“Look, I’m not going to insult your intelligence. We both know exactly what’s going to happen next. One of them”— Lin jerked his chin at the pair, his fingers curling with mine and when he squeezed, I squeezed back, hard as I could, like our hands could keep us moored in normal—“is going to say something really fucking stupid. The other one is going to snap. If it’s Faiz, he’ll get a boost of adrenaline and he’s going to grab Phillip, and they’re both going to wrestle until Faiz somehow manages to accidentally impale him on a piece of scenery.”
“And if it’s Phillip?”
Lin had a laugh like a bark, like a wound weeping sepsis. “Faiz is going to die outright. Duh.”
*
This is the problem with horror movies:
Everyone knows what’s coming next but actions have momentum, every decision an equal and justified reaction. Just because you know you should, doesn’t mean that you can, stop.
*
Phillip moved first.
If I was a betting woman, I’d have put money on Faiz being the one to break the stalemate. I’d have gambled on his idiocy. Grief makes us worse people. But it was Phillip who pulled the metaphorical trigger, knuckles gore-smeared as he drew his knuckles back from Faiz’s face, vermillion and black. Faiz gawped at him, palm cupped beneath his jaw, nose bridge split in three spaces, the tip concave. He drooled blood and rills of mucus.
“You broke my nose.” You brok muh nus. Enunciation is a bastard when your nasal septum has been flattened, and your mouth is sticky with salt and snot. Faiz swallowed, rubbed his thumb along his chin. The skin stayed red and wet.
“I—” Phillip shook out his fist and stared at Faiz, stupefied. Golden-boy Phillip, good-guy Phillip, valedictorian, voted “Most Likely to Succeed” seven consecutive years in a row, cut down at the knees, no more exceptional than your average punk, another man’s blood curdling between his fingers. He wiped his hand over his face, leaving four lines across his cheeks. “I didn’t mean to.”
His voice was a hush, full of shame for the sin he’d committed against better judgment. Men like Phillip don’t punch people. Except when they do.
“You broke my fucking nose.”
“It was an accident—”
“You fucking punched me.”
“Dude. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you. You were just going off the rails there—I. I didn’t know what else to do. It was an accident, okay? I wasn’t thinking.” He breathed out. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Beside me, Lin was unfolding, uncurling to his full height, slim as my waning hopes. Ohaguro-bettari. Nothing but blackened teeth. Nothing but teeth stained with tannic acids and ferric compounds. An old girlfriend told me once about the unguent that the aristocrats used: iron fillings fermented in vinegar, in tea, in cups of sake, stirred with gallnuts from the sumac tree until it became something that’d stick.
I wondered for a second what the mixture would taste like, if it’d be like kissing copper from the ohaguro’s tongue, if I could content myself knowing the last person I kiss was a dead woman’s ghost.
“This is the part where we all die,” Lin whispered.
Faiz pulled a knife. Of course he did. There was no timeline where he wouldn’t have escalated, wouldn’t have found a knife or a gun or a jag of glass. Something heavy enough to breach the skull, pulp the brain into paste. He swung as I staggered to my feet, a scream loaded in my lungs. No artistry to the swoop of his arm but a knife is a knife is a knife is a sharp edge meant to split the seams of the skin, open up the torso and let in the light.
I bayed like a wolf under the lunatic moon as blood gushed free. Muscles relaxed and gravity tugged; slick reams of purple-grey intestine unspooled from the gash in Phillip’s belly. Faiz had cut so deep. Lin grabbed me, both arms. I howled. Phillip spasmed onto the tatami, every convulsion disgorging another palmful of viscera, clawing at his entrails but they wouldn’t fit back inside.
The room smelled of gastric juices and vomit, of urine and bowels. The room smelled of blood. The room smelled of the man my best friend had murdered. The room smelled of dying.
“Help me.” His face was whiter than paint.
“Don’t,” Lin hissed into my ear. I couldn’t tell what he meant, if what he was saying was don’t engage, or don’t try because we are in act three and barreling down to the end, or don’t look. Don’t let this be the thing you remember about Phillip, golden boy, dead boy, organs slopping out of his side.