This is very short, and it's not meant to be longer. I was just listening to "Lime Tree" by Bright Eyes and the idea came into my head. Tear it apart!!

__________

Her words were brittle, old paper.

“It’s done.”

Only two words left on my voicemail, each a shaky fragment of a grand horrific idea. What was “it”? What was “done”…?

But I knew. The message crackled out, I could ask no questions.

It was only eight in the morning. New light filled my box of kitchen, and even with the window open all I could smell was coffee and cigarettes and last night.

The apartment was just a step, a hoop to jump through. High school, car, college, apartment, good boy… I moved forward, but there was no destination. Just another sign, another detour, another phone call and job application.

Have you ever committed a felony? Check yes or no.

Have you ever killed a human being?

Y means “yes”, pay close attention, and then N is “no”, get this right, where does the check go?

I sat at the table with my cellphone facedown on the table. My clammy hands on my forehead, my brow like wet peach marble.

Marla was only herself now. Oxygen touched those pale lips just for her expanding lungs, and nature would follow her around and fill her again and again but there was only her. Months would pass and her body would be the most beautiful functional factory, making no output but preparing just in case. Nature would be puzzled. What is the point? it would ask. And human people will laugh harlequin laughs at the question.

My heart pounded as a reminder in my chest. Every beat, small putter, felt foreign inside me. When you feel empty, why does your heart insist to continue its awkward flutter? It only sends echoes over a void expanse.

Marla was wonderful, too. She was amazing, she danced all the time, she read books, and now she would be gone. That’s what we had decided: something about the new emptiness made it impossible to look into each other’s eyes. All we saw was a tryst, a possibility - a mistake, two little pink lines, one paler than the other so we had to stare at them for ten more minutes as the world fell apart. We were two functioning individuals with dreams and moving parts, and from the possibility the only thing we had created was destruction. The truest memory we now had was of blood and sterile tools and equipment.

I would miss her.

I would miss something I had never even seen.

I had been so pleased with the riotous life - it was a dream! - that had followed from evening into morning. Now there was an aftermath. Now real life was no good.

Every song on the radio was of another time. The joy, anger, angst, free style living - all of this was packed into compartments in my mind with the memories. With Darren and Keith and Tay. I hadn’t contacted them in days.

I moved Marla into her compartment, which she shared with the baby. Now I could live with two lives that I had once held in the my hands, the two mixing together and mixing and mixing. And I would see the world in the color their blended memories made.

My fingers crawled across the tabletop to my cell. It was so light, weightless, new - I could clutch it in a fist.

When I threw it against the wall, it snapped into two pieces and clattered on the linoleum, noisy, deafening, destroyed.