The Victim

He waited for the horror that was supposed to come with finding a dead body.

Marvin stood in the doorway of his cousin’s bedroom, staring at the pile of waxy flesh that was once a living girl. It was colored all wrong, and he had this sudden urge to massage the pink back into her skin, and to maybe rearrange her limbs so that she wouldn’t cramp up later. Marvin almost let go of the doorframe to approach her, to fix her up, before he remembered that there was no her left to fix.

His first real thought was this: just like her to overdo it.

Vomit dribbled from the corner of her mouth and onto the floor. Marvin could see an assortment of emptied prescription pill bottles and spilled jars of Aspirin under her bed. There was a scarf tied tightly around her neck, digging into the skin. And blood. Her wrists were sliced vertically, a deep river of red like gummy smiles interrupting the smooth of her pale grey skin. He could remember when they were eight, how she hated being indoors. Back then, her skin was bronze.

Marvin examined, from his place at the door, the bruises on her face as he wondered what killed her. Was it the blood loss? The overdose? Asphyxiation? Maybe she’d choked on her own vomit. There were faint tracks below her eyes, old tears -- maybe she’d gotten scared at the last second, even… maybe she had a heart attack.

He supposed he didn’t really care all that much. Marvin pushed himself out of the doorway and wandered back out into the kitchen. He picked up the phone and grabbed the plate of cheese and crackers he had fixed before (it was a double portion. As usual, he had assumed his cousin would be alive). Plopping himself onto the living room couch, he looked at the phone in his hand -- then at the remote on the coffee table, and the black television screen. In its reflection, he saw a shadowy version of his living room, a regular beige space made for regular beige families.

Frowning at this alternate home in the tv screen, Marvin dialed and the phone started ringing.

The ringing did not last as long as he would’ve liked.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Uh. I think my cousin’s dead.”

The woman on the other end was quiet for a moment. “What’s your name, son?”

“Marvin.”

“Okay, Marvin, do you think you can tell me your address?”

He recited it automatically, thinking about how peculiar words were -- how sometimes they sounded like nothing at all.

“All right, Marvin,” said the operator, “I’m dispatching a unit right now, they’ll be there very soon, all right? But for now, I need you to stay on the line, can you do that?” The dispatcher spoke fast. It was not a frantic sort of fast " more like a check-out-girl-on-a-busy-day fast. Efficient, he thought, that’s what you call that. “Son, can you stay on the line?”

“Yes, sorry. Yeah.”

“Good. Are you safe?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Wonderful, all right -- and can you tell me what happened, son?”

“What happened?” he echoed. He glanced around his empty living room, disoriented by the normalcy, the familiar afternoon absence of his family, and then: “Oh! Uh, yeah, um -- I think my cousin’s dead. I walked in her room and she was just… lying there. Bruise-y and stuff.”

“Are you sure the victim is dead?”

“I don’t know. She looked dead,” there was a twitch in his chest cavity, something like a restless animal turning around in the soft space below his ribs. He added, “Her name is Claire.”

“Was she hurt by someone else?”

“No. I think she did it to herself.”

Marvin thought he heard the lady cluck her tongue.

“How old is the victim?”

“Uh, seventeen.” Her birthday had been a month earlier. "Her name's Claire,” he said again.

“Okay. What exactly is the nature of her injury?”

It took him a moment to realize that the question was a genuine one. “Death,” he said, “She’s dead.”

“Yes, son, but can you tell me exactly what happened?”

“Uh. She choked, I think. With a scarf. I-I don’t really know, it’s hard to tell -- I just. I mean, she was just.. like that when I got home.” Marvin could’ve mentioned the slit wrists, or the antidepressant cocktail lying half-digested on the floor beside her mouth, but he didn’t. He thought it would bring up too many questions that he really wasn’t in the mood to answer.

“When did you get home?”

“Uh. Ten minutes ago, maybe. At the most.”

“Okay. Marvin, son, there’s a chance she is still alive--” he almost snorted at this, “--and so I’m going to ask you to check her for vitals. Can you do that?”

He stilled, holding a cracker halfway to his mouth. He hadn’t even noticed he was eating. “...Iiiiiii don’t know how to do that.”

“I’ll walk you through it.”

His mouth twitched. “I really think she’s dead--”

“Son,” said the lady. She was calm. Still brisk, but not abrasive. “It is very important that you do this. A unit will be with you very soon, but maybe not soon enough. A minute can make a difference.”

Marvin was silent.

“Marvin. Do you think you can check the victim for vitals?”

