How Best to Avoid Dying by Owen Egerton Read Free Book Online Page B

knees are wet. I gag. I don’t yell. She has a piece of paper taped to her belly.
    Don’t tell anyone what I did. Tell them I went to Mexico. Love Jenny
    I look around the kitchen for the cordless phone. I don’t see it. I run into the living room.
    I find the phone on the receiver. There’s a note taped to it as well.
    Please
    I put the phone down and walk back to Jenny.
    Don’t tell anyone what I did. Tell them I went to Mexico. Love Jenny
    Jenny left the comma out after Love , so it’s not so much a signing off as a command. Love Jenny . I laugh. Then I feel sick.
    She’s small. Long fair hair that she’d forget to wash. The note is taped to the pooch under her belly.
    No blood. Maybe there’s a mouthful of bleach missing from under the sink. Maybe there’s an empty bottle of sleeping pills in the trash. Maybe something else happened. Was she alive when I went to sleep?
    I sit on the floor and look at her. My hand hurts because I’m biting it.
    I get up, close the blinds, pull the curtains, and make sure the doors are locked. Then I sit and watch her some more. Mingus is still playing.
    She looks wrong on the kitchen floor.
    I towel her dry and sit her on the couch. She’s stiff and smells. Not like rot. It’s a different smell. It’s the smell under the bleachy smell in hospitals. She looks better on the couch. More comfortable. I try to cross her legs. Her legs used to be so ticklish. Just a touch and she’d start kicking and squealing.
    â€œI’m going to peeeeeee,” she’d say.
    She’s wearing that leather wristband I got her on South Congress. Just a leather strap, like a belt for her wrist. Seventy dollars. Seventy dollars, but she just had to have it. That was Jenny. Just HAD to have it. Just HAD to do it. As if nothing was a choice, all things were inescapable. Just HAD to die.
    I should cry and yell. I don’t feel like crying. Her corpse is on the couch looking at me. Mingus is still playing. It’s Mingus Ah Um . Maybe his best. Most people say The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is his best, and it’s good. But Ah Um is going for more. It hurts more. Lives more. Jenny is dead.
    I need coffee. That will help me think. A slow cup. I make enough for two out of habit. Jenny likes hers Miles Davis black. I add milk to mine until it passes Coltrane. Then some honey to get the color of Mingus. Almost yellow. Name a race and Mingus had the blood. Black, white, Indian, Chinese. A Klan man’s treasure chest. Kill half a dozen races with one rope.
    I place the cups down on the coffee table and sit across from her.
    Jenny had been with me for three months. Ninety-two days. She moved in a week after I met her. She came over onenight and never left. I liked watching nature documentaries with her, liked the way she made the sheets smell, liked drinking Lone Star on the porch with her, liked how she rubbed my neck with her chin, liked how she bit my nipples at odd times like breakfast. I loved taking care of her.
    â€œWhat would you do if I died?” she once asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “Cry, I guess.”
    â€œBut what would you do with the body?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œCome on. Let’s say you found me and I was still warm.”
    â€œThat’s sick.”
    â€œNot for two consenting adults. Don’t be such a prude.”
    â€œI’d call 911,” I said.
    â€œSo they could rush me to the morgue before I got deader?”
    â€œWhy do you keep asking?”
    â€œDo you love me?” she asked.
    â€œI just met you.”
    â€œDo you love me?”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    â€œI’m going to ask for a favor.”
    She was alive when I went to sleep. I’m almost sure. I sip my coffee.
    When I was nine a friend told me that a scorpion would rather kill itself than touch fire. I didn’t believe him. “Animals don’t do suicide,” I told him. We