Floating Above the Table

His body drops in a way she doesn't expect. Janet poisoned her husband David's food, yes, but she's still unsure what exactly she put in the tuna. Rather than plopping to the floor like characters in stories or real people in documentaries, David's body hits the ground and levitates upward. Janet is not a scientist; she's a clerk at Walgreens. But, she knows about gravity and is aware that when things crash to the ground, they don't then reverse course of their own volition. Now her dead husband hovers over his tuna sandwich, which she poisoned, running counter to everything she knows about science, dead bodies and murders.

"What did that lady give me?" she mutters exasperatedly.

***

She received the poison exactly two days prior during her lunch break. Instead of dumping her poorly constructed turkey and cheese sandwich, with no crusts, onto the crumb-ridden break room table, she scurried past the self-checkout machines slowly replacing her peers, through the eggwhite automatic doors and from underneath the fluorescent retail lighting into the sunlight of a Tuesday. She found the poison maker on Craigslist on Sunday night, and after asking her computer whiz brother to help communicate with the mad chemist, agreed to meet with her after a series of back and forth messages. The woman said to meet her at a coffee shop near the highway 2 p.m., and insisted on sitting outside in the patio area, despite the temperature reaching triple digits. Of course, Janet arrived early and sat in the heat, with each gust of wind burning her face as if she was a stunt man on a Hollywood set requiring a flamethrower for an actions sequence. And after checking her phone approximately 42 times in the span of 10 minutes, the woman sat across from her.

Resting in her hand was an iced coffee so black, Janet was sure she didn't purchase it from the counter just behind them, were high teens took orders and slogged their way through conducting a barely-working espresso machine. The woman held out her hand, seemingly inviting Janet to grab and caress, to connect in person as opposed to through Craigslist's awful messaging service, which involves layers of protection so people can't poach identities from one another on the lawless Internet. Of course, once Janet reached out, the woman pulled away, finally speaking: "First the money, then the goods." Janet wondered if she was actually peddling poison at all, because this felt like a run-of-the-mill drug exchange between a weed dealer and a twentysomething starving artist.

"You've got the poison, right?" Janet said, too quietly to be heard. The woman looked at her, blankly, with an expression that could only be translated to English as: "of course, that's what I do, I sell poison, now where is my money?" Instead of repeating herself, Janet slid the cash, nestled neatly in a fresh envelope, across the table. The woman's hand followed the white rectangle and snatched it off the table, opened the top lip and wrestled the bills from the pocket. She counted, sniffed and gleefully observed the $400 as if she had never seen such an amount in person, like she was from another planet. After a beat, the woman composed herself, stowed the money away in her left jean pocket and fetched a vial from the opposite side. Upon handing the liquid entombed in thin glass, the woman only said, "Give it all to your victim, otherwise there could be unforeseen responses from the body." Before Janet could ask, "What the hell?" the woman stood, neatly tucked the chair under the table and left the cafe's patio area.

Upon returning to work, Janet couldn't stop looking at the elixir, taken aback by its vibrant sky blue shade; think Frost Glacier Freeze Gatorade, but with an added twinkle that elicited the feeling of

"M-A-G-I-C."

***

David had to ask for tuna, a dry canned fish squished between two dryer pieces of toast. Janet found it difficult to mix in the poison without arising suspicion. And despite the cold woman's warning, Janet was scared of the damage a full dose could cause; she wanted David dead but didn't want his head to explode. Finally, she figured half of a violent potion would probably be enough to kill her husband. She had fantasized about this moment for months, upon learning her once adoring partner was cheating on her with his golden-haired boss. The two would sneak around, meeting in the local park three blocks from the family home where he'd hop out of his silver Ford into his boss' black Honda. Janet discovered the two in March after he acted strangely and left, to which she tailed him and followed him as he made strange circles in the neighborhood, before turning into the lot of the park. He was so absorbed in the likely conversation taking place between the doors of his car, that he hadn't even noticed her car behind him.

Now the bastard's dead, and his head is touching the ceiling. His feet float above the half-eaten sandwich, which contains Tobasco sauce, fish meat and poison. He's been there for hours, as Janet continually paces around the kitchen trying to reach the chemist responsible for this unseemly turn of events. After several calls, the woman picks up and without a hitch says, "You didn't give him all of it, did you?"

"No."

"And now he's floating, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"I don't know what to tell you dear, good luck."

-Click-

"YOU B----"

Janet attempts to pull at David's corpse, but can't reach his feet, hands or legs. She tries to stand on a chair and nearly falls, stumbling and tripping as she grasps for his bray (brown + gray) slacks. She eventually sulks to the garage and grabs a ladder, before stalking to the adjacent overstuffed storage room to fetch a kettlebell and copper cable, just a leftover relic from their years together before chord cutting. When she arrives in the kitchen, she secures the cable around the handle of the weight and tightens it with a knot, before placing it on the shelf extension at the top of the ladder. Before tying the other end of the cable to her deceased husband's foot, she begins to cry and stomp, nearly throwing the metal legs holding her up over and sideways onto the floor. While she closes the loop around his cold ankle, she screams, "Floating through death like you floated through life huh David?" before hoisting the black metal ball and dropping it the floor, cracking the tile as gravity's unrelenting pull yanks hunk of metal to the floor. This finally brings David closer to the table, eye-level with Janet if she were to sit across from him like how their dinner's used to and were supposed to be forever.

As she climbs down the steps, she thinks about drinking the remaining poison like a shot of gin at a grimy dive bar with neon tube lights advertising beers and smoking patrons, or maybe she could pour the leftover drops into the minuscule margarita mix on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Janet does neither and grabs her cell phone, calls the police and reports the murder and the miracle. As the sounds of sirens carry through the wind, racing from the connecting streets that eventually lead to her front door, she sits on her porch with a freshly lit cigarette in one hand and the plastic bottle of green marg mix in the other, waiting for the inevitable arrest and unexplainable scientific mystery stiffening in her former husband's corpse.