POV: Mavis

Here's what was going to happen: stop at a hotel, rest up, and be back on the road by tomorrow morning with the tied-up woman in her trunk. Mavis was heading back home to Missouri from a trip. Her plans were thrown off completely by the man resting one arm over the other on the balcony.

He was too good to be true, his white cuffs going down to his wrists and black tie draped around his neck. She imagined what it would be like to wrap it around just a little bit tighter, for his perfect shirt to bloom like roses painted red.

Mavis took note of the brass room numbers on his back door and walked through the parking lot to the lobby. She had been idling on the curb with a cigarette, her briefcase still packed in her truck. Mavis thanked her tendency to procrastinate.

It would make her immediate exit all the easier.

She walked at a casual pace across the bottom floor despite her blood racing, finding her way to the kitchen. It was late, and the hotel only provided free breakfast, so Mavis was the only one there. She grabbed a knife from a block on the marble counter and slowly pulled it out.

The dim bulb hanging over the counter made the knife glint. It was sharpened to a razor quality, the blade reflecting the rich, red walls on the unique finish. It was such a simple thing, so unassuming when chopping an onion, and yet such a symbol of power and beauty when put to the test.

Her opportunity had arrived to give the tool a proper christening. Mavis slowly backed away from the counter and held the knife close to her thigh, slightly behind her at her side. She swallowed and looked out of the corner of her eye at the island.

The cook swiped at her phone, her leg crossed over the other on a buffet stool, right fucking there but not bothering to look up. Mavis suppressed a giggle. The other woman let out a yawn and slumped over the table as she slipped away and up the stairs.

Mavis took the steps to work out some of the adrenaline and savor this moment. Her palm filled with sweat as it turned the cold, brass door handle. Her heart beat in her throat when she gripped the sweaty knife with the other.

The door turned halfway, then the lock stopped it. She grumbled. Mavis knocked on the door, hiding the knife behind her back.

"Who is it?" a weary voice came through the thick, wooden door.

For a moment she froze, uncertain of what to say.

"Special delivery," Mavis answered, driving the doubt out of her voice.

Complete silence met her on the other side of the door for a long moment. There was a brief terror that gripped her as if her plan had somehow been discovered. At the door, there was the lightest breathing.

She pictured the man checking the peephole before the door opened with a sluggish whine. He got out a questioning sound before Mavis ran him through with the knife. The look on his face at that moment alone was sublime.

The man clutched protectively around the gash in his stomach, heaving in shock. The red that came off of his fingers made the colors in the room brighter and fueled a thrilled laugh from her, and she had only just begun.

Mavis knocked him to the floor and brutally plunged the knife into his throat. He let out a garbled sound that was seconds away from being a call out for help. A brunette bang fell over her forehead. Heat seared the back of her neck as she grinned in an almost strained fashion.

The murderous look set off the man who pulled the plug of a lamp and knocked it to the floor. He gripped her middle and shrugged her off of him weakly, getting up and falling back to the floor with the blood quickly pooling around his stomach.

Mavis stood on his back and silently assessed in the back of her head where she wanted to take this next. So many options, and so little time. Mavis struggled, then a clear thought entered through the thoughts that were making her fired up.

"I know what I'll do," she narrated to herself.

The man garbled something and kicked. An actual scream came through for half a second before the blood drowned it out and it died in his throat. He made one more attempt to claw his way out from under her foot, then seized on the ground.

Mavis turned his body supine once more and dug into his eyes with her thumbs. She knew that the man was screaming but his voice was entirely suppressed, dug out so that he could not call for help.

Mavis grinned at the realization that she had even taken that from him, his own pain withheld from being vocalized. Next, she picked up the knife that had fallen at her side when by some reflex or instinct, he hit her with an uncurled hand.

Mavis was knocked off balance. It was like a club to the side of her head, clumsily swung and not particularly striking, but with her small frame she fell onto her side. An odd laugh bubbled out of her chest.

This one had enough fight in him yet. Mavis fished the knife out from where it skidded under the dresser and gripped it firmly. She loomed behind the man who was dribbling a stream of red as he crawled.

The man grabbed the bottom of the door's edge. Mavis slowly approached from behind. She gripped his hair and with a cruel jerk of his head backward he fell lopsided to the floor. The man kicked her once before the woman pinned him again.

Mavis dragged the knife across his stomach, ripping the flesh in jagged rows as she struggled to work it deep into his body. Having a heart, she never subjected her victims to pain for very long, so Mavis dropped the knife.

She looked at the window, a fun way to send him off. Mavis gripped his leg and pulled, straining as he, now nearly dead, flopped blindly on the ground like a fish on a dock. The man left a trail and then stilled when she dropped his leg.

The sticky notepad next to the pen on the nightstand inspired her to leave a little note, her own personal memento mori in written form. The woman scrawled on the strip and stuck it to the man's back: Short trip, long fall.

Was it the most clever thing Mavis could have thought of on the spot? Eh. She cracked open the window all the way and, with strength that could only be fueled by a murderous adrenaline-fueled high, Mavis pulled his body upward.