He was still staring at the tv screen and the dark living room it reflected. “Her name’s Claire,” he said. “...Yeah, okay, fine.” And then he was on his feet, abandoning his half-eaten snack to venture down the hall to his cousin’s room. He walked slow and his head was empty.

“I’m here,” Marvin said into the receiver, eyeing the awkwardly positioned body on the floor, same as he left it.

“Good. I’ll tell you what to do… Marvin, are you ready?” There was a pause. “Take a deep breath, son.”

Marvin frowned at the phone in his hand, suddenly wishing the woman on the other end had  continued her clinical approach. Now there was something like compassion mixed in with her words and Marvin could feel the grain of it. He could feel it swirling around in the liquid of his body -- but it didn’t dissolve right, instead sank to the bottom of his stomach. He wanted to puke it right back into the phone. This was wrong. All of this, wrong.

“Marvin? Are you there?”

There was another silence. Then, “Yeah. Yeah. What do I do?”

The emergency operator began listing instructions. Marvin was more comfortable with these; they were pretty dry, unremarkable. If he didn’t speak English, or if he wasn’t listening too closely, the dispatcher’s words could be mistaken for instructions for inflating a kiddie pool -- it sounded so normal.

Check for breathing, she said.

Feel the neck for a pulse.

Count the beats.

But he hadn’t even stepped into the room yet. He glanced around and then took a step forward, wincing when his socked foot sank into the carpet -- it was wet. He wished he had looked down before moving. Now he could clearly see the amoeba splotch on his cousin’s blue carpet, see where it disappeared under her body. He inhaled, choking on a foreign combination of smells, like chemicals and feces and metal… and something else he couldn’t name, didn’t really want to name. Swallowing, Marvin kneeled. His eyes were locked on his cousin’s discolored skin. Through the grey, it was tinted a faint purple and it looked rubbery under the overhead lights.

“Is she breathing?”

His eyes snapped up to her face; her lips were chapped white except for where they’d been decorated by crusting pink vomit. Marvin watched for any quivers, and then reluctantly held his free hand over her face -- despite everything, he expected a soft, warm breeze. But there was nothing.

“Not breathing,” he found himself saying. He retracted his hand. The side of her face closest to the ground (--she must’ve lolled her head to the side when the bile started coming up, as it was half-sitting in a puddle of the stuff--) was an astonishingly dark color, a deep plum stain swelling over her cheek and temple. Her eyes appeared unnaturally sunken, even when closed. “Looks like she got punched in the face,” he breathed, looking away.

“What’s that, son?”

“Nothing.”

“... Well, all right. Does she have a pulse?”

Marvin stuck two fingers at her throat and jabbed inwards. He nearly dropped the phone at the contact; she was still a little warm and a part of her face twitched when his fingers pressed too roughly against a tendon in her neck.

He couldn’t speak. The animal in his chest shifted again.

“No,” he coughed. His gaze raked down his cousin’s body to her splayed arms and the gaping wounds that grinned back at him. He thought he even saw a tooth gleaming white in one of them, buried snugly underneath blood-slicked muscle fiber.

On the other end, Marvin heard the emergency operator give a thoughtful hum before she spoke in that unwaveringly calm voice of hers: “Okay, Marvin. Thank you for all your help. You can go wait for the paramedics now.”

He didn’t answer -- he was looking at the curled ends of Claire’s hands.

They were blue. She attained quite the color palette in death; her skin was a cartoon sky, exaggerated opaque colors bleeding into one another like marker stains, blackening where they overlapped.

He thought of crayons and days spent at a kitchen table, the two of them coloring the table cloth and ignoring the piles of printer paper sitting between them. And he thought of the rhymes they used to sing, none of which were clear in his memory"

“Marvin?”

Something inside Marvin pulled tight and then snapped. It was a brief glimpse into that grief people always talk about -- the sudden, unbearable yearning, an overwhelming need to extend his arms, to thrust them backwards through time so he could just grab Claire, pull her back to him while she still had the option of stumbling through life. She was just scared.

As quickly as it came, the feeling left Marvin, and the dispatcher's voice trailed behind like those tin cans tied to wedding cars -- only in this case, Marvin supposed it would be a hearse. "Marvin, are you there? Can you hear me?"

“Wha--oh,” he coughed again, grimacing at the bad taste in his mouth.  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go wait.”

“Alright, Marvin. Don’t hang up yet.”

“I won’t,” he murmured, hand now brushing against the scarf Claire had tied around her upper neck. The scarf must’ve been tied to the towel hook, only now the fabric was piled at the base of the wall. There was a plaster crater in the wall where the hook had been ripped out.

