2015:

He had been staring at Rosa off and on for the past ten minutes. She sat next to Marie at the shiny, sticky bar, talking about the article she was writing for the magazine, the promising Tinder date she had been on last weekend, how her landlord was an ass who would kick her out if he discovered her cat. And every once in awhile, she glanced back at the man in the booth. He was with four others, two of whom were women, so at least Rosa knew he wasn’t some creepy predator. He had accountability. Witnesses. She had sworn off creeps after the cute cashier at the bookstore had started following her around. It didn’t hurt that this guy also looked vaguely like James Dean. He slouched into the corner of the booth, laconic in a leather jacket and white t-shirt, twirling a lollipop from one corner of his mouth to the other, occasionally removing it to sip his beer.

His eyes flicked back to her at the bar now and then, taking in her red work-to-night dress, tastefully slit up to just above the knee and exposing a tantalizing bit of caramel thigh. She could feel him looking at her. She just hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.

“Marie, you see that guy in the booth? My right, your left in the leather jacket? He’s been staring. Do you think I should go say hi? Maybe send him a drink?” Marie’s blue eyes darted over, moving in that circular, non-obvious way that is so very obvious to anyone bothering to watch. Which he was.

“That depends. He’s cute. Very devil-may-care. What do you feel like doing?“Marie smiled, waggling her blond eyebrows suggestively. Rosa glanced back one more time, taking in the pile of glasses on his table as his friends dug in their wallets and laughed loosely.

“Marie, I think you can go. I’ll see you next week.”

To a chorus of Marie’s “ow-ows” and after a go-get-em slap on the ass, she rose without another word. Rosa strolled over nervously, arriving just as they all started getting up. They looked at her appraisingly, the women nodding at her and the men nudging him.

“Mason, we’ll uh...see you tomorrow, man,” the tallest of the group said, smirking at him -Mason -before he winked at Rosa. Mason nodded before he turned back to Rosa, not saying anything. He hadn’t even gotten up.

“Umm...hi.” He stared at her, raising his eyebrows. Even though she had felt them on her all night, this was the first time she could see that his eyes were green. “I was just wondering why you were drinking with that ridiculous lollipop in your mouth. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Why do you -I mean -do it?” Well, that was smooth.

He rolled it across his mouth to the other side. “If I drink something bitter while eating something sweet, it makes both flavors more intense. More extreme. I can appreciate each more. If you sit down, I’ll let you try.” He glanced from the other side of the booth back to her, a challenge in his eyes. She sat.

“Isn’t that kind of -well, gross? Suckers and beer? It’s not exactly cookies and coffee.” He smiled, and she glimpsed his slightly crooked, overlapping front teeth.

“On the contrary. There are actually some pretty great pairings. This one, for example, is Blue Moon and orange Tootsie Pop.”

With one hand, he took the candy from his mouth, a strand of saliva stretching thinner and thinner before it broke, dripping down his full lower lip. He held it out to Rosa. She took it from him, cold fingers brushing his warm ones as her mouth watered. Looking from it to him, she slowly sunk the candy into her mouth, sucking on it and twirling it from side to side in imitation of him. Mason watched hungrily, eyes dilated. With a final suck and as loud a pop as she could manage, she took it out of her mouth and handed it back to him.

“And now,” he said, plunking his half-empty glass in front of her, “drink.”

****

2016:

Mason sat against the wall on his bed, long legs stretched out in front of him as he watched the clock and waited for the mail to come. It usually came sometime after lunch, but whether or not there would be anything worthwhile was another question. His brother had sent him a wedding invitation. Mason wasn’t sure whether that was supposed to be ironic or heartfelt, but he knew that he wasn’t going. He wouldn’t be going anywhere for awhile.

Bang bang BANG! Some asshole was pounding on the door again.

“Harding! Back corner. You have mail.” The asshole guard who insisted on making such a racket every time he opened the fucking door clanked his keys and stomped his feet, giving Mason plenty of time to get off the bed and amble into the corner. The one time he hadn’t, the asshole had cracked him in the head. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Mason stood with his arms crossed, leaning into the white wall as the metal door opened. He had been with other inmates until they had started threatening to rape him. He’d been moved to solitary for his own safety. The asshole guard came in, his beer belly preceding the rest of him. Mason fixed his eyes immediately on the packet of letters he was holding. On the outside, no one ever sent anyone letters. On the inside, it was all they had. Sometimes, Mason would swear the Postal Service was being propped up by the prison system. USPS and USps.

“More fanmail, Harding. I swear, you’re a rockstar to some of these poor morons.” He tossed the letters on the bed and left again. It was the first time someone had spoken to Mason in -he glanced at the clock -eight hours. He pounced on the letters immediately, shredding the first one open.

Dear Mason,

I was so happy to hear from you -are you sure you’re okay? I wish you weren’t so lonely. I would keep you company...

Dear Mason,

I just want u to know that I think your inoccint. I should probly introduse myself. I live in NJ and Im a wife and mother...

Dear Mason,

I truly think we were meant to be together. From your last letter, it sounds like we would get along perfectly. I wouldn’t mind if you choked me every now and then ;). Please find a few pictures of me enclosed...

