Page 72 of Deep Feelings & Shallow Graves

“God, your form is terrible,” he groans, ducking the next swing. “You’re leading with your elbow like you’re trying to paddle a canoe!”

“You’re bleeding on my shirt! You even die like an asshole. Just like the rest of the dumbasses I killed.” I shout, backing him toward a mossy rock. “Do you know how hard it is to get ex-husband out of cotton?!”

“You can’t even do this right,” he pants, tripping slightly. “How’d you manage to kill anyone? Sympathy aneurysms?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I sneer, hurling the meat tenderizer at his knee. He goes down with a yelp. “I left my Murder Choreography binder at home. Didn’t realize I was auditioning for the fucking Bolshoi Ballet!”

He tries to crawl away.

“Stop moving, Walter! You’re making it weird!” I snatch up the tenderizer.

THWACK. THWACK. SQUISH.

“You never finish anything,” he spits, bleeding and still somehow sanctimonious. “It’s always dramatics and tears and then…”

WHAM.

The tenderizer meets skull.

He gurgles something. Probably something smartass.

I pant.

My hair is in my face, sweat sticking my shirt to my back, and I have enough of Walter on me to look like approximately one third of a Costco meatloaf smeared down my left pant leg, and this motherfucker still had the nerve to try and condescend me through blunt force trauma.

I stand over him, blood on my shoes, rage humming through my ribs, and something loosens in my spine. I look down at this red, pathetic pile of ego and khakis.

“You don’t,” I whisper, “get to live in my story anymore.”

WHAM.

Then there’s silence.

Well, except for my heavy breathing. And maybe a few birds tweeting. Nature is a bitch for ambiance.

And suddenly I’m just tired. Deep, whole-body tired. Like my bones are exhaling and the adrenaline handed in its two weeks’ notice and left me to clean up the mess.

I stare down at my shirt. There’s too much blood to salvage it. Of course. This was my nice forest murder shirt.

“Asshole,” I say, toeing his corpse. “Always ruining shit.”

He has nothing to say anymore.

I stand there, blinking like I’ve just come out of a blackout, staring at the corpse of my ex-husband like it’s going to apologize for being heavy and inconvenient.

“Where the hell is my team?” I whisper. Carson said he’d be here. Edgar has the hearse. Blake’s got the muscles. Where the hell is my meat-moving entourage?

I do a frantic 360, hands on hips, breathing like a woman who just finished a very intense Zumba class that ended in homicide.

Nothing. No voices. No footfalls. Not even a squirrel offering me a congratulatory nut.

“Unbelievable. I just performed soul surgery with a kitchen utensil and not one of my boyfriends showed up for the curtain call.”

I glare at Walter’s stupid dead face.

“You couldn’t even die cleanly, could you? No, you had to go out like you lived, messy, dramatic, and leaking bodily fluids on shit that doesn’t belong to you.”

I try to lift him. I get maybe an inch off the ground before gravity kicks me in the tits.

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