Bob DeRosa

Zooey Deschanel killed her first man when she was twenty-two. She was on location in North Carolina filming her indie break-out All The Real Girls when her handler called and told her a Russian operative was passing through the state. After filming the crucial bowling alley scene, she drove to the cheap motel where the operative was spending the night. She waited until he came out of his room with an ice bucket and followed him into a shadowy alcove where he began scooping ice from a large bin with a plastic trowel. She shot him twice in the back and he slumped into the open bin, his blood cooling as it leaked onto the mound of ice. Then Zooey drove back to her hotel near Asheville and memorized her lines for the next day’s scene. 

Zooey’s handler paid a film journalist a lot of money to call her a manic pixie dream girl. He felt it would divert people’s attention from the qualities that seemed plain as day to him. The blankness of her eyes. The cool demeanor that defused anyone nearby. The sweet, quiet energy that signaled she was no threat. But she was. She’d been recruited in high school after a career aptitude test revealed that her strong work ethic combined with an inherent ability to transform her inner self at a moment’s notice meant she was qualified for exactly two careers: actress and assassin. After years of training, she became a professional killer in manic pixie dream girl’s attire. And her handler was the only one who knew. 

Zooey killed a billionaire’s bodyguards (two men and a woman) while filming Elf in New York City. On one of her weekends off, she entered the VIP suite of a nightclub with a message for the billionaire. She shot his two male bodyguards first, but the female was fast, knocking the gun from Zooey’s hand. They traded martial arts blows for nearly a minute before the woman said, Wait, aren’t you in that movie, and then Zooey crushed her windpipe with a flying elbow. The billionaire shivered in fear as Zooey walked away. He’d received the message Zooey was instructed to give: that he was touchable. The next day during lunch Will Ferrel made a joke about how funny it would be if Zooey was actually a cunning assassin. Everyone laughed. Zooey paused, then laughed, too. That night she asked her handler if she should kill Will Ferrel but he said, no, it was only a joke. 

The assassination business slowed for Zooey when she was cast on the TV show New Girl as it was harder to cover her tracks if she killed too often in the same city. Luckily, she was in a band that would occasionally tour. It was after a She & Him set at Coachella when she killed another assassin, a German model there to hear the music and maybe shag the lead singer of the rock band Muse. The model had killed several of Zooey’s colleagues in the past, so when she went to a VIP bathroom, Zooey locked her inside and set the whole thing on fire. Afterwards, Zooey had a drink with her Almost Famous co-star Kate Hudson. Zooey asked how her Coachella was going, and Kate complained about all the attractive women trying to sleep with her fiancé (who happened to be the lead singer of Muse). One less now, said Zooey, and to this day, Kate has no idea what she meant. 

Zooey retired from professional killing when Property Brother Jonathan Scott asked her to marry him. Her handler understood the decision and thanked her for her years of service. Zooey knew what that meant, so on her next solo trip out of town she went to her handler’s summer house in New Hampshire. She waited until his family left for the grocery store, then forced him into her car at gunpoint and made him drive deep into the White Mountain National Forest. He knew it was over when she had him stop the car near a large hole that she’d dug earlier. When she asked him if he had any last words, he said the proudest moment of his career was convincing the world she was a manic pixie dream girl. If only they knew, he began, before Zooey killed him quickly with a single shot to the heart. He was the last person she would ever kill. 

Zooey flew back home and made dinner for her fiancé. Over orecchiette with tomatoes and olives, he asked how her trip was. She said it was fine. He said he missed her, and she said she missed him, too. And she meant it. She really did. 

Where BOB DeROSA comes from, nice guys finish first. His screenwriting credits include Classified, Killers, and White Collar. Along with frequent collaborator Ben Rock, Bob co-wrote the Audible Original Catchers and SHUDDER’s Video Palace. His short fiction has appeared in Escape Pod, Every Day Fiction, and the Simon & Schuster horror anthology Video Palace: In Search of the Eyeless Man.When he’s not writing, Bob studies Kenpo karate and keeps his Little Free Library filled with good stuff. Come say hi at bobderosa.com

September Woods Garland

Death devoured his beloved over the course of a waxing moon, blackness creeping up her fingers and toes like a morbid thermometer. He cried at her bedside, holding her hand and begging for a do-over. The town was far and the burden too great, so he moved her body into the walk-in cooler where they stored their bounty. Shelves of preserves that once signaled abundance now haunted him with a promise of finite servings of her love.

