Her hair splays out on the dirty, tiled floor; the strands falling in all directions, each one an incomplete river of the deepest chestnut brown. Her face meets the ground, hidden underneath hair that was shoulder length when it was allowed to fall to her shoulders.
There’s something about being unconscious that makes the human body so messy.
Inevitably, permanently messy.
I study the angles of her elbows; which side her palms are turned; how the limbs overlap one another; how gravity compresses her body until it’s as level with the ground as it can get. There are places where her clothes have been rumpled; folded by the force of her fall. In the light, it’s clear that most of her body was composed of the length of her legs; long when she was standing up, now bent at perfect Vs at the knee, one resting on the other in a dignified way. Her arms look almost graceful as they circle her head, the tips of the fingers almost curled into her palm. Blood is pooling near her head and grazing her fingers, not afraid of what it touches. Everything is so still, she looks like an artifact belonging to a museum exhibit.
Except the hair. All I can think about is how a portion of the hair will be dripping with the blood and I’ll have to clean it somehow so that she doesn’t leave a breadcrumb trail to her whereabouts. She’d laugh about that one; how even in death she managed to score a point against me. And then I’ll have to hold her head away from my face when I carry her so that her hair won’t brush against my face. But I can avoid all this by tying it up in the first place so that when I put her in the bag I won’t waste a few seconds shoving it all in so that the zipper doesn’t get caught. If I had the time, I’d shave it all off.
And then I remember that I don’t have any bag to put her in. There’s no portion of ground I’ve marked anywhere to bury her under. There’s no plan. I don’t know what to do with her.
I close my eyes and imagine myself half an hour ago when she was still alive. I want to pretend that if I think hard enough I’d be able to bring myself back to that time and avoid this whole process. I don’t know what I want to do with her. She’s gone but her body speaks for itself, it’s clear what I’ve done and there’s no use thinking about her when it’s me that’s left to handle whatever comes after.
If only I had kept my temper in check.
She wasn’t a terrible person, sometimes she was just terrible. There were moments where I thought: I could kill her. But everyone thinks those things and no one really means it. And very few people ever find themselves in situations where they not only meant it but have accepted it. In my mind I’ve already gone through the stages of grief.
There’s no panic in me, I simply have to leave. It was a clean death. For me. I can just walk out of this room and I’ll be a normal person again. I put on my winter gloves and drag her body into the corner of the dark room. I cover the blood with a musty carpet I find rolled up in the supply closet down the hall.
I walk upstairs to my office from the empty offices in the basement floors and prepare to leave for the day.
George walks down the hall and nods at me as he passes by, “Morgan.”
“George,” I say in return with a curt nod of my own.
“Morgan,” says Jessica from the office next to mine. She barely looks me in the eyes as she continues speaking with her client over the phone.
I grab my satchel, jacket and keys and walk away from the office at a leisurely pace. On the road, I drive just a few kilometres below the speed limit. At home, I pack a suitcase. I’m just going on vacation, I tell myself.
I get back on the road, ready to make decisions on the spot as I know I’ll have to. All the streets and people blur into my periphery. I can only remember some sort of ad I saw on the side of a bus: Crisis never calls. But you can…