flash flooding.

“I’ve heard it both ways,” 

“No, you haven’t.” 

“I have,” 

I flicked my cigarette and watched the ash slowly spin to the ground.

The back of my neck feels itchy, probably from the tag on my t-shirt. I usually cut the tag out, but I didn’t, and now my neck itches, and that’s all I can think about.

Well, that, and how it looks like it’s about to rain pretty soon. We’ve been watching the storm roll in for the last 20 minutes. All the while, bickering to keep ourselves entertained and taking smoke breaks from that.

Barely even summer, and already it was so hot. 

That damn tag. 

“You think you’re so smart,” 

The clouds out there in the distance rumbled, lightning flashed within them—the air electric feeling, tingly.

“Hmm,” 

The garage was open behind us, country music playing from the little stereo in the corner. The neighborhood around us was slowly retreating back inside, away from the soon to be rainstorm.

“Light showers, I think.” 

I hoped for flash flooding. 

I like it here; in the identical rows of single-family homes, I like the superficial chitchat between neighbors, and I liked how everything was always the same. Mundane and slow, so calm. Peaceful.

We pull the grill out and position it in front of the garage just right in case it starts to rain. The overhang of the garage will shield us, but we’re far enough outside for the smoke to not back up into the garage.

I’ve always liked the sound that striking a match makes, the sound that something catches fire makes; I likes the crack and crinkle as the charcoal turns red.

“Is the grill ready?”

I itch my neck and wonder if I should just rip the tag out – what if I rip the shirt?

“I suppose so.” 

There’s one stand up freezer in the garage and another one that’s a chest. The stand-up one holds the beer and sides for dinners and this and that and the other. The chest one is where we keep the meat.

I should tell you now before we get much further into this and you potentially start to like me – I am the bad guy in this story.

I know, I know – now you have to hate me and want me gone. I know how this works. But I’m a likable enough bad guy. I live here, in this house with my wife and daughters, I work a 9 to 5 at a firm, and I take my two weeks of PTO up at a cabin, and I coach the kid’s soccer games, and I have my friends over on the weekend for a grill out and some beers. I have short blond hair and brown eyes, and I’ve recently slimmed down and started running in the morning to stay fit.

It was the running that did it; if I had never started running, I would have never met Synthia.

The rain began, small drops that colored the concrete driveway a darker shade of grey. I could hear it on the windows—tap tap tap.

We pulled the meat out of the freezer and unwrapped it. It looked store bought – looked normal. It’s wasn’t.

The rain came down harder and harder – there was no one outside now. The smoke from the grill curled out into the weather.

Yea, it was the running that ruined everything. It was her deciding to run with me that did it. That was the nail in the coffin.

“Ofta, it’s raining hard.”

We opened two more beers and watching it storm.

The lightning was bright and white and reached all the way across the sky.

Yes, it was a good life here. I had nice cars and a big backyard, and did Synthia really think I was going to give it all up? Really?

The thunder just about shook the house. Briefly, the wives came out to say hello and see how things were going. The kids were in the backyard – probably soaking wet and muddy by now.

The wives left, and so did the conversation and the silence that filled the garage, with exception to the grill sizzling and the occasional crack of thunder was deafening.

Synthia lived two houses down. Well, she used to live two houses down. She had a husband and no children. They drove sports cars and were very rarely, not traveling.

If she had never started running at the same time I did, we would have never talked, and we would have never had an affair, and I wouldn’t have had to get rid of her.

But really, whose fault was it?

“Maybe we should grab a plate for the meat that’s done.”

And the grilling process was started over with new burgers.

“How much will the kids eat?”

“Never know.”

It was a stormy night like this when it all happened – when the push came to shove, and the shove went to blunt force trauma.

Then there’s the whole problem with what you have to do with a dead body. What is there to do with it? Really? What options do you have?

Dump it someplace? Wait to be found out?

Leave her where she was?

Call the cops and pretend you happened to find her?

I always get a half a cow in the summer – I like to process it myself, so I spend the next few nights after getting it processing meat in the garage. It’s a bloody mess, and by the end of it, I have a ton of hamburger.

It was the best-case scenario that I happened to kill her that same week. No one ever came out into the garage until the whole thing was cleaned up and put away. The kids were apparently too young to see a dead animal, and my wife hated the blood.

It’s almost like it was meant to happen, how everything worked out.

The hamburgers were flipped and flipped again. Poking a thermometer into each of them. Putting some on the finished meat plate, I wondered briefly if anyone would think they tasted odd. Outside of the normal?

“Could you cut this tag out of my shirt?“ I asked Dave

It kept raining hard. It looks like I was right about flash flooding.