By Evin Simonen

IlluStrations by Viktor Olynyk

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| took her down to the beach to shoot her. It was the least | could do, considering her current circumstance. She stood in a puddle, letting her shoes soak as the falling rain hit the water and sent small splashes onto the legs of her jeans. She crinkled her nose when she smelled the stench of piss and shit coming from the outhouse behind her. | couldn't bring myself to do it in a wretched place like this. I'm not a monster.

She walked slowly, as if doing so would make me change my mind. | nudged her back with the barrel of my shotgun to make her walk faster. She flinched at the cold metal then tensed, making her shoulder-blades hug the barrel. It felt like an invitation.

It felt like an invitation when she unlocked her car from thirty feet away after leaving the mall, giving me enough time to crawl into the back seat and wait for her. Her bare arms glistened in the moonlight from the rain. Her arms were skinny. They barely held the thin straps of her damp tank-top. Her hair was black and stuck to her face. When | spoke to her at the bar, she was a dirty blonde.

| let her reach the freeway before making my presence known. | sat up in the backseat and waited for her to check the rear-view mirror—an action she didn’t perform nearly enough. When she saw me, she sweraved into oncoming traffic, then back into her lane. She didn’t scream. She looked like the type of girl that would scream. | watched her as she grasped for a weapon, something to defend herself with. She stopped when | placed my shotgun on the arm-rest

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beside her. | wondered if she recognized me as the guy she tried to go home with earlier that week. A sloppy “I live just three blocks down.” was whispered to me through breath that undeniably gave away the six tequila slimes. 4 She looked like the type of girl that would scream <a = i when she let men fuck her, when she whored herself iy out to these men that she barely knew. She reminded LY me of my older sister. Her arms were skinny too. My

sister was an echo of my mother. “You'll never amount to anything if you coop yourself up in your room all

“Youre special” S7 Hf, A from behind her. day.” My mother would nag. “You're not special.” My

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sister would echo. The night | found out she let a boy

from her school take her virginity, | tied a plastic bag around her head while she slept. Even though | was only nine, her skinny arms made it easy for me to hold her down when she struggled.

| made her drive to a rest stop that was hidden away just an hour out of the city. Not many

people knew about it because there was no signage leading people to it from off the high- way. | only knew of it because that was where my parents abandoned me when | was eleven. They told me we were going on a vacation, packed our bags, and left town. They stopped at the rest stop to let me go pee and when | came out of the outhouse, they were gone.