his jeans, but he pushed me away, turning back to the limp body, prodding it with his foot. Then to my horror he picked it up and began to strip flesh away from the corpse like peeling a banana, tearing off slabs of red muscle tissue to reveal the gleaming blue-white ribcage. Cracking the ribs open, he reached into the chest cavity, tearing out the heart, squeezing it to pulp in his fingers like a strawberry and then licking it off. A pile of offal lay at his feet on the sidewalk, with what resembled a human head still attached, bloodless shreds of flesh and bone— organs spilling out onto the sidewalk— loops of intestine, lungs, stomach popping out of the gaping wound. I stood gagging as Kurt nonchalantly walked away.
“You can’t leave this!”
His eyes narrowed to blue slivers. “It’s a slaughterhouse.”
“Maybe so but we can’t leave this here.”
He shrugged, shoving the remains indifferently into the dumpster, staring at the gore on his hands. Blood was smeared and spattered all over his face. Couldn’t walk through the streets with him looking like this, I had to lick him clean. I pulled him behind the dumpster to clean the blood from his face and hands with my tongue. Panting, he grabbed my face, kissing me hard as he pinned me against a wall. “Now we fuck!”
“You’re completely covered in blood… ”
He tugged at my jeans and turned me to face the wall. “Don’t care.”
We fucked standing up, crying out like animals.
When we made it back to the apartment, Kurt collapsed on the futon, moaning. Alcohol in the blood was affecting him adversely. He sat up suddenly, vomiting blood onto the floor and all over his clothes.
“Boy, you’re a fun date.” I ran and got a large plastic garbage bag from under the sink and wet towels from the bathroom. “You should know better than to take a drunk,” I scolded him as I mopped up the blood. “Did you want to get caught? Let’s get these clothes off.” I took off his lightweight brown leather jacket, much nicer than anything I had. I sponged it off, throwing it onto the chair. Tearing off his shirt, I stuffed it into the plastic bag and then stripped off his jeans. I wiped as much blood as I could from his body and threw the towels in the bag, too.
“Come on, you’re taking a shower,” I said, as I hefted his arm over my shoulder.
I put him under the shower to let the water sober him up. He grimaced and groaned. Ethan had sometimes taken inebriated victims but they never affected him quite this much. I was careful never to indulge too much myself. Silent, Kurt leaned back against the wall of the stall as I washed the rest of the blood away. Now and then a little shiver of pleasure convulsed his body.
Afterward, I wrapped him in a robe I’d stolen from a hotel, and led him out to sit on the chair while I disposed of the bloody sheets. While I remade the futon, Kurt sat behind me, staring at his hands even though they were free of blood. It was far from sunrise but the best thing he could do was to sleep it off.
“Lie down.” I took him by the hand like a child.
He loosened the robe, letting it slip down his body to the floor, sinking to the futon in my arms with a bemused smile. “Fuck?”
“Go to sleep. You’re in no condition.”
“Always ready.” He moaned, grasping the sides of his head in pain. “Scheisse!”
I soothed him, laying myself alongside him. “It’s all right— sleep.”
While he slept it off, I took the bag down to the incinerator and dropped it in. After that was done, I went back to clean the bathroom. As I came back into the room I noticed Kurt’s passport and wallet lying open on the coffee table. I picked them up and flipped through them. The passport was Norwegian, counterfeit. It named him as one Erik Nordstrom, giving his age as twenty-one years, birthplace as Oslo. I picked up the wallet, a few credit cards and about fifty dollars cash were inside and his Norwegian driver’s license, also faked. That wasn’t what I was looking for. A faded, creased photograph was tucked behind the driver’s license, a slender dark-haired man, a pretty blonde woman, a dark haired little girl and Kurt, about thirteen years old, his parents and his sister, a world ago, as he’d