Happy Anniversary

I hate clichés. Everyone says they do, but they still buy twelve red roses on the 14th of February as if it means something more than they couldn’t come up with an original idea (even if they tried so hard it caused a delicious blood vessel to burst in their insignificant little brains) and the local 7/11 still happened to have some fresh ones left. So, when I found myself, without an umbrella, running through the rain in a tan trench coat that barely did enough to keep my clothes underneath from becoming drenched, heading to the 24/7 Diner on the edge of Connolly Street, looking like something out of a bad PI movie, nobody could have been more disheartened than I was.

Why is it always raining when people meet late at night at Diners? Is there some unwritten rule I don’t know about that dictates it absolutely must be raining? Because of course, anyone engaging in this particular activity must not have enough bullshit going on in their life, they need wet and uncomfortable clothes sticking to their bodies while they attempt to enjoy what will only be a joyless cup of coffee.

She was already sitting down in one of the booths furthest away from the kitchen on the left hand side of the room when I got there, staring out of the window she had perched herself next to, no doubt looking out for me. I’d expected this, so I had come from the opposite direction. It had taken longer and meant that I was uncharacteristically late which I assumed accounted for the expression on her face that had it been anyone else sitting there I might have called worry.

Death or capture. That was the rule. The only reason we had agreed it was acceptable to miss our annual appointment. After twelve years of always arriving precisely when I was meant to, I decided it was time to change things up a little, just to see if there were any subtle differences in her (ordinary people would refer to it as) affections towards me. The almost worry confirmed that if she could care, she still would have cared for me.

Of course her keen, wide eyes found me only moments after I stepped through the door. She didn’t smile, neither did I. Anyone would have believed us to be perfect strangers exchanging a cursory glance. In truth, she was the closest thing to a friend and a lover that someone like me can have.

Her gaze remained stayed fixed on my face as I approached her table, which was exactly the same as every other table and exactly the same as they had been for as many years as we had been meeting here. The same tired and dreary brown faux leather clothed the seats in the booths and the tables bore the marks of overuse and employees too underpaid to care if they were cleaned properly.

I sat down across from her, shaking myself out of the coat and dumping it on the floor by my feet under the table, an action which gained an eye roll from my companion. When I settled, she pushed a lukewarm cup of joyless sludge at me.

“Oh goody,” I said, sarcasm dripping for my lips.

“If you had been here on time, it would have been hot,” she said drily.

As I took my first sip, I greedily drank her in. My Suzanna. The only constant in my otherwise inconsistent life.

If I had a concept of beauty, I would say that she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. I have no way of knowing if anyone else would consider her so. I can say with confidence that she most likely adheres to some of what society would call, ‘basic standards of beauty.’ Suzanna is taller than most women, with long blonde hair and blue eyes. She has full and round lips and a bosom to match. Her clothes, usually black and never flamboyant, clung to her in all the correct places. None of this however, in any way influenced what I would have felt towards her. It was her mind that at the very least fascinated me. She was the only person I had ever been intimate with and the only person I ever would be. That was before our annual meetings. We had called it a scientific experiment. It had only been once and once had been sufficient. I had wanted to know what it would actually feel like physically and if it might inspire some other feelings that I’m told should come from the empty space where the stump that pumps the blood around my body exists. It had felt physically pleasurable as it should have done, but it involved a significant amount of touching that neither of us were comfortable.

“Why were you late Christopher?” she asked barely blinking and somewhat irritated. Even psychopaths can be irritated.

“The rain, traffic,” I replied.

"Ah. I am glad to see you.”

“And I you old friend,” I told her with more sincerity than I ever spoke to another being. Well, another living being.

Suzanna reached across the table and ran her sharp red fingernails over the back of my hand.

“How many this year?” she asked.

“Well that was very quick. Are we done with the small talk already?”

Suzanna nodded with the smallest of real smiles beginning to pull up the corners of her mouth.

“Four,” I told her.

“Slow year. Feeling your age?”

I laughed and the only other clientele turned to look at us along with the young man behind the counter in the unfortunate 50s style pink, pin striped uniform. I tried not to laugh in public for this very reason. My laugh was unsettling, disingenuous, even on the rare occasions when I truly found something amusing. I was told it was akin to being laughed at by a shark about to gobble one whole. I suppose given my proclivities, that wasn’t too far from reality.

“And you?” I asked.

“Nine; but then, there is never a shortage of rapists in the city. Throw a stone and you’ll hit four.”

“You hit nine my love.”

“I’ve always found stoning effective. Do you still prefer the knife?”

“Oh yes. It was the best change I ever made.”

The boy in the ridiculous uniform began moving towards us and then seemed to think better of it, steering towards a different table instead. He should have asked us by now if we wanted anything to eat, but people tended to avoid us unless we called them. There must have been an air around us. I suppose after you have taken a certain amount of human lives, that air would change around you and at least to ordinary people, that air would bring with it fear.

“I’m pleased. I never did like the gun. Too impersonal,” she said, just loud enough for the boy to hear.

Striking fear into strangers had always given her such amusement.

“How is she?” I asked her.

“Lorna?”

I nodded.

“She’s well. Uncommonly intelligent even for one of us. Though she does exhibit emotion. Which surprises me,” a small flicker of that, almost concern, once again passed over her face. “I fear I won’t understand her as she grows.”

“You fear?”

“Yes, I do.”

Nothing Suzanna could have said would have sent more shock through my body. Suzanna had always been utterly fearless, even when we were children.

“We never wanted her to be...exactly like us,” I said, treading more carefully than I had ever felt the need to do with her before.

“No, of course not,” she said and I could see that the subject of our teenage love child was closed.

Lorna was never something that Suzanna wanted me to be involved with. I sent money, cards and presents every year and had seen her a handful of times, but my mask was practically non existent (it was really a miracle I had not been caught for my crimes, but then there aren’t many people too interested in discovering why the drug dealers go missing) and Suzanna’s though still cold, was almost perfect. Suzanna had always believed that if Lorna was to have a chance at a normal life, one psychopath raising her was more than enough.

Suzanna waved over the boy in the ridiculous uniform and he approached with a fake smile plastered across his pasty, spotty, barely out of adolescence face.

“What can I get you guys?” he enquired with a cheeriness that was sickening and far too common in customer service.

“Two more cups of coffee please,” said Suzanna, returning the fake smile with her own.

“Coming right up,” he said and then bounced away.

We sat in silence until he returned with the pot. He poured us a cup each and without asking if there was anything else he could get us he bounced away again.

I raised my mug of sludge and she did the same. We clinked our mugs together.

“To the anniversary of our first kill,” I said quietly but enthusiastically.

“Our first kill,” she repeated and I swear her eyes lit up the way any other woman's eyes would have at the sight of their naked sexual partner. I almost loved her for that.

We sipped the lava sludge tentatively. How typically human. We complain when it’s too cold and we complain when it’s too warm.

“I know it is a break with tradition, but I got you a present this year,” I told her.

“A present?” her perfectly shaped eyebrows raised slightly.

The corners of my mouth twitched and turned upwards in what anyone would else would call a murderous grin. I preferred to think of it as the most genuine smile I was capable of.

Her head turned slowly towards the boy, as though she could read my thoughts.

“Does he meet my criteria?” she asked me, licking her red lips.

“It's better than that," I laughed almost soundlessly. "He also meets mine. We can do this together, just like the first time."

“Well then my dear,” she turned back to me, eyes completely aflame now in a way I had not seen in twelve years. “This shall be the happiest of anniversaries."