"Good day at school?" Elliot eyed the sullen boy beside her. "That uniform seems to have had a lot of fun." She reached over to straighten the boy's collar.
Elliot found it best to pretend she didn't know the boy hadn't set foot in Benjamin Lowe's School for Intercultural Cohorts, affectionately nicknamed "BLIC." Even when not in the presence of her older brother, she liked to ignore his nightly escapades to the hollow opposite highway 65.
"Steer clear of Mr. Gurken senior year. If you score below thirteen hundred on his exams, he'll go ape shit." Finch presented the missing button on his shirt collar as evidence for his claims.
Elliot pretended not to notice his"teacher's" name was the same as an empty can of Gurken's brand tomato soup peaking out of the glove compartment.
"He'll look over your shoulder an' go as purple as a plum." Finch searched his book bag for spare food.
He withdrew a squashed banana, peeled it and then stuffed it into the empty can of Gurken's soup after finding it to be inedible.
He reached across the seat and drew his sister in for a hug, cupping her head in his hand. "Thanks for picking me up." His attention was elsewhere. He studied the empty lane over Elliot's shoulder and then added "again."
He leaned back against his seat and massaged his ankle. Elliot withdrew the greasy fast food bag and placed it in his eager, dirt encrusted fingers. She started the car.
"Another kill?" Finch asked nonchalantly as if he hadn't just accepted a greasy barely food-like object from her a second ago.
"An easy one" She rested her elbow on Finch's seat and looked behind her to assure herself the road was clear.
His voice was acidic. "Who?"
"The actuary on fifth street. The call was from his wife."
"Plot twist." Finch licked his upper lip, capping small straight teeth.
She nodded, her hair drooping over her forehead.
"How'd you do it?"
Elliot knew her job made her brother queasy and he only entertained discussion about it as it was the little contact they would get before parting for school and work.
"A magician never reveals her secrets."
Even with her eyes on the road, she could see her brother grimace in response.
"One day you won't have to kill anymore."
"if you keep racking up my gas money by asking me to pick you up all the way at highway 65, it's the only thing i'll ever be doing" she teased him, unwilling to admit what both she and her brother knew well.
She liked it. She wouldn't dream of doing anything but assassination just as she would never trade in those impractical fingerless gloves. Elliot parked the car in the driveway of 9763 Kviig Drive.
"You've hardly got an hour of sleep until school" She informed him as she shut the side door.
"Last time I checked, I was the oldest" Finch showed off his small matched teeth when he laughed.
"Then, you should act like it" Elliot teased.
Finch was a clean-cut boy, his hair was always glinting as if he'd just popped out of the shower, moussed up so that thick black curls nipped at his dark forehead. An angular nose drooped over a pronounced top lip that shrouded his small teeth when he smiled. A chin just as angular as his nose rested perfectly under his bottom lip. Long thin eyelashes, each the same length, cloaked irises identical in coloring to his pupils. A visor of well gardened brows seemed to fill his forehead, drawing attention to his east indian complexion. He was unlike his sister who's hair clumped and coiled in different lengths, rubber banded braids interspersed throughout. Her nose was flat, more typical to her heritage and her brows were unkempt branches of wiry black. They shared their angular chins and dark eyes but, Finch was darker skinned, thin and built like an anorexic abe lincoln, the perfect contrast to Elliot's wide hips and chest that spilled over her fraying dollar store bras.
The minute finch hit the olive sofa, he was out, his head hidden behind stray couch stuffing. Elliot undressed, looking at her complexion in the splotched mirror. She liked to look at her body, marks in her skin trailing up the sides of her legs like ivy. Her stomach ached to be freed from the brim of her undergarments. She would look at herself and imagine the imitation greek sculptures in the city hall, porcelain poses outstretching delicate hands and thick fingers to frozen men in dresses offering cold sculpted rings. She posed like the lady receiving the ring. She ran her fingers across her cheekbones and around the hook of her ear down to her navel, feeling for the cold placid stone of the statues but ultimately touching warm skin. The light dressed her in pleated gold, rays of sunshine circling her torso like ribbons. She tucked her sculpture into jeans and a sweatshirt, sitting on the end of the couch where her brother slept.
His eyelashes painted eyelids shut and his toes twitched from the end of the blanket. She pulled a stool up to the table and opened her email. She didn't know whether to hope for a new murder to keep her mind off her brother's visits to highway 65 or to be relieved for a break. Had murder become the nonchalant escape that liquor served old men or highway 65 served for her brother, the meaningless buzz to ignore the sunrise and sunset?
The unsettling and admitted truth was that murder calmed her anxiety and it was easy to be swept off by weeks of stalking yet another unfamiliar suspect whose name was only apparent to her by typed letters on her phone screen. She never stopped to wonder if she had committed the murder of the unidentified man thrown in a ditch accompanied by words like gruesome and evil. Often, Elliot never even asked what the to be deceased had done to deserve a gunshot to their temple or a knife to their throat. She was not under the false pretense that she was protecting the world by eliminating criminal masterminds, she had no doubt that some of the countless people she'd killed were kind, but too Elliot death was a fickle thing. In death it would not matter the good done, death does not distinguish between saints and sinners or between vices and virtues, death would always take all of them equally without second thought.
By the time Finch had awoken, Elliot was already gone. Alone, Finch scrubbed his face with a ragged washcloth in the kitchen sink and removed the cast iron pan from it's hiding spot beneath the stove. He cracked two eggs into the pan and stripped himself of the muddy navy blazer and faded slacks. Throwing the uniform into his laundry, he grabbed the first set of clothing he could find and slipped it on. He washed his hair in the kitchen sink with nothing but detergent and lukewarm water from the faucet. His curls refused to lay flat against his forehead, the wet mess licking at his hairline like unkempt hungry dogs. Opening up a stained laptop from early 2007, he popped a slice of toast topped with scrambled egg into his mouth. The laptop was so old and dysfunctional that some of the keys had fallen off and Finch, who was already a shitty typist could never figure out which key correlated to which letter.
After what seemed like hours of mistyping, he finished his account of the night before. Even though nothing ever changed each night he approached the hollow opposite of highway 65 he found countless new ways to describe the place. He scrolled to the top of the document, rereading the first entry he had ever made. It was only six months ago and yet the document was filled with new accounts of the same place each and every day. After completing each entry he would always scroll up and read the first and coincidentally the longest entry. It had been so long since he first discovered the hollow opposite highway 65 that Finch had begun thinking he might have dreamt the events that happened there six months prior. And yet, every inch of him knew that he would always come back to the hollow each night even if the events never replicated.
Finch rubbed his eyes. Ever since the first night in the hollow he hadn't slept more than five hours. He was surprised he hadn't collapsed by now. Hopeless, he closed the document and opened up a desktop folder. He clicked on the video link downloaded to his computer six months ago. He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth as the video began to load, sputtering. He prepared himself for what always happened. The video would buffer for a few minutes, and then give up citing a generic error message. Finch had tried everything to make the video play. Everything except bring it into the tech company. They'd brush it off as a virus. Finch knew quite well that the video was not a virus or a faulty link but instead a message that he hadn't yet encrypted. Sleepily, he brought his dishes to the sink and sat at the couch, the computer piping hot against his lap. He closed the video, defeated. It had only been a few minutes since he shut the computer when three solid knocks berated the door. Finch stuffed the computer under the couch cushion and unlocked the series of locks on the door.
