10th
Conversations with a Sociopath
Like Cincinnatus C. I keep wondering when the axe is going to fall.
Everytime I pull my hair back I tease fate, flaunting a bared nape. “Her neck is so swanlike,” they have all begun to say.
Cincinnatus used to waste his time wondering about when it would happen too:
“So it may be tomorrow morning?” he used to ask.
I know I am guilty of something terrible because I feel guilty all the time. I suffer deeply even for the tinest of transgressions.
When Cincinnatus escaped there was no jaunty prison break, no police chase. It was a lot more dramatic than that. He simply willed them all to disappear.
”I don’t know if I started believing in myself more or if I just stopped believing in them,” he confesses one night when we are together. “You should try it sometime…But for god’s sake, would you put some clothes on? Your transulence is such a turn-off. You always look so guilty and that makes even me nervous.”
Suddenly his tone softens into something so slick the words come out like liquid gloss.
“Remember this,” he murmurs, stroking my hair now. “Only a guilty conscience can ever make you truly guilty.”
Sometimes at night we sit together watching re-runs of Dexter and he boasts about how he really got rid of his would-be executioners. And then we practice bending spoons.
