From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

I’m in a pool of blood staring at a swan with an ax in its back. The room is dark and empty. No bed. No chair. No carpet. No curtains. No music. No lamps. Just a floor of an abandoned house and the moon coming in red and full through a barred window with a crack in the glass. Just me and Max on a concrete floor covered with dark blood. More blood than is possible to come out of a bird.

I look at the bird’s long snakelike neck. Dark glassy eyes wide open. The smell of green tea, wet leaf hangs in the room so faintly now. 

I stare at bare walls, at the single suitcase on the floor, my dark clothes tumbling out of it like a spilled secret, my musty sleeping bag in the corner, my open notebook facedown on top of it. A lady-shaped lamp I rescued from the dorm dumpster beside a coffee mug I stole from the English department lounge that says A Room of One’s Own. 

“Ava.” My voice echoes in the unfinished room. Off the cheaply insulated walls of wood. Nothing but rusted pipes and beams and hanging wire above my head. 

I look at Max beside me, swimming in his anarchy trench coat. I stare at his face. The knives and the wolf have fallen away like so much costume makeup. His features no longer shift, no longer recall transcendent moments or former lovers. His face is simply my face. Undisguised at last. Familiar as mud. Punched in with grief. Rage. Suddenly, I want to kill him. This thing I made out of hate and love and air and one fucking animal. There’s an ax right there. The handle slightly curved, cherry colored. And then I know it wasn’t him. I see it now, the pinky white hand that clutched it. Small and delicately fingered, trained in piano.