Golden Trophies

The murder should’ve been easy.

I had the whole thing planned out. A ladder, a card, a chain, a hook. It was all there. And now I was shrouded in blood. Far too much blood to clean. The red soaked my yellow shirt.

Perhaps I should’ve planned for things to go wrong, to give room for error. Yet another shortcoming.

I looked down at Maddy’s disfigured head. “Always so precise,” she taunted. “Always losing.”

I was supposed to win this time. I was supposed to throw her off guard, kill her, and get away with it. I was supposed to win in the end, the slow but steady turtle crossing the finish line. But even now, in her final moments, she beats me to it. The hare wins. The turtle got caught.

The frantic drum of my heart was deafening as blood roared through my veins. It was too hot. God why was it so hot? Was it Maddy’s warm and sticky blood that was scorching my skin? Or perhaps the heat of Matt’s veiled gaze? I was starting to sweat.

The headlights of the parked car on the driveway shone through the windows, casting the white walls in a yellowish tinge. The ladder lay on the ground while the lamp with a shattered light bulb rolled to a stop between Maddy and I. The yellow lampshade was now a dark red. A swing hung precariously at the center of the room, a golden chain holding one side up while the other dragged across the floor, its chain detached from its hook in the ceiling. The groan of the chain as the swing swayed ever so slightly was the only sound in the room. Maddy was trying to fix the old swing earlier.

The butcher’s knife sat a few feet away, it too stained with blood. It was from my parent’s kitchen, but I could hardly remember who used it the most. Just a little ways off, by the door, Matt stood in the dark, his silhouette still as he observed the scene. The blood hadn't reached Matt’s feet yet, but it would soon. Next to him was a little coffee table on top of which sat an urn. The urn was untouched and unmoved. Undisturbed. I forgot all about it.

Maddy had wanted the urn. She said as much in the days following the car crash, and then again just a few minutes earlier. She was placing a card on the table, one that read, “Gone, but never forgotten. You will always be in our hearts.” in swirling, typed golden letters. It matched the gold and black decor she put up all evening while quietly humming a strangely blithe tune to herself. There was only one picture of our parents, placed between the card and the urn. It had a golden frame.

As she adjusted the card to stand at just the right angle, she stopped humming and spoke. “I think it’s best if I keep the urn.”

She brought it up before, and after I argued back—my ears roaring and my words stumbling and sharp and clipped—we decided to save the discussion for later. My hand paused from where I was placing the last barren vase in the living room into a cardboard box. “But I want it.”

Maddy bit her lip. “Your apartment is too small. Plus, you’re always moving and you always have so many… friends over all the time that you might lose it.”

“Why do you keep bringing my friends into this?”

“I’m not trying to judge. I just think you can do better.”

I snapped the cardboard box shut. “You’re just like them.”

She paused for a long moment, watching as I pushed the box out into the hall, avoiding her gaze. Finally, she spoke again. “I just think it's better for me to keep the urn.”

“But you’re keeping the rest of their things.”

“My house has room.”

“So you want to fill it with boxes?”

“My husband won’t mind.”

There was a pause.

Her husband, Matt. Kind, caring, observant Matt. When Maddy first introduced him, I thought he would be like all of her other boys—aloof, arrogant, dismissive. He was, after all, from the same preppy university, an overachiever who worked as a part-time auto mechanic. I was surprised when he turned out to be accepting and attentive. I was shocked when I realized that he also saw me. Saw my potential. Saw my value. Maddy never deserved him.

When Maddy announced that she would be marrying him, that he wouldn’t be replaced by another one of her horrid boyfriends, I wanted to feel happy. I didn’t.

Still, even after a year of marriage, he remained the same—close, mysterious but open, understanding. I visited the two of them often. One time, just a week before the car crash, Matt and I sat side by side on the veranda of their grand house, the setting sunlight casting his red sweatshirt in shadow, making it a much deeper shade. We were shoulder to shoulder, speaking in hushed tones, when Maddy came out from inside the house. She seemed to glance at the space between us, pausing before telling Matt to help her with the dishes. He stood and followed her inside, his unbothered expression at odds with the slight tense of his shoulders. Since then, Maddy seemed to be more alert and distant, though I never had the chance to find out why. Our parents crashed their car before I could.

And then Maddy demanded to keep the urn and implied that Matt would agree with her. I doubted it. I was sure I could convince him otherwise once I shared my side of the story. I was about to tell her as much, but she spoke first.

“It’s okay if you need some time to pull yourself together,” she started in a softer voice. She faced me. The sympathy in her eyes was suffocating. “I know you’ve had a difficult time ever since you graduated college and now this… You can take a moment. Find some help.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Okay.”

“I just want to plan things out first, be precise. Figure out what I’m going to do before I do it.”