One of them was written on an honest-to-God napkin.

Dear Mason,

My name is Annabel Lewis. I promise I’m not one of those silly women who write to inmates, but I saw your picture on the news (the one where you’re wearing the blue AC/DC shirt), and I just felt this connection...

There were twelve fan letters today. Four of them were from new women. A couple of them were heinously written, misspellings and atrocious grammar galore. He stopped reading the hate mail, the letters calling him evil and coward and son-of-a-bitch as soon as he realized what they were. There were sixteen of those. But at least answering these women -he had taken to mentally referring to them his flock -would take some time. And God knew he had that.

***

Dear Rachel,

Of course you’re the only one I write to. My one and only...

Dear Greta,

It means so much to me that you think of me as much as I think of you. Never before have I felt so understood. I, too, believe that we would be exactly suited for one another...

Dear Lucia,

I know you are just fourteen but you sound so much older...

Dear Alexis,

Of course I’m innocent...

He signed all of them ”Your One and Only -Mason.”

***

2015:

He had eluded them for so long. His mistake with the Mexican one was that he had fallen asleep after, and somehow -somehow -she had managed to saw her wrist ties off on a tree branch. By the time he woke up, there were cop cars on the road down to the shed, and he could only run so far with bare feet before they caught up to him.

It was unfortunate that he had chosen to take her to the shed that night. He could have just chosen his nice, tidy, evidence-free apartment, but instead he had picked the shed. It had been weeks since he had treated himself to the sight of a woman strung up among the trees, spread-eagled in the branches, rivulets of red running earthward. Plus, it had been a full moon -all the better to see you with, my dear. And so he had chosen the shed, with the dumping grounds just a stone’s throw from the porch and his Polaroids in their special case on the rusted shelf inside. The cops had found his lovely, decomposed harem when some poor hapless trainee had stumbled across a femur bone. Literally. Apparently, someone had thrown up when they saw the Polaroids. That still made him smile sitting in his cell weeks later.

He actually wasn’t sure how many women there were in the woods. Sitting in handcuffs at his arraignment with his lawyers beside him, he counted as the names were read off. Nine. Plus aggravated kidnapping, rape, and “forcible penetration with a foreign object” (ha) for the bitch who escaped. Rosa Perez. At least they didn’t know about the others. Although nine was surely enough to put him away for life, if not worse.

***

2019:

After endless appeals and delays, interrogations and interviews, bribery and battery, there was no putting it off any longer. Mason Harding would be executed tomorrow. It had been over three years since he was caught, two since his trial and sentencing. The publicity had died down for awhile, but with the imminent demise of the eminent serial killer, media outlets brought back the old pictures and experts, the footage of female admirers with their “we believe Mason” signs. Psychiatrists attempted to explain the inexplicable.

Mason, who had maintained his innocence during his trial and throughout too many interviews to count, suddenly decided that he wanted to talk. A camera was set up, a famous criminal biographer was called in, and he began listing the locations of what he called his “dumping grounds.” By his estimation, he had killed somewhere around forty women. Maybe more.

***

2024:

They made a documentary miniseries based on Theo Winters’ biography of Mason Harding. The last episode of the series showed that famous interview between the two men, exactly nine hours before Harding had been executed by lethal injection. Rosa had heard that he mentioned her directly at the end, that man who haunted her nightmares, and she knew that she probably shouldn’t watch it. But she needed to.

It took her weeks to work herself up to it, but she finally suceeded at talking herself and her husband into it.

The episode title appeared on a darkened screen, and then there he was. James Dean with his leather jacket and lollipop. Only now he was wearing prison orange and looked slightly haggard. Bags under his eyes. Thin wrists. James Dean on a hunger strike, righteous indignation blazing from his green eyes. She wouldn’t watch the whole thing. Rosa told her husband to fast-forward to five minutes from the end, covering her eyes and breathing fast, even here, in the home she had designed to be a haven of comfort and security. When he gently touched her shoulder, she opened her eyes again. He handed her the control, and she pressed play.

“Mason, I just have one more question for you. Why are you admitting this now? You’ve always said that you’re innocent. Why now?”

Mason Harding paused for a moment and smiled, that same slow grin she remembered from the booth at the bar.

“Well. I suppose it’s because I don’t have any time left. If I want people to know, it has to be now.” Theo Winters knit his eyebrows, uncertain.

“I’m not sure I follow. Do you mean that you’re sorry for what you did? You have to get it off your chest so families can have closure?” Harding stared at him intensely, arrogance and disbelief twisting his mouth.

“No. More like if I want people to know everything I did, everything I accomplished, I have to tell them now. I waited this long because this way, I know that people will still be talking about me, the police will still be searching.” Mason turned directly to the camera, eyes boring into the screen. “When families are informed of what I did to their daughters and sisters, they will think about me. Maybe if there’s a little sister, she’ll picture me doing the things I did to her instead. When Rosa Perez hears about it, she’ll remember every time I touched her, beat her, tied her up, like I’m doing it all again. I’ll be the one and only person that makes all those people feel that way, even after I’m dead. And if this interview ever airs, even more people will imagine me and everything I’ve done. I will be fucking immortal.”

