Sheriff Brannigan stares at the woman, leans toward her. It was as if when he opened the door to this room- there’s a corpse in the bathtub-he’d entered a bubble and now only he and this dead woman and this inauspicious bathroom existed. only the sounds of his pulse, his breath, coming in, going out, in unconscious, tidal sway. His sheriffs badge gleams like the edges of the dead woman’s pillowcase: too bright, too clean for this room. Lincoln, how was the play?… The joke passes through his mind like a bit of trash blowing down a deserted street. Exactly what you might expect for the fourth guest bathroom on the third floor of this dizzyingly large mansion. The room is like a despised relative in some opulent family: richer than sin, but not a lot of love to show for it. The cream-colored hand towels have a weather-beaten thinness to them. The actual-gold soap dish by the sink is speckled brown with tarnish and scum.

His policeman eyes pick up plenty of details that tell him a more nuanced story.

At least compared to any bathroom he’s ever had. Other than that, Sheriff Brannigan thinks, it’s a pretty nice bathroom. Stains smear the areas around the body like an aura bloody hands having done bloody work. More blood trails out from under the pillowcase in thick rivulets, down her neck, across her chest, clotting along the basin of the tub. There’s so much blood the fabric clings to what’s underneath like a second skin, leaving hollows where the eyes, the still-screaming mouth had been. The topography of what was once a face presses out of the middle of the dark, wet stain. A clean, almost glaringly white pillowcase, featureless other than the huge stain of dark, sopping blood in the center. She’s been stripped nude, save for the pillowcase pulled over her head. She’s leaning against the wall, legs dangling over the lip of the tub.

Mary by Nat Cassidy