I Don't Want To Kill You by Dan Wells

elegant, long and slender. Her hair was golden, and today she had pulled it back into a ponytail that hung past her shoulders. She moved simply and gracefully.
     
    She reached the edge of the lawn and turned around, coming back towards me as she cut the second row. I slumped down in the car so she wouldn’t see me, but her eyes were on the grass. When she turned again to go back the other way I got out of my car and walked slowly towards her, coming to a stop in her driveway. She reached the far edge and pulled the mower around again for another pass. She saw me now, and paused a moment. She turned off the mower and pulled a headphone out of her ear.
     
    ‘Hey, John.’
     
    ‘Hey.’
     
    We stood there, silent. There was so much I wanted to say, but really nothing that I actually could say. Not because the words weren’t there, they just weren’t in any kind of order. Anything I said would be a string of random words: food shoes house, my not floor holding. Everywhere. Sky. Language fell apart, not just for me but for the entire world, from now until the dawn of time.
     
    How did anyone ever talk to anyone else?
     
    She spoke. ‘How you doing?’
     
    ‘Fine.’
     
    Silence again.
     
    She bent back down to grab the starter cord, but I stopped her.
     
    ‘Do you think . . .?’ I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask her.
     
    ‘John,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry for what I said. But it’s still true. You’re . . . I mean . . . I don’t know what I mean.’ She sighed. ‘We talked about this already, right? I can’t just forget everything. I can’t just look at your eyes and see the person I used to see. I’ve seen . . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know what I’ve seen. More than I wanted to.’ She braced herself to pull, hand on the cord, but I stopped her again.
     
    ‘Wait.’
     
    She closed her eyes. ‘Did Marci ask you out?’ she asked.
     
    I nodded. ‘How’d you know?’
     
    ‘She asked me if she could. Like I had any say in it. You’re not my . . . anything. I mean, we only went on two dates, right?’
     
    ‘You told her to ask me out?’
     
    She let go of the cord and straightened up. ‘I didn’t tell her not to.’
     
    ‘I thought you were scared of me. Seems like you would’ve warned her or something.’
     
    She shook her head. ‘Please don’t think I hate you, John. You’re a good friend. You saved my life, maybe more than once. But now every time I see you I see him , and I see the smoke, and then I see the way you . . .’ Her voice cracked and I could tell she was trying not to cry. She kept her eyes down, avoiding mine. ‘I see the way you looked at me. The way you looked when you asked him for the knife. I’m not scared any more, I just . . .’ She looked up at the sky. ‘I don’t know. I think it’s because I saw someone else, someone behind your face, like you’d taken off a mask. It was still you, but it wasn’t. And I don’t think that person is going to hurt me, or Marci, or anybody else, but . . . I guess the thing is that I don’t know anything about that person. At all. And that’s what scares me more than anything – that there could be two people, so different, and one of them so secret.’
     
    I looked at her – bright blue eyes, clearer than the sky, wet with tears like drops of rain. I wanted to wipe away those tears, I wanted to run, I wanted to hold her and hit her and scream and disappear. I wanted to melt into a puddle of sludge, like Crowley and Forman before me – gone forever, like a drop of nothing. I wanted to deny it all, and tell her she was crazy, and act as normal as possible, and convince her I was just like everybody else. I should have stayed in my car. I should have stayed in my house.
     
    She bent back to the starter cord, but I stepped forward, my hand held out desperately.
     
    ‘Can we talk?’
     
    ‘About what?’
     
    ‘About . . .’ About what? I had nothing to talk about. I had no hobbies, I had no