All The Bad Choices

We watched as the sun rose over the lake house, above our lake view cabin. Tom sat beside me fidgeting with a twig. I looked down at my tank top, the blood had gone from red to brown. It made sense. We had been sitting here for hours.

               I turned to look at tom trying to wipe blood from his face. It smeared all over him, like paint on a canvas.

               “What now?” I finally asked.

               He looked up at me sheepishly, like he wasn’t sure himself. We needed a plan. Clearly, he wasn’t an expert on making plans. His ended up with three dead people and us dripping in blood. This plan should have been completely thought through. He better spit something out.

               “We need to bury the bodies.” He answered me in such a monotone voice he barely sounded human.

               “Bury the bodies?” I asked back. “In mid fall? The ground is as hard as concreate.”

               His eyes where moving back and forth as if he was calculating something in his head. I knew he didn’t have the answer.

               I got off the porch and walked back into the house. It was cold and all I was wearing was a tank top. I could see my breath in the air. Why didn’t I feel the cold before? It must have been exhaustion. My whole body was numb.

               Tom followed me like a sad puppy. He was huffing and puffing like I took away his bone. I knew why he was so upset. He didn’t like insubordination. Usually I would be stroking his delicate ego. Today was not that type of day.

               “Well what’s your great idea then?” he huffed.

               “Cut them up and throw the parts in the lake.” I spoke so callously, it surprised even me.

               Tom absorbed my words, turned, and walked back outside. I heard the far sound of rummaging. He must have gone into the shed.

               I walked over to the kitchen sink to wash off… what ever was on me. I starred at it for a while. Its white linoleum splattered with blood. Lucy’s blood. She had been sitting in the kitchen chair closest to the sink when the gun went off.

               I decided against washing my hands at the same time Tom walked back into the house. He was holding an electric hand saw. He walked towards me and forcefully pushed it into my hands.

               “Why are you giving this to me?” I asked.

               “It was your idea!” he shouted.

               “Really tom, was it my idea to play Russian roulette?!” I started to yell back. I never raised my voice to him. He was surprised by the volume. I wanted to slap the stupid right off his face.

               “What do you think happens when you put a gun to your own head Beth!”

               “I thought it was fake! One of those gag guns that spit out a flag that says bang or water or whatever! I’m sorry I was unaware my boyfriend was stupid enough to put actual bullets in an actual gun and pass it around.” I spat my words at him like poison. “I’m even more sorry Lucy was unlucky as to catch the wrong clip, I’m even more sorry her bullet ricocheted and hit Ben right in the chest. Oh, and let’s not forget how poor Rick started freaking out, threatening to call the cops. I’m sorry I had to axe him in the back of the head too.”

               “Rick was your fault!” He shot back.

               “My point is that this started because of you. Now you finish it.” I said shoving the saw back into his hands, I was pretty sure I had almost cut him. I didn’t care.

               He looked down at it like it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his entire life, before he turned it on and started on Rick first.

               Hours had passed before Tom was finished. We began shoving the body parts into garbage bags as the sun was slowly going down. The room had an orange hue to it. I couldn’t understand how such a gruesome scene could look so beautiful.

               “We need to weigh these down with something.” I said as if I wasn’t in the middle of stuffing parts of my friends in bags.

               Tom shot me a look of surprise. He stuttered and stumbled trying to find the words.

               “Rocks Tom, we stuff the bags with rocks.” I said ignoring his incoherent blubbering.

               We went to the back of the cabin, near the lake, dragging our friends behind us. We stuffed the bags with every rock we could find. Once the bags where heavy enough, we heaved them into the rowboat paddling our way to the middle of the lake and started dumping.

               “Last one.” I said throwing the last bag over the edge. “there, done.”

               Tom stared at me with a sheepish sad frown. He looked so weak. Not the Tom before last night. That tom had been so stubborn and strong. His cocky nature used to be desirable. It used to be a part of his strength. Now he looked ugly and unreasonable, like a child having a temper tantrum.

               “This is nuts.” He said sitting back on the wooden seat. “We should tell someone. I mean, technically we where just being stupid. If we look at the facts, Lucy committed suicide and murdered Ben. We shouldn’t be liable for that.”

               “That’s not going to fly.” I stated matter of factly. “Rick died because I killed him with an ax.”

               “You can claim temporary insanity. You weren’t in the right state of mind. You panicked.”

               He was going to blame this all on me. He was going to get away scot free because other then cutting up the bodies he didn’t actually hurt anyone. I started to panic. I saw what was going to happen so clearly, almost like a dream. He would tell them the only reason he cut them up was because after I axed Rick, he was afraid of me. If I was lucky enough, he would probably say the Russian roulette was my idea too. After heartlessly killing poor Rick, who would believe it wasn’t.

               “Is that what you want?” I asked grabbing my oar. “To call the police?”

               “Yes.” He answered so quickly I barely had time to finish my sentence.

               I grabbed the length of the paddle so hard it turned my knuckles white. How could he want to betray me like this?

               Before I could even think, I flung the oar at his temple as fast, and as hard as I could. It took him by surprise, and he leaned so far off the boat that he lost his balance and fell in the water.

               I knew he couldn’t swim. He was flaring his arms in the air, not even thinking to use them as support. What a moron, he couldn’t even use his basic instincts to save himself from death. I wondered how he had survived this long.

               He tried to scream for help, but water was filling his mouth and lungs. I wasn’t afraid of people hearing him. There was no one for miles. His voice would just get lost in the wind. Eventually, his body began to give up and tire. It slowly began sinking to the bottom of the lake. It was too dark to see him hit the bottom.

               I just sat there for hours, until the moon was right over the lake, thinking of my next steps. I needed to disappear, to move on. I started making plans to start my life over in a different country, hopefully with a language barrier. The more confusing the better.

               I watched as the moon reflected undisturbed against the pitch-black lake. So still and relaxed. I wondered if I would ever feel like that one day, as I grabbed both paddles a headed for land, breaking the perfectly mirrored image of the moon as I rowed.