S.O.S.

Hello friends. Here's a(nother) flash fiction story challenge submission for Bony Fingered Limbs, the "Message in a Bottle" contest. Extra short this time. 1000 words.

I am quickly falling in love with writing short stuff. I may very well leave a novel unedited because of this obsession. And let me tell you the few important things I absolutely loved about writing this one. Oh, wait. I'll tell you later. Just read.
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S.O.S.
(c) J. Evans

If there’s anything Sabine truly regrets it’s not making friends. Many others in her predicament might instead choose: “not having a chance to say goodbye,” or: “the biggest mistake of their entire life,” or: “disappointing someone,” or even, in their darkest, most honest moments: “getting caught.”

Because sometimes she wishes she had someone to say goodbye to. And then she wouldn’t say it.

And with a friend or (dare she imagine) a herd’s worth, she would've also had someone to disappoint. Would she still have done it? Probably. Would it have felt as good? Probably. But oh, to feel that inflicted disappointment. Oh!

Her mind in the clouds (so far from the wall-to-wall grey), Sabine rubs her ankles together, a borrowed trait.

She once saw a young woman stretch long, well-dressed legs beneath the table at Kensington Grill. Though she could have surrounded herself with scores of adoring supporters, she was alone. Sabine loved that about her, watching across the top edge of her hammered steel menu. It was right then that she noticed a flash of movement beneath the table. The woman rubbed her ankles together slowly, front to back, over and over again. Ruby toes pointed out of her peep-toe d’Orsay slingbacks, and she somehow balanced this movement on the tips of her three inch – Sabine looked more closely – no, four inch heels. Sabine downed the rest of her Manhattan and left without tipping. Her walk home was not her most graceful. She nearly stumbled across the freeway bridge to her dumpy apartment, until finally she could put on better heels and see how it felt to rub her ankles together.

Later that night, it wasn’t that she fantasized about that woman. She fantasized about being that woman. The men in her mind complimented her legs as they fucked her. They complimented her elegance. They complimented the way she rubbed her ankles together. Of course they did. When Sabine came, it was unmatched. From that night on, she adopted that ankle rubbing full-strength.

Sabine never considered befriending someone interesting. Instead, she would do one or more of the following: One, obsess. Two, stalk them. Three, mess with their lives so much that these people often utterly lose their minds and cycle through therapists and antidepressants. Four, and perhaps this is her life’s work, her opus: watch them die.

Incredibly meticulous, she never got caught. Well, with one notable exception.

Luckily, for the woman with the ankles, she was an out of town visitor. Sabine never saw her again at the Kensington Grill, or anywhere else in town that might also host such a woman. Sabine gave up on her after eight months, one week, and four days. It frustrated Sabine to conclude that the woman was likely visiting on business, because of course that’s why she was alone. That woman (her name, incidentally, was Summer Ellis Stephanides of Charleston, and she had suffered a particularly difficult mosquito bite on her ankle. She was in California, she had told herself! There were no bugs here!), she hadn’t made a conscious choice to be alone like Sabine. It was circumstantial. If only Sabine knew where she lived. Perhaps that’s why the ankle rubbing stuck. Something to cling to.

Sabine laughs out loud, a cacophony against steel and concrete. She rubs her ankles together and plunges her forehead to her hands, fluffy blonde hair tumbling around her forearms and slipping past her knees. The shampoo they have here is surprisingly spectacular. Right now it is easy to imagine her torture, impossible regret and shame. But Sabine is only thinking about her own curious brand of regret. Shame does not compute.

Sabine only ever killed women. Okay, technically, she never (notable exception) used her hands to kill them but she surely likes to take credit. This time, this last time, this notable exception, things went wrong. Things went really fucking wrong and Sabine’s heart raced like she had never ever known it. Was it panic? Was it adrenaline? There was a woman, and she made the awful mistake of looking at Sabine. The woman (her name, incidentally, was Janice Spencer, and she was thirty-six years old, single, childless, liked crosswords) actually looked at her, and god help her, smiled.

For Sabine, enemies and strangers comfort her. It’s the niceties that unnerve her. It’s the smiles that mess her up. For someone like Janice Spencer, an advertising exec, to smile and exude friendliness was her grave mistake. In her career, Sabine stalked forty-two women and two men, and, as she likes to call it, has “contributed to the demise” of seven of those women, eight if you count Janice (Sabine does not count her mistakes). Her pattern involves months in the obsessing stage, additional months in the stalking stage, until finally, she can make it look like an accident, like suicide, or (her personal favorite) a cold case mystery: no traces, no suspect, but possibly foul play.

The afternoon that Janice smiled at her, Sabine snapped. She lost the cool she had spent twenty-nine years fabricating. It was definitely foul play as she followed her home and sliced her repeatedly with Janice’s collection of under-used steak knives. She definitely left a trace when she left Janice’s cozy Spanish Revival without cleaning up, when she left her handbag on the reproduction soapstone countertop.

She’s not sure why she started fantasizing regrets. Maybe it’s her cellmate, pitiful and spineless and always innocent. Maybe it’s the grey, year after year. Maybe it’s her sentence, looming but not looming at all: life, without parole.

But at the very end, the chink in her armor is so loud it drowns out the rest of her very different brain. It’s not about making mistakes, or the missed thrill of disappointing some imaginary loved one. And it doesn’t matter how detached she always was. Because right now, stronger and stranger than anything else, is Sabine’s need to know: is there anybody out there? and, if so, help.

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