5/

The nightly news theme jingles back from commercial in the other room. Between the drill whirls, over the gurgling, Theodore can make out an anchor calling him process-focused.

“Reductive, don’t you think?” he torques the tool he’s using until he pushes past the resistance with a crack, wipes it on the towel at his belt and clicks his tongue.

As of an hour ago the man below him can do nothing but stare with glassy eyes and choke on his own whimpers; this one’s followed the script from begging to dissociation almost perfectly. The initial hit of dopamine is fading, so Theodore palms his last tool and spins it in a toss, whistling.

The chatter on three screens is background as he cleans and sets a new offering upon his altar, twelve in all. He mutes the video playing in the upper corner of his phone as he scrolls social media and sees he’s trending.

Theodore prickles at becoming a subject of theoretical psychology: all these people thinking they understand him, claiming omnipotent insight into his desire to play God.

A downy woodpecker whinnies from out on his porch while he’s washing dishes. It hops up on the step outside the door and takes off in undulating flight across the yard before it twists and vanishes behind the giant oak.

Someone’s sprinkled birdseed on his porch. One bird lands and then another, twittering, dancing, and taking flight. He wanders to the door and spends some time standing behind the screen, head still cocked in contemplation when the arm slips around his throat. Instinct raises his hands to grab it and the metal slips between his ribs.

She lowers him to his stomach and twists the knife, letting him twitch and gasp. “I taught you that one,” he stutters out, unable to get enough air in his lungs to cry out when she does it again. “Why the birds?”

“This isn’t sentimental,” she says, flicking blood from the blade and wiping it on his shirt. He’s not going to fight her — wouldn’t even if he could. Two songbirds flit and peck at the birdseed on the porch.

He tastes copper and smells plastic as he tries to asks her intention in a sputtering gurgle, and asks if she knows they’re the same.

“You’re too addicted to this. You got cruel. You got sloppy. Enough for them to find you.”

It’s his last wish to throw her own cruelty back in her face, but his body is too numb to coordinate his muscles. She curses, squatting by him while he watches and listens to the birds.

It doesn’t feel like much, dying. But then, nothing ever really has.

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