The screen freeze-framed on her personal face of evil, and the credits began to roll. Rosa put her head in her hands.

We stand among the ocean’s sweat

A hair’s breadth from the cigarettes

The music swings and dips again

An endless song begins within.

Who could you be, if you really tried?

If breathless dreams bequeathed a sigh?

In solemn, steady lyrics lie

Coded quietude amplified.

Nevermore will sweet winds blow

Strangers and teardrops scream below

A fantastic neon stretch above

The sagging, sobbing death of love.

Sharpened strings go with the grain

Pulling toward the depths of pain

Silver ring and patterned rose

To the world’s embrace, he drunkened goes.

Written in Hemingway's style.

David Hemingway believed himself to be very clever. Descended from the greatest writer who ever lived, he said. I do not know whether this was true. He was the best card player I ever met, and I told him that, and it was a mistake. Every night in the dark barracks after patrol, he lit his cigarettes and looked at me through the side of his eye, nodding at the cards with smugness that said, aren’t you ready to lose again you poor bastard? He never turned the lights on because the first time he had beaten me had been during a power outage. I think he believed that his luck came from the dark.

He had grown up on Long Island in the 1980s, in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and had become a permanently closeted homosexual as a result. His father had told him how stupid and uncontrolled all the gays were. And so Hemingway believed that being smart and controlled and hetero and healthy were all the same. This was why he believed himself to be smart. He did not have AIDS, and he was somewhat smart, and he shared the name of a man who was so. But he was not hetero, and he was sometimes uncontrolled because he looked at me when we showered together. His eyes moved as when he came in wanting to play cards, and I did not begrudge him this. If there were a woman in this desert I would look at her.

Sometimes I looked at him as well for he was brave and true and golden. He was clever in that way of boys who have become men who may now die and who know this. He was clever in his avoiding death but stupid in his risking it. I -I am neither brave nor true nor golden, and when he looked at me, I am sure all he was seeing was my form. In card playing, he was clever because he was not afraid of losing. When he played in the light, his fear was his downfall.

We were braver at night in the barracks, and in the sunlit patrol we were afraid. One day, we were patrolling, and Hemingway stepped on the thing which was his downfall. He was golden and true but not brave. And the sun shone on us and he died.

Love is like

A funhouse mirror.

In we walk, willing witnesses

To the diverse distortions of dimension.

We enter to gaze at the reflections -different

Versions of ourselves grinning

or frowning back at us.

Shorter

Fatter

Taller

Thinner

Hourglass

Stretched to the ceiling.

We find one that shows us something

We never pictured for ourselves.

We pause.

And gaze.

The other us

Gazes back in the dim

Liminal light of the otherworld.

They say breaking a mirror

Is seven years of bad luck.

But breaking this one

Would shatter us.

Roses are red

Your face is blue

Fresh meat is sweetened

By your perfume.

Your hair is yellow

Your eyes are glass

One slice as you lay there

Watching clouds pass.

My heart is black

Your blood is red

Life leaking away

After you took me to bed.

My knives are silver

My fire burns bright

I feel you inside me

With each unholy bite.

I saw an ad in the paper yesterday,

and you might be curious what it had to say.

At first I thought it was a joke, you see -

whether horrific or hilarious is up to you and me.

But the more I think of it, the more I believe

a joke like this no normal person could conceive.

It is written in rhyme, as I suppose is right -

appropriate for those with a literary bite.

If you're curious, look ahead to read

the full-page ad for librarians who will feed.

Wanted: Cannibal Librarians

     This miserable town is terribly crowded

     and not by those who we would say are well-read.

     If ignorance is bliss, then this town should be euphoric,

     but stupidity and inanity cause nothing but choleric!

     Innumerable dunces wander the street

     Shuffling dumbly as though with clubfeet.

     A true traffic hazard with heads bowed to phones, 

     Dozens and dozens of Kardashian drones!

      If we fail to act now, true readers of this town,

      the morons will transform your children into clowns!

      We must act for true literature, politics, philosophy -

       or else education will stutter and atrophy!

      I therefore propose a necessary action,

      and I curse this paper should there be a redaction! 

      We, caretakers of the world yet to come, 

      must devour the uncaring -leave not a crumb!

      With homo sapien -phagia, 

      we will prevent knowledge's euthanasia!

      If interested join me at the library Wednesday next.

      At our first meeting we decide the leaders of the sect.

      The Cannibal Librarians, we will of course be called,

      and under our reign, the illiterate will be mauled.

      Of course they will not anticipate our feed,

      for which of them would pick up this newspaper to read?

Silence

Don't you love that word

The one that has so many sounds

But, yet, none at all

Its enough to fix a heart

Or break one

Its enough to make you sane

Or insane

Silence

It bothers me

But it calms me

Maybe I'm crazy

So loud, I can't hear a thing

Yet, so quiet, I can hear too much

Silence is scary

But also beautiful 

Maybe someone should speak up

Change things

Maybe

But it won't happen

It could all be different

Just think

This world is so silent

But still too loud

I feel so alone

I think I'm going crazy 

Possibly insane

Or maybe I'm just silent