“Of course.”

Another pause.

“But I’m keeping the urn until you do.”

This time her voice was firm. Final.

I cast my eyes down. “Okay.”

She turned back around and started humming again, satisfied.

I knew it would come to this, knew that she would win. She always won. She won at her dance competitions, at our academic clubs. She won when she found better friends than I, prettier dresses than I. She won when she gave everyone that arrogant smile that people called “dazzling”. She won when her perfect friends pulled me behind the high school all those years ago, laughing and jeering. And now, she won our parents for the rest of her life.

I peered at their smiling faces and I could imagine their disapproval through the golden frame, their scoldings which came after all of Maddy’s victories. Sometimes they’d shout, sometimes they’d whisper, sometimes they’d beg, sometimes they’d demand. But the words were always the same.

“You need to do better, like Maddy does,” they’d say. “You can’t survive in this world if you don’t. No cares about failures or losers. They care about winners.”

It was the speech I always heard when I was a child and kept hearing even when I wasn’t one anymore. It was a speech that only really seemed to increase fervor when our wealthy grandparents announced they would be passing all of their wealth to their first living son, effectively cutting my own father out after some petty argument or another. Of course, that changed when my uncle’s family died in a helicopter accident in some European country a little over a year ago, making my father the eldest son once again.

I thought my parents would finally tire of their speech after the helicopter accident, especially since we knew we would have the cushion of the inheritance once my bedridden grandmother passed away. But, still, they repeated the same words, wielding Maddy’s success against me. And Maddy, of course, would call me afterward or slip into my room late that night to apologize as she did for years. She would give the most apologetic, the most sweet look, just like she did when our mother was particularly angry one evening and grabbed the heated spatula or when her friends cornered me. And then she would leave, and the next day she was singing alongside our mother in the kitchen or laughing with her friends in the halls.

The few times I questioned her actions, spoke back to her, she would put her foot down and make her voice firm as stone until I looked away and agreed. And she would move on, ignoring me, humming to herself. Just as she did with the urn.

A roaring filled my ears.

I asked Maddy if she could fix the swing. She left to get the toolkit. I grabbed the knife. The ladder tipped. The lamp shattered. The roaring was a quiet buzz.

I knew Maddy texted her husband earlier, but I saw his answer only when her phone lit up, illuminating the dark.

I’ll come help. Be there in five.

And then the headlights were spilling through the window and Matt was standing in the dark. I’d been caught.

He wouldn’t tell anyone, of course. I knew that. But he had seen it, seen the loss. Seen the way I failed at executing such a simple scheme. The way I would’ve gotten caught had he been anyone else. He never scolded me for losing. But now he would see just how horribly I lost. How I always lost.

Despite everything else that Maddy always won, I never thought she won Matt. Not even when she first brought him to our parents’ house for dinner, arm in arm, claiming it was fate that he happened to be the one to fix her car. Not even when our parents laughed in agreement and he gave a sheepish grin. He was the one thing that didn’t fully belong to her. But in this moment she proved that I was undeserving of his care. That I would never be able to reach the potential he saw in me. In the end, Maddy won him too.

The roaring choked my ears, even louder than before.

The swing stopped moving and the world was a dark painting until Matt finally stepped towards Maddy’s body, leaning forward to peer at her remains. He bent down and plucked something off her finger. Her golden ring. He pocketed it. He searched her pockets. He found her black and gold wallet. He pocketed that too. He grabbed the knife.

“Is this part of a set?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Clean it.”

I cleaned the knife in the kitchen and placed it back in its original spot.

“Did you text her?” He asked when I walked back into the family room.

I shook my head.

“Is your phone’s location on?”

I shook my head again.

“Leave. Don’t make any footprints.”

When I didn’t move, he looked back at me. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I lost.”

A long silence.

“You didn’t lose. You would’ve had to split your grandparent’s inheritance with Maddy. Now you don’t.”

He mentioned the same thing when I told him about the urn and asked him if it would be better if we just split it. Mentioned that now that my parents were dead, Maddy and I would receive our grandmother’s inheritance without the burden of my parents’ frivolous spending or the double inheritance tax. Mentioned that perhaps there were better solutions than losing half of what was owed to you, that maybe there was a world where I wouldn’t need to split anything with anyone.

I hadn’t fully realized the implication of that until now. That I could finally win something of her’s.

He stuffed his hand into his pocket and pulled out the black wallet with the golden emblem and the bright gold ring. He asked for my hand. I outstretched my palm and held it before me. He placed them in my hand, the cold and bloodied objects sending shivers down my spine. He kept his hand over mine for a moment longer in reassurance. A slight smile tugged on his lips as he spoke.

“You didn’t lose. You won.”

The roaring in my ears faded. I smiled.