Schmuckumentary

I knew I wanted chocolate after the paella.
You sampled everything before deciding on straciatella.
Little shreds.
Already we were selecting our afterlives.

You told me about a murder in your childhood town.
One summer night, the neighbors heard shouting.
They were concerned, but no one bothered.
By morning, the woman was dead.
Some said it was the husband.
Nothing was proven.
Some time later, he was found in the woods,
face down in the moss with an axe buried his back.
A second spine.

I told you I have seen every episode of Forensic Files.
As if that proved I was harmless.
As if that made it safe to ask:
if you were going to kill someone, how would you do it?

“We’re going there, huh?” you said,
half-laughing, half-armored.

You paused for a bit, and said,
“A gun, probably.”

“How American,” I retorted.
Clean, calculated.
Does the job from a distance.

You asked the question back.

I said, “Let me think.”
Because how do you answer that without admitting
you’ve thought about it in your most vulnerable hours.
I answered:

“Probably with a baseball bat. Or a dos por dos.”
I struggled with the translation.

A terrible intimacy, wood meeting bone.
The mind forced open, its thoughts suddenly matter.

We laughed at how absurd our conversation has become
and finished our cones, mine melting faster than yours.

True crime taught me the method unmasks the murderer.

An axe is excess, revenge.

A bullet is cold, polite.
A way to become a stranger to what you’ve done.

Blunt force is different.
It asks for closeness, for witness.
For you take the final decision into your hands.

Maybe that explains why I’m still picking at the exit wound,
while you walked away with nothing but amnesia.

Only shreds of sugar left at the crime scene.