To pass those first nights without her, he hid from the world and baked obsessively, the kitchen his personal limbo between life with her and a flavorless future alone. Hands sticky with jam and confectioner’s sugar, he hungered for the days he and his love foraged bulging flats of huckleberries and sold their love-pies at the local market.

It was at the height of the full buck moon when the idea entered his mind like a download from the cosmos. Surrounded by his culinary creations, he was consumed by this new inspiration. The berries of his belated, hand-plucked with love, would serve his vision now—a vision he scribbled on a scrap of parchment in a surge of grief-driven madness. 

His was a generative madness, first tasted when she led him on a polar plunge in the peak of winter. Like that dip in the ocean, her attention had shocked him into his body after years of numb plodding. He’d watched her run naked into the surf, laughing and beckoning him near. He’d never run with such abandon. After all he’d seen and done that he’d been sure had condemned him to a lonesome existence, she and her moon showed him hope.

It was this madness he channeled now as he placed his beloved among the mise en place, the star ingredient of his newest confection. Into the early morning, he worked on her. As he sliced through her epidermis, he bisected a tattoo of an eclipsing moon. The ink had faded through decades and death, yet the sigil pulled at him like an invitation to elemental intimacy.

That skin-moon glowed, echoing the lunar light they’d bathed beneath. Moon after moon he, the skeptic, had felt magic. In a world where he’d not been shown grace, she’d led him to the safety of moonlight and they’d poured each other out. Dissolved into the sea. Shivering, loving, alive.

Peeling back the penumbra, he half-expected moonlight to pour from the wound and illuminate a detour around his grief. Instead, her insides shone slick under the artificial light. Muscle, tendons, yellow bubbly fat. Ordinary and dead.

His hands stayed steady, his mind intent on preserving every ounce. Layers deep he cut, through flesh and to the bone. Digging for something he couldn’t place. Searching, certain he’d discover a treasure. Something to cling to.

Her smell mingled with the fading scents of days-old scones and muffins and a compulsion to feel her insides arose in him, the onset a rush that nearly knocked him off his feet. To be close again, intimate. A yearning to be inside her pulled like the moon on the tides. 

Just a quick touch, he bargained.

He recoiled at first, the cold of her parts an unsettling confirmation. There was no life in her. No blood pumping or lunar magic flowing. Just cold death. But his heart refused and directed his hands to go deeper. Bare fingers searching. Tentative touch gave way to exploration—pulling and tearing. A rhythmic movement, urgent and frenetic. Soon enough, ragged filets lined the butcher’s block counters. Timers dinged. Flour and sinew coated his apron where he wiped his hands after the final fold and seal of each pastry. Batch after batch, he stuffed them with equal parts berry and beloved.

He wrapped the tarts in foil and scrawled the dates of a decade’s worth of full moons on each with a permanent marker. A vision began to form, fueled by love and lunacy. A vision of ritual and reunion, of consumer and consumed. His heart pounded at the thought, his mouth dry, an acrid taste creeping forth. 

Where for weeks her body had lain in stasis, preserved by the power of electric cold, he now placed tray after tray of his love in her new, consumable form. Preserved. Here, not yet gone—not really. And maybe never, if he were to believe in consumption. And act upon that belief. If he could only bring himself to.

SEPTEMBER WOODS GARLAND hails from the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys long, romantic walks through haunted houses and feeding Bigfoot peanut butter & seaweed sandwiches. Her work has been supported by Hypatia in the Woods and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Berlin Literary Review, The Stray Branch, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere. September serves as editor in chief at Weird Lit Magazine. She splits her time between Richmond Beach, WA and Fidalgo Island. www.septemberwoodsgarland.com