First

Crime Fiction by Lissa Muir

I’m walking in the ravine. It’s early Fall, a Thursday, and I am alone. Well, not alone, exactly. There have been fifty squirrels, mostly black, and one scrawny coyote, hungry and haunting at the top of the hill beside me. This is the twelfth walk I’ve done over the past three months—I do them weekly—and it’s getting colder and darker every day. Back in July, there were runners and cyclists getting their exercise in before the sun and humidity smothered their will. Now, there’s just me and the animals. And one woman. We always pass each other on the big hill, her coming down as I am walking up. She’s the reason I keep coming back. When we pass one another, she smiles reflexively, a good sign. I’ve also noted her wedding ring, meaning she isn’t some lonely middle-aged single woman. She has a husband. And a job, judging by the purple World’s Best Teacher! sweatshirt she’s been wearing lately. A teacher, with fellow teacher friends and a principal boss and students who love or hate her. A woman of routine—always coming down the hill at 5:48 am. She’s perfect.

I time my walks so I am home by 6:15 am, enough time to sneak in through the back door and slip silently into bed before my dad’s alarm goes off at six thirty. When he knocks on my door at seven, my rumpled pajama bottoms and bedhead make it seem like I have just rolled out of bed. I can’t seem too awake or be too eager. Dad wouldn’t like it. He detests perky, he abhors earnest, would hate it if I were the type who was in all the clubs, eagerly at school before most of the staff. Being who he wants me to be is easy and keeps him off my back. Which is why I’m on the hockey team. Because Dad says it’s a game for real men, not pussies. Plus, there’re no girls on the team, which would be a waste of ice time. Girls, he says, are good for three things: flirtin’, fuckin’, and foldin’ laundry. Which is probably why my mom left without a backward glance at my sister and me when we were ten and eight respectively. Katie and I were so young, didn’t yet understand how Dad worked, and we’d cried and begged him to find Mom and make her come back to us. He said we were pussies and gave us something to cry about, and we learned to never mention Mom again.

“Theo. Now,” Dad yells. “I’ve already called you twice.” True, but since I know that consequences only come after the third time, what point would there be in me doing what he asks before then?

“Sorry, Dad,” I say as I come out of my bedroom. “I stayed up too late on the computer.” A knowing smile spreads across his face, splitting his extensive facial hair in two.

“Watching porn again, were ya?” I let my head fall a notch and look up at him with a grin. I do watch porn, of course, but that wasn’t what I was doing late last night.

He shakes his head. “Can’t fault ya there. Every man needs a little release. When ya turn eighteen, you’ll know what it’s like to give the ole hand a rest.” I smile and he walks past me, slapping my thigh so close to my balls I flinch, and he laughs.

My Dad has been planning my eighteenth birthday since he first found out I was a boy. He and my uncles—and their father and uncles before them—were given the same present the year they officially became men. A sex worker. Prossie. They hate all that woke politically correct bullshit nonsense. So, instead of a birthday cake and my favourite dinner of spaghetti and garlic bread like I used to have on my birthday when Mom was still around, I’ll have a warm-up beer and a session with some diseased whore he and his brothers have probably already fucked. I haven’t decided if I’ll go through with it or just make small talk with her until a reasonable time has passed. Though I am curious to experience sex with a paid participant, it’s kind of pitiable to do so. Like paying friends to hang out with you or paying an employer to let you work for them.

After Dad leaves to drop Katie off at school on his way to work, I have two hours to do whatever I want. On Thursdays, I have first period spare and don’t have class until ten past ten. I watch porn for a bit—Dad would approve—and then sift through the card deck I bought on eBay. Fifty-two serial killers, one per card. Like hockey cards, only less banal. I’ve memorized them all. Not because they’re my heroes or anything because, let’s face it, they’re only on the cards because they were dumb enough to get caught. But I study them to get ideas, to learn from their mistakes. Ergo the three months of ravine reconnaissance I’ve done. Next Thursday will be the day. Dad has arranged for Katie to spend the week at Mrs. Daniels while he is away at a car show for some fresh wheels and fresh pussy with his brothers. I’ll be under the weather Thursday morning, not feel better until after lunch, and I’ll have plenty of time.

