out she went to see him and, predictably, raised hell. To appease him, the department thought it would be best if she didn’t have any further involvement with the case. Not that there was much else to do on her side—Rogers handed over the case to the prosecution already, now he just had to wait for the subpoenas to go out.
She took a meandering route to the hospital—the ‘scenic’ route, she told Mariana, but her eyes weren’t on the harbor side. When she wasn’t looking at the road, Liv was looking at the buildings that passed them.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay over?” she asked, an old and practiced question. Mariana was due for an overnight stay due to her history with the previous chemo.
“You should rest,” Mariana said, head leaning against the window to look out to the ocean. “You’re gonna have to deal with the aftermath anyways.”
Liv began to nod, but stopped herself stiffly. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, you know,” she said slowly. “The taking care of you. I meant it when I said in sickness and in health.”
She could hear Mariana’s steady breathing. “Not much longer, hopefully.”
It was a statement of hope from anyone else, but the way she said it send a pang of fear up her throat. “What do you mean?”
Mariana shook her head. “Nothing. I’m giving chemo one more chance.”
Liv had heard of cancer patients who considered the cure worse than the disease and chose not to fight it. If it was terminal, who could blame them? But Mariana still had a chance—no matter how small. “Please do,” she said in a whisper, and gave her the choice to leave it at that. Mariana took it.
Liv stayed with her until it was time to start the infusion, at which point Mariana started all but shooing her off. As she pulled up to their driveway, she received a text.
Silvio: Hey I heard what happened. Beers tonite?
Liv hesitated. The prospect of going out and being social felt daunting to her, especially now, but so did spending the night alone in the home she’d built with Mariana. She could use the drink.
Liv: Yeah, sure.
#
There was a UFC championship on one of the TVs, and Liv and Silvio sat with their backs to the bar to watch the lightweight match. She didn’t actively follow the championships, but she watched occasionally, and right now she welcomed the distraction.
“He’s not gonna last like that,” she commented, nursing her beer.
Silvio drank from the bottle and shook his head. “I’m telling you, he’s lighter on his feet, if he knows what’s good for him he’s gonna— Oh shit!”
They ‘ooh’ed when the fighter they were rooting for sidestepped quickly and uppercut the other square in the jaw, along with some other customers that were watching the same match. They waited for the knockout, but the opponent caught his footing at just the right time. They circled each other again for a second, but then the bell rang and the round ended, and Liv and Silvio leaned back against the bar.
“Our guy doesn’t look like much, but he’s durable and very fast,” said Silvio.
“Yeah, he could probably even take you,” Liv said, shooting him a smirk.
“As much as I might like that, I don’t think I’m his type,” he said. Then, after a pause, “I’m more of a middleweight.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and then burst into laughter.
“Man, I missed this,” he said. “We gotta find time to hang out more often.”
“Yeah, well, you know how work gets,” she said, a weak excuse even to her own ears. She let the pause hang in the air for a moment, waiting for Silvio to say something, call out her flakiness, but he didn’t. She busied herself with her glass. How would she even begin to talk about what bothered her?
It looked like he was going to break first, but the moment he opened his mouth, the bell rang and the next round began. She leaned forward to watch the match, and he saved his advice for the next break. The knockout was so sudden that their side of the bar roared, Liv and Silvio included, but he pumped his fist in the air forgetting that he was holding a bottle in a crowded bar.
It could’ve gone worse, really, but the guy he accidentally punched was so large and so drunk that he didn’t seem to feel the hit against his back. More than anything, he turned either when heard glass break, or when he felt the back of his shirt splashed with what little beer had been left in the bottle.
Silvio was quick to apologize, the bartender to give him a warning, and Liv to notice the blood on his hand. He insisted on footing the bill anyways, before embarking on the walk of shame to the nearest hospital.
“Sorry for the mess,” he said, pressing a clump of napkins to his bloody hand.
“It’s fine,” she said. “At least you can still feel your fingers, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. Five blocks to the hospital, roughly, but the silence wasn’t as awkward as it could be. “You don’t have to hang out.”
Liv shrugged. “Mariana’s spending the night in the hospital anyways.”
“Ah.” A pause. “So you’re using me as an excuse to be near her, got it.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t aiming for it, but now that you mention it…”
He laughed with her, and they drifted off into that comfortable silence again for the next block or so. “You know,” he began. “If you ever need extra help with like, picking her up, getting to appointments…”
“I can manage just fine,” she said, too snappish for her own liking.
“Not saying you can’t,” he said patiently. “It’s just, I don’t want you two to feel like you only have each other, alright? Especially now.”
