Page 1 of ILY
ILY
CHAPTER ONE
LEAF
“Oh,Michael. I’m gonna getcha this time,” I murmur to myself, my eyes wide and wild as I clack away on my dead aunt’s ancient desktop keyboard.
I know I’ve lost my mind, but to be fair, I haven’t had a lot of sleep the past two weeks. Michael has been keeping me up all hours of the night. He’s mocking me with his beady little eyes and his long front teeth.
I swear I can hear him laughing in my sleep.
He’s a groundhog, but he’s also the goddamn devil, straight from hell itself.
I bet Satan sent him as some kind of karma. Maybe this has to do with quitting my job. Maybe one less interpreter out there is hurting the world in some way.
I scoff, discarding that. That can’t be the case. It really can’t.
We have a code of professional conduct. We might, on occasion, be questionable people, but we don’t do badthings. That’s kind of the whole point of the job. The terrible things I might have signed over the years were just interpreted from the equally terrible hearing people saying them out loud, so I can’t possibly be paying for those sins…right?
I rub at my eyes. They’re hurting from staring at the screen for so long. I blame Michael for any inevitable loss of sight in the future. When I blink at the monitor once more, I see him scurrying back to one of his many hidey-holes.
The cameras I set up around my property to catch him in the act of death and destruction have only seemed to have emboldened him. He finds the time to sit in front of each one, eating my hard-earned vegetables.
Slowly.
With a twinkle in his eyes.
It’s why I’m on the dark web right now, buying explosives. You can’t just buy any old TNT online, apparently. A fun fact I learned when I attempted to google where to get it. You need to have a reason—a good, valid reason. Like owning a mine or a demolition company. Since I have neither of those things, I had to get clever.
I had to go deeper. To the seedy underbelly of the interweb.
And I plan on going there, damn it. I plan on getting that TNT, tunneling under Michael’s home, and blowing all of it up.
I’m going to make himruethe day he ever thought to mess with me.
My fist lifts in the air, and I shake it, cackling wildly.
“Michael!” I shout and then hunch back over my computer. My hair is askew, my goggles sitting pushed back on my head, my shirt is on inside out, but I don’t care. The seller online is going to sell me the explosives.
I’m going to demolish the rodent and his evil hidey-holes.
He will regret his life choices. I want to hear him squeal.
I want retribution.
I continue my sale and then lean back in my computer chair. The seller foolishly asked me yesterday what this was for. Curious little fucker. I have nothing to hide. So, I told him.
It’s for Michael, I’d typed out.He needs to die.
They said nothing after that.
It’s fine. I don’t need their approval, and I’m sure I can find someone else to fulfill my order. I just need the TNT. I’ve turned into Wile E. Coyote. Michael is the Roadrunner. Only unlike the cartoon version, I will be victorious.
That beady-eyed piece of shit willmeet his end.
Standing up, I walk a few feet away to the little bar area that looks like it came built into the house. It’s hard to imagine my aunt ever drinking. The few times I saw her, she was a little weird and reclusive, but she was soft-spoken, never swore, and was always brewing kombucha and other shit because she wanted to live until she was a hundred.
The last time we’d talked, she said she had too much unfinished business, whatever that meant.