***

“Bye Dad. Make good choices, everyone,” I call out from the doorway. He’s getting in the passenger side of Uncle Matt’s black Chevy pickup, which is his right as the second-eldest brother. Tim and Brad are in the back, and they laugh like I am a comedian. “You, too,” Dad calls back and Matt waves out the window while Tim and Brad mockingly blow kisses.  Once they’re gone, I close and lock the door. Just before Dad left, he made a point of showing me the keys to his own truck and tucking them into his jeans. He didn’t want me fucking it up. Doesn’t matter because I won’t be needing a vehicle. All I need are my worn-out Nikes and some nerve. I open the freezer and take out the vodka, pour a half-glass that I fill up with OJ. Taking my drink to the den, I turn on the TV and scroll options until I find what I want. An Ed Gein documentary that I’ve watched at least ten times already. I press play and lean back on the couch, run my hand across the smooth tan of the expensive leather, and picture the cow that was sacrificed so Dad could have a couch fit for a man.

***

Thursday morning dawns dark and ominous. Like rain on the day of a funeral, it’s exactly what I would have ordered, if weather was orderable. I slip on black sweatpants and a zip-up hoodie, dark blue. My running shoes, formerly white and now a scratched and scuffed dull griege. I pop my over-the-ear headphones on and check myself out in the bathroom mirror. I’ve been wearing some variation of this outfit on all my ravine walks, starting with shorts and a T-shirt in the heat of July and adding long shirts and pants as summer waned, adding the hoodie as fall nipped in. It’s utterly forgettable. When the woman sees me, I’ll be as familiar to her as the trees and creek and squirrels. Relaxed and complacent is how you want them. Not scared or worried and on high alert. I leave my phone where it is on my night table—the headphones are for show—and close my eyes, soaking up the moment. I’ll never get another first time and I want to remember this feeling, like a swarm of bees in the hive of my body, erratic and buzzing and dangerous.

I enter the ravine, go down the big hill, and push my way through the brush at the bottom to get to the creek. It’s less lush down here than it was in the thick of the summer, but there are enough evergreens and brambles and downed trees to block the view from the path. Though not rushing as it was in spring, the creek is still more than a foot deep and the giant culvert that sits at one end remains camouflaged, a dark portal through the hill. It’s thirty minutes before the time I usually meet the woman on the path halfway up the hill, and I walk along the creek to calm my nerves. Soon, I will run up the hill through the trees and position myself to be in front of her when she descends. I’ll be sheepish and blushing as I come out of the woods. I’ll say, embarrassedly, that I had to pee and then I’ll shrug and smile. Her return smile will be reflexive; she’s seen me so many times and does not fear me.

I’m still by the creek when I hear footsteps crunching on the gravel path of the hill. I run as silently as possible beside the creek until I am at the bottom of the hill, then take a moment to catch my breath and adjust my headphones. I wait until the woman is less than ten metres away, before I come out from behind the trees and push my way onto the path in front of her. She halts, startled, but smiles when she sees it is me. I halt, too, letting my hands drop from the string of my sweatpants and fall to my sides. I smile an awkward smile.

“Good morning. Sorry if I startled you,” I say. Though she tells me it’s no problem, I can tell she’s wondering what I am doing popping out from the forest. I shuffle my feet, look down at them briefly, and gesture to the woods behind me. “I, um, had to pee.” Her shoulders relax and she laughs. “I’ve had to resort to al fresco pees in the woods myself a few times,” she says. I smile and shrug like we’re the same, even though the image of her dumpy, middle-aged body squatting in the dirt makes me queasy. She tells me to have a nice day and walks by me with a wave on her way down the hill. I begin to walk in the opposite direction like I do every other Thursday, but I only go twenty steps before I glance behind me. She’s not looking, so I slip back into the trees.

As quietly as possible, I walk slowly on fallen leaves back to the creek where I can run soundless on the damp earth of its bank. When I am sure I have run far enough, I walk to the edge of the path and peek out through the trees. She is walking briskly, her arms bent at right angles, pushing behind her like plump pistons. She does not walk with ear buds or headphones because she knows the danger of being a woman alone and distracted. But I am not a danger to her. She has already forgotten about me because she knows me, and I am harmless. Casually, I walk out through the woods at just the right moment so that she has no choice but to bump into me.

“Oof. Sorry.” Her manners are deep-seated, instinctive. It will take a moment before she recognizes me and she will smile before she remembers that she left me only minutes before, going in the opposite direction. When she does, her face will betray her confusion. I shouldn’t be here, but also there is no reason to be scared. But she is. Because there is. I am a predator, and she is my prey. I have carefully chosen her to be my first.

---

Bio: Lissa Muir is a Toronto-based writer whose short stories have appeared in After Dinner Conversation, Grande Dame Literary, Agnes and True, and The Yard: Crime Blog. She also writes the Substack, Middle Aged Neophyte. When not writing, she listens to true crime podcasts while going on increasingly slow walks with her fourteen-year-old Newfoundland dog, Molly.

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