She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,13

willed my head still.

“Good,” she muttered. “Not that I expect much of you. I think you may have found your peak as a busboy, picking up the filth and waste of others. Wiping the urine stains from the grimy porcelain tiles of the bathroom floor, scraping away the dried shit of strangers from a communal bowl, that is where you truly belong.”

“Where…where is Stella?” I wanted the words to sound forceful, tough even. They didn’t, though. They squeaked from my lips as if from a boy half my age, as if from the boy in the grocery nine months earlier as he wet his pants.

“Do you find her to be pretty? Our little Stella?”

I didn’t say anything. My eyes fell to the stack of comics on the bench.

The woman went on. “You will never have her, you know. As much as you may one day desire her, she will never be yours. Does that bother you?”

“I…I don’t like girls. Not like that.”

“No? Ah, but you will. Someday, I believe, you will. Someday you will want her so desperately you would step in front of a racing car just for the chance to touch her, to feel her warmth near your body, to know her kiss. Our Stella.”

“I just want to talk to her, that’s all.”

Ms. Oliver snorted, lost in her own words. “I bet you go home after these visits and pull your pecker out of your pants and touch yourself in the most obscene of ways just thinking about her—the smell of her hair, that smooth skin of hers. Have you ever even seen a naked girl before? I imagine not. Not at your age. You probably think about it, though, the filthiest of thoughts floating through that head of yours. You’re no better than other boys, all of you are the same. None of you are good enough for our Stella, and it sickens me to think she would even speak to you, let alone…” Her voice trailed off as she shook her head. She turned and stared at me, those dark gray eyes boring into me, burning with a hatred so fierce I could taste it on the air. “She will be your everything. Every breath of air you tug from the world will belong to her, everything you do will be for her, and you will mean absolutely nothing to her in return. You will be something she scrapes off her shoe and leaves on the side of the road for the vultures to tear and eat and shit back out. You are, and always shall be, discarded waste—building blocks the universe should have used to make something better, an afterthought.”

She stood then, again smoothing out the long, white coat, and without another word, she climbed back into the SUV followed by the others. I watched as they drove away, the stillness and quiet of the cemetery suffocating.

2

Preacher stepped into the apartment and pressed both hands to the door, closing it with a gentle click. He knew nobody was home, he was certain of that, but he didn’t want to alert the neighbors of his presence any more than he would have wanted to startle the homeowner had they been drowsing in bed or watching television rather than visiting the rotting corpses of two long-lost relatives in the cemetery behind the apartment building.

Neighbors in buildings like this tended to stick together. They got themselves caught up in the business of those living around them just a little too often for Preacher’s taste. He could never live in a place like this, and he didn’t understand why anyone else would make the conscious choice to do so.

The place was a box.

The place was a box stacked on top of other boxes, next to more boxes, and under even more. This wasn’t a home, this was a cell. This was the kind of place society put you.

Josephine Gargery didn’t make a lot of money. He had reviewed her last three tax returns before coming here. As a waitress, she earned $2.01 per hour plus tips, the average tip being 10 to 15 percent. Preacher, of course, tipped 20 percent whether service was good or not and always treated his waitstaff with the utmost respect. Not because he felt they had a hard job or deserved more than the norm from him because he could sometimes be difficult, but because they handled his food and often did so outside his viewing area. He would never consider treating someone poorly,