Prompt: The List | Word count:1500 words | Genre: Fiction
They say the first time is always the hardest. I didn’t feel a thing my first time. I knelt beside her double bed and listened to the staccato pulse of the shower and the trill of her voice sing an old song from a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical as she played with the echoes in her bathroom. The light under her door made a straight line in the darkness, a disapproving golden mouth. Her shower knobs squealed as she turned them off, not quite masking her flat note.
The aroma of her perfume mushroomed ahead of her on a blast of warmer, humid air when she opened the door. Roses, vanilla, and sweet honey enveloped me as she hesitated at the threshold, survival intuition from caveman days warning her not to enter a dark room, barely acknowledged, quickly brushed aside. I watched her walk toward me, wrapped in a towel, her body limned by the glow from the bathroom. As she reached for the light, I surged up and wrapped my arms around her, one hand over her mouth, the other drawing my knife across her neck. Like a bunny, she squealed once, but was quiet when I let her sink to the floor. Her blood splashed across her blonde hair; it looked brown in the faint light.