It was a heartfelt wish, and Liv wished she could’ve replied with equally heartfelt gratitude, but her attention had been drawn elsewhere. As they passed other bars, restaurants, and storefronts that had closed for the night, she found herself in front of the one that never closed.
“Liv?”
Her breath hitched as his voice brought her back to reality, but the store remained in place no matter how many times she blinked. “Silvio, this— This is the one.”
He came back to stand next to her and look at the store. “What’s a 108 doing in the middle of the block?”
“It’s the place I’ve been telling you about. The one Solomon showed us, the one that showed up after you dropped me off the other day.”
“When did it…” He was looking at the store with the same incredulity she had when she’d first seen it. This was more his neighborhood than hers, so he had more reason to notice the sudden change.
“I’m going in.”
“Liv, wait,” he said, took a hesitant step forward.
She looked at him and his bloody hands. His bleeding wasn’t that bad, but he still needed stitches. “I’ll meet you at the hospital,” she tried.
He looked at her meaningfully, then at the store with distrust. “No,” he said. “I’m going with you.”
#
The bell announcing their entry was all but swallowed by the junk inside the store, but its ringing stuck in Liv’s ears. She held the door open for Silvio, and he stepped into the narrow aisles with much more courage than she’d had the first time she’d entered. She wondered if it was the beer giving him all that bravado, or if he really was that protective over his friends.
He made it to the end of the aisle before her. “Anyone home?” he called.
“Detective!” The shop owner’s voice felt much more material now, much friendlier, though it still carried an undertone of something she couldn’t quite place. It always sounded like that at first, didn’t it? He came out from the storage room and leaned on the counter—once again, if someone held a gun to her head and asked her to physically describe the shop owner, she’d be eating that bullet. All she knew was that he grinned. “I knew you’d be back.”
He had barely acknowledged Silvio, even though he was standing between them. “Uh, when’d you set up shop here?” Silvio said.
She felt the shop owner’s attention shift onto him—not like he finally noticed him, but like he’d much rather look at her. “Oh, I’ve been here forever,” he said noncommittally, his voice distracting from her rustling through the shelves. “It’s good business, opening shop wherever people need me. You can find anything you need here.”
Silvio hesitated. She imagined he’d have asked something, but she had to interrupt him.
“I’m sorry.”
Thwack.
A few things hit the ground, then. The last of them was a bloody fireman’s axe. The second to last was Silvio, unbalanced and caught off-guard, closely followed by the junk and knick-knacks of the shelf he collapsed against. The first was his right arm.
She knelt over him with panicked efficiency and unclasped her belt—she was done with the tourniquet before the first cry left him. “I’m sorry!” she cried again, and stepped away while he clasped the bloody stump of his arm.
She didn’t have to grab it from the ground. The shopkeeper, the collector, he was already standing where it used to be, commanding her attention. “Usually I’d ask for the pair,” he said, and there was laughter somewhere under his voice, like many voices made one. “But I hadn’t seen a show like that in a while.”
“You can save her, right?” she begged.
The collector opened his arms in a gesture of goodwill, which might have landed better if she was able to count how many he had. “Consider it done.”
She hesitated. “Will I forget her? Like Solomon did his husband?”
“It’s not imperative for her health,” he said. “So no.”
Before she could begin to process that, the bell rang again, and the door slid shut. She looked back to see a generous trail of blood leading to the exit from where Silvio had been writhing just seconds before.
The hospital was just two blocks away. He might still make it.
The wave of relief that washed over her nearly knocked her off her feet—Mariana would live, Silvio would live, it was the best outcome she could’ve hoped for. She had to sit on the ground to avoid falling, riding off the surge of adrenaline and coming to terms with the blood on her clothes. She breathed for just a moment, before looking up to the collector. “Will… he forget about any of this?”
“You want her safety, not yours.” He shrugged. “But since you’re still here— would you want him to?”
She sighed and shook her head. She couldn’t live with herself if she went scot-free— she knew what she was willing to give up, even before she’d made her choice. “I’ll get out of your hair, then.”
He nodded, and reached down to help her up. The hand she took had a scar across the knuckles, and left bloodstains on her fingers from fresh cuts on the palm.
© Copyright 2025 R.M. Sayan
About the Author
R.M. Sayan is a writer of queer spec across most genres, with a soft spot for classic fantasy in the style of movies like Ladyhawke (1985) and Willow (1988). Some books that he never stops thinking about are The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, and The Elementals by Michael McDowell. He currently resides in Cajamarca, Peru, and enjoys hiking, origami, and his wife.
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