Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill

“Is this real?”
    “Yes.”
    “She’s really dying?”
    He looked at the TV. The naked girl had gone slack and boneless on the floor. “She’s really dead. They killed her boyfriend, too, didn’t they?”
    “He begged.”
    “A cop gave it to me. He told me the two kids were Texas junkies whoshot up a liquor store and killed someone, then ran for Tijuana to hide out. Cops keep some sick shit lying around.”
    “He begged for her.”
    Jude said, “It’s gruesome. I don’t know why I still have it.”
    “I don’t either,” she said. She rose and ejected the movie, then stood looking at it, as if she had never seen a videotape before and was trying to imagine what purpose one might serve.
    “Are you all right?” Jude asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. She turned the glassy, confused look upon him. “Are you?”
    When he didn’t reply, she crossed the room and slipped past him. At the door Shannon caught herself and realized she was still holding the tape. She set it gently on the shelf before she walked out. Later the housekeeper shoved the video in with the books. It was a mistake Jude never bothered to correct, and soon enough he forgot it was even there.
    He had other things to think about. After he returned from New York, he found the house empty, Shannon’s side of the closet cleaned out. She didn’t bother with a note, no Dear John saying their love had been a mistake or that she’d loved some version of him that didn’t really exist, that they’d been growing apart. She was forty-six and had been married and divorced once before. She didn’t do junior-high theatrics. When she had something to say to him, she called. When she needed something from him, her lawyer called.
    Looking at the tape now, he really didn’t know why he had held on to it—or why it had held on to him. It seemed to him he should’ve sought it out and got rid of it when he came home and found her gone. He was not even sure why he had accepted it in the first place, when the tape had been offered to him. Jude teetered then on the edge of an uncomfortable thought, that he had, over time, become a little too willing to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences. And look at the trouble it had led to. Anna had offered herself to him, and hehad taken, and now she was dead. Jessica McDermott Price had offered him the dead man’s suit, and now it was his. Now it was his.
    He had not gone out of his way to own a dead man’s suit, or a videotape of Mexican death-porn, or any of the rest of it. It seemed to him instead that all these things had been drawn to him like iron filings to a magnet, and he could no more help drawing them and holding on to them than a magnet could. But this suggested helplessness, and he had never been helpless. If he was going to throw something into the wall, it ought to be this tape.
    But he’d stood too long thinking. The cold in the studio sapped him, so that he felt tired, felt his age. He was surprised he couldn’t see his own breath; that was how cold it felt. He couldn’t imagine anything more foolish—or weak—than a fifty-four-year-old man pitching his books in a fit of rage, and if there was one thing he despised, it was weakness. He wanted to drop the tape and crunch it underfoot, but instead he turned to put it back on the shelf, feeling that it was more important to recover his composure, to act, at least for a moment, like an adult.
    “Get rid of it,” Georgia said from the door.

10
    H is shoulders twitched in reflexive surprise. He turned and looked. She was naturally pale to begin with, but now her face was bloodless, like polished bone, so she resembled a vampire even more than usual. He wondered if it was a trick of makeup before he saw that her cheeks were damp, the fine black hairs at her temples pasted down with sweat. She stood in pajamas, clutching herself and shivering in the cold.
    “You sick?” he asked.
    “I’m fine,” she said.