Stay by Nicola Griffith

Author:Nicola Griffith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery, Science Fiction, Suspense, Gay, Thriller
ISBN: 9781400032303
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2001-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

Peroxide. Bleach. Pierced people with bleached hair and writhing tattoos. At night Tompkins Square Park was full of them. They hung out by the fountain that has been dry for years, on the side opposite the gay boys with their squat, muscular little dogs wearing bandannas. I didn’t want those dogs getting a scent of blood-drenched clothes.

I stepped off the path. It felt wrong walking on grass in Karp’s shoes. Light and sound faded until there was nothing but my breath and the rustle of plastic bags. I stopped, listened. Silence. And under the scent of green growing things, the smell of urine-stained clothes and unwashed hair.

I dumped one bag—the underwear, the shoes, the jacket—behind a tree. Someone would find it within half an hour, someone who wasn’t particular about bloodstains, and who wouldn’t talk to the police. I walked on a little.

The park bench was made of concrete, still almost whole, and in the dark you couldn’t see the graffiti. I went down on one knee to shove the second bag—the trousers and tunic—beneath it and was about to stand when the razor touched my throat.

“My bench, bitch. What you doing to my bench?”

The concrete smelled of mold and cold stone. My knee, to which I had transferred all my weight as I was about to get up, hurt. The arm around my throat, the one holding the straight razor, was thin and scabbed.

“Gonna cut you good.” A young voice, very young.

With a straight razor held firmly against your carotid, there’s very little you can do. If you kick out backwards, the person holding it goes backwards, dragging their arm and the blade with it. You wouldn’t feel much but you’d be unconscious in thirty seconds and dead in two minutes. If you turn to your left, it pulls across your trachea. You wouldn’t bleed too much, but you’d be getting no oxygen. Turn to the right and the blade slices into your jugular as well as the carotid. Move downward and it takes the artery where it eases past your jawbone. Try to pull the blade down and it opens the blood vessels where they dive under the collarbone.

Neither of us moved. I couldn’t think of a single thing to do or say that would save my life.

“What you say, bitch? Fucking with my bench.”

This is how it would end, then, killed by a barely teenage junkie in a squalid little park in a city I hated.

The arm under my chin tightened. A thin trickle of blood ran down the neck of my borrowed shirt. Dying in someone else’s clothes, with a pornographic tape in my pocket, dying as the kind of person who could disassemble a man with her bare hands for no particular reason and who hadn’t even thought to check whether he was still alive.

“You think I’m shitting you? You think I won’t do it?”

What did it matter? “Actually, I’m thinking of an afternoon a year or two ago, in my garden in Atlanta.” I closed my eyes, remembering.

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