She took one last look at him, appraising her work. Blood mixed with saliva dribbled down his lips. The man looked like he was mouthing something. Mavis thought that she could read one word on them: Why?

His bleary eyes still held a dim flicker of fear when Mavis pushed his top half and let gravity do the rest of the work. Her head poked out the window as the man hit the ground with a crunch. It was like her jello platter that fell when a woman bumped her shoulder accidentally, hard and soft when it hit the floor.

Incidentally, that same woman was tied up in the back of her car. As he lay in the blood steadily pooling there were screams in every direction. She thought about his unvocalized question as Mavis bolted out of the room, slowing in apprehension when there was another in the hall.

She stood side by side with him in the elevator, covered in warm blood on the front of her shirt. He was too engaged in the bright screen of his phone to pay her any mind. His face was a blank slate, and Mavis hated the look of it.

She framed the previous man's face in her mind, so full of desire to live. Mavis rarely witnessed that spark, that greedy hunger to hold onto life, outside of the people who looked her in the eyes right on the way out.

She thought that humanity was a row of ellipsis fitted between two exclamation points. Mavis could only get a glimpse of one exciting endpoint. She walked out of the back exit to her truck. Mavis glanced at the inspirational palm leaf placard on her dashboard as she climbed into the driver's seat: It's about the journey, not the destination.

Mavis thought that this is what her answer would be to him. She revved up the engine and pulled smoothly out of the lot, driving up the steep exit onto the thin road laid between the gravel. After several hours, Mavis glanced at her hazel eyes in the rearview.

They were tired, with bags circling them underneath, changing to a dull muddy hue as opposed to the green that would pop out when she was in a frenzy. Mavis slowed to a stop on the side of the road.

She wrangled out of the sticky shirt and balled it up to throw it into the back seat. Mavis huffed, pulling a new blouse out of the briefcase that she had not even bothered to unzip. The journey was what she lived for, after all.

Everything leading up to a kill was what made her blood course hot in her veins. In the days after, Mavis dipped into a depression until someone new caught her eye. It was the next day that she returned to the scene when all that she knew changed.

The forensics team stood in a half circle over the white chalk. It made Mavis think of a summoning ritual, only the chalk was in the shape of a person, and there were no candles. She thought that it was anything but spiritual until one of the investigators locked eyes with her from across the pavement.

Her heart knocked into her teeth. For a fleeting moment that felt like an eternity all thoughts voided from her mind as Mavis gasped shakily. Her body felt as though it were floating. Those stormy blue eyes held such a depth of soul behind his otherwise stony face that everything but him faded away.

Nothing else mattered. Not the police car throwing red and blue lights as it pulled away, the thrill in the fact that she was standing right in front of them, literally within a few strides reach of their suspect and they had no clue.

Not the woman tied up in her truck, the look of shame and apology when she knocked her off balance, and later, her muffled screams through the gag and the look of wide terror in her bloodshot eyes when Mavis opened the trunk.

Not even the outline of the man that was all she could think about all night could compare. Mavis tore that perfect picture down, putting it through a shredder as a new image was locked into place in her mind.

He looked away and the moment was over, but the blue-eyed man held her heart and soul as the world returned. She looked down at the sidewalk, taking note of her feet on the ground. Mavis looked back up as he was walking toward a car.

She flailed in a panic. Mavis could not let him get away. She ran toward her own truck parked in the lot across from the scene and pulled out, following him down the road. They drove for about an hour until they parked at a familiar workplace.

Mavis was a morgue technician herself, from another town, but that would change. The man made a beeline for the doors. There was no indication that he noticed a truck tailing him. She put one arm over the other on her low steering wheel and smiled, then fixated on the sign in front with burning determination.

This was why Mavis was here.

She enjoyed digging through bodies. Even though her job involved putting them back together again more than it did taking them apart, it satiated her appetite for some time before the urge to kill overcame her again.

Her parents didn't know what to do when she killed her gerbil, her rabbit, and the fish in the tank. Mavis buried them under rocks made into headstones in the flower garden on the side of their home. They took her to therapist after psychiatrist after holistic doctor, but none of them knew what to do.

Her earliest memory was of stomping on a beetle until its broken wings fluttered reflexively before it was ground into pieces in the driveway. What she liked the most about it was how the body moved even after there was no way to sustain its survival.

Her parents thought that she grew out of this phase and moved on. Mavis had many friends growing up, which seemed to signal to them that she was fine. Even now she maintained these friendships through events, finding plenty of people through her mutuals to play with, once she found the opportunity to pull the object of her twisted affection from the group.

Her job bid her time between those points, like a smoker chewing on a toothpick soaked in cinnamon oil before their next hit. Her hands began to shake, and Mavis became irritable, dragged toward an inevitable relapse.

She didn't know why the universe made her this way until today. It was so clear to her now. Mavis was given this crumbling, sunbleached road to race toward her destination, the man inside of that building. She got out her phone to make a few calls.

Mavis had to know his name.