He tried to piece together some sort of timeline. What, did she  take the pills, cut her wrists, and prepare the noose? Or did she take the pills, prepare the noose, and then cut her wrists, right before sliding into a sitting position and waiting for the air to run out...? Either way, two of those methods must’ve failed. A person can only die from one thing.

So it doesn’t matter, Marvin thought as he climbed back into standing position. He tried not to breathe. There were wet splotches on the knees of his khakis and his empty hand curled stiffly where it hung at his side, holding within it a distinctive filthy sensation -- a thought that he’d never be clean again.

He wandered back out to the living room and resettled himself on the couch.  The phone made some noises and it was then that Marvin realized his arm had fallen away from his ear. Moving slowly, he brought it back up to his head.

“--arvin? Son? Are you there? I’m going to ask you some questions about your cousin, is that okay?”

“Fine,” he said. She wasn’t really asking for permission anyways.

What came next were rapid-fire questions: were there any signs, where did she go to school, was there a suicide note, and so on. There was so much that Marvin had to think she was sitting in front of a questionnaire print-out "--no one can think that quickly. He answered her questions as best as he could, but most often could only supply her with an ‘I don’t know’ " just barely biting back the accompanying ‘and I don’t care’.

Because what did it matter now?

Soon enough, the paramedics came crashing into his driveway -- finally, he was able to end the phone call -- and he wondered, while watching dancing blues and reds on the wall opposite the window, why they bothered with that whole light show.

The girl was dead. There was nothing to be done. There was no mystery behind it. No emergency. Still, they rushed.

He breathed deeply one last time before the paramedics burst in. They were aliens, wearing dull jumpsuits and expressions like masks. They all walked in that same assured way as they approached him.

Without waiting for any of them to open their mouths, Marvin said, “Down the hall, to the left.”  

The paramedics zoomed off, leaving a couple people behind to question Marvin with the same authoritative rigor as the dispatcher. Actually, he kind of missed her; these folks were different. They were brisk, sure. But they were also sympathetic (in that plastic sort of way that made him think they must’ve taken a class on consoling civilians), occasionally offering condolences and administering heavy-handed shoulder-pats.

Their questions were similar to the dispatcher’s so Marvin let his mouth do the talking, let it flap mindlessly, like when he had recited his address earlier. Anything he said probably came out sounding like a script, but he wouldn’t know -- he couldn’t really hear himself.

He stared out the window, watching the sun fall. It sunk, sunk, and kept sinking until a slanted orange light came through the window, the kind of light made for afternoon-napping. Marvin sort of felt like he was already asleep.

He probably answered a thousand questions, and half of those were probably repeats of previous questions. The police had come and wanted to know the same things as the medics. His mother had come home soon after the paramedics arrived and she was crying somewhere as an officer attempted to interrogate her in the same way he did Marvin.

Marvin, meanwhile, waited to feel something. Anything. He wanted to get back to what he had felt before, even if that sensation had only lasted a few seconds -- that solid loss with the tugging rope in his stomach. But there was nothing.

Marvin forced his mind to replay images of him and his cousin playing together as children, forced himself to remember all their bitter fights and naptime whispers. He remembered the middle school years when they spent every waking moment together, running back and forth between their homes, stealing flowers from front gardens and sharing after school snacks in front of the TV (their favorite was cheese and crackers).

Then came the more recent events: Claire’s gradual change in attitude, her increasing silence as the days went on; her constant anger and how most days she slept, and most nights she sat on the back porch, only returning to her room in the blue hours of the morning.

There’d been a lot of arguments lately -- mostly Marvin’s dad shouting about her failure to attend school. There’d been a lot of crying, too. Mostly from Marvin’s mom, who’d beg Claire to talk about it, and then when Claire refused, she’d start yelling too. At some point, they’d threatened to send her to a hospital, but Claire had calmed down long enough to convince Marvin’s parents that she was fine. It didn’t last.

There were mutters, tense meals, general avoidance; there was with Claire’s arrival a trail of bitter exhaust clouding thick within the household. It was so draining that Marvin had taken to avoiding home altogether.

Now, with her finally gone -- a girl who had once been his best friend -- Marvin felt… nothing.

He reached over the coffee table for his cheese and crackers. They were stale, but Marvin didn’t mind. They tasted fine.

Author's Note

Hey, I'd appreciate reviews. My Ultimate Goal for the future is to be an actual writer, so any criticism is welcome. I would appreciate it if you could support any criticisms with examples, though! None of that, "Your writing is bad," stuff. Tell me why.
You're also welcome to just talk about your general opinion of this piece. Was it boring, etc. Aight, thanks for reading.

PS: Advice on a title? I really don't like "The Victim" but I can't seem to think of anything else.