Read Harmless for Free Online Page B

barely sufficed.
    Really, I couldn’t help
myself.  I’d had daydreams of the magic happening in Kerry’s bedroom.  For
months. 
    I know.  Trust me, I
know.  Sick, pathetic, twisted.  But you have to understand something: the
reality of Kerry being dead hadn’t truly sunken in just yet.  Of course there was
the absence of essence I’d mentioned earlier, yet when something is there and
then it isn’t, you need time to adjust. 
    Think of it as
something akin to jet lag.  Like when you fly to New York in an attempt to
check, in person, whether or not Brian Williams has had a chance to look over
the packages you’ve been sending.  Your body still thinks it’s noon, regardless
of the fact that every clock around you, even the one on the police cruiser
dashboard outside of Thirty Rockefeller Plaza, says it’s three o’clock. 
    A change has happened
within the world, but your soul hasn’t had time to catch up.
    Acceptance comes later,
after you’ve had a chance to process.
    Maybe jet lag isn’t the
right way to describe it.  Think of pressing Enter on an old, dusty computer,
like something from the early 90s, and then waiting around for thirty seconds
for the grinding, screeching hard drive to execute your command.  You’ve
pressed Enter, the information is out there—it simply takes a while to show the
results.
    Copying files… You
have five hours and forty-three minutes remaining .
    So yeah, the bedroom.
    Her bed was made.  Her
nightstand was free of the usual jumble like lotion, a jewelry holder, and an
alarm clock. 
    Who doesn’t need an
alarm clock?  I admired her confidence.
    I didn’t notice the
blood on the carpet, not at first.
    Inside the single
drawer of the nightstand, I found an eye mask, cherry lip-gloss ( yuck —cherry,
an abomination to flavors everywhere) and…well…and a personal massager . 
    Hint taken?  I won’t
bother to tell you the places my mind went for a fraction of a second.  How
could it not?  Remember…still computing.
    Nothing of consequence
there.
    To my left, a cat tree,
of all things.  The tall kind, covered in rainy-day gray carpeting, with
multiple levels and legs covered in sisal rope for scratching.  I have the
exact same one in my house.  Sparkle loves it.  That’s his territory.  His
domain.  His perch atop the world where he can nap lazily while I bust out the
morning workout routine.
    Sparkle’s idea of “ Be
the victor ” is sleeping eighteen of twenty-four hours.
    He succeeds daily.
    The presence of a cat
tree surprised me, because, again, I thought I knew her, and I couldn’t recall
ever seeing a cat coming or going from her home.  I’d never gotten the
cat-owner vibe, so it was bizarre, for lack of a better word. 
    As if the whole situation
wasn’t cuckoo enough, here’s where it got strange.
    Or began to get
strange, I should say, because the events that followed made this tiny
discovery seem like a minor coincidence in comparison.
    On the top level was a
black collar, decorated with a series of small, silver, glow-in-the-dark Harley
Davidson logos, and dangling from it, a skull-and-bones ID tag.
    Do I have to tell you
that it belonged to Sparkle?  Or could you have guessed?
    Myself?  Not in a
million years.
    He’d lost it weeks
ago.  Or so I’d thought.
    Here’s the funny thing:
isn’t it ironic, Alanis, that a male cat with such a frou-frou name like
Sparkle would be wearing such a badass collar?  No, not really.  That’s just
amusing.  Maybe the irony would be this: a cat named Traitor pulling a Benedict
Arnold in his neighbor’s home.
    I did, I felt
betrayed.  Yet another instance of being not good enough for someone in my
life.  Felis catus or homo sapiens .
    In the months since
Kerry had moved in next door, Sparkle would often disappear for hours, and me
being me, the trusting individual that I am, I would just assume that he was
out doing cat things.  Like sleeping in a different place. 
    And by that I mean