House of Skin by Jonathan Janz

genitals, but there was no time. The axe was already descending.
    She dove forward between his legs as the blade hit the concrete behind her. She rose to her knees and spun. She jabbed the loppers with all her might, felt them sink into the flesh of his back. He bellowed in agony and the axe clattered to the floor. He writhed, unable to free himself of the lopper blades buried in the muscles of his back. With a cry, she brought the handles together and squeezed. Brand’s cry rose and broke as the tree loppers crunched through his spine.
    Then he was tumbling forward, the loppers going with him.
    Lying there on his face, he hardly moved, a low keening gurgle the only sound coming from his mouth.
    Julia stood.
    She walked around his body, the lopper handles sticking straight up out of his back. She picked up the axe.
    “God help me,” she said, and brought it down on his head.

Chapter Eight
    Paul awoke at a quarter of eight with a sense of anticipation he’d not felt in years.
    The time had come.
    Pencil in hand, notepad and coffee atop the mahogany desk where he sat with his eyes wide and his every nerve ending alive with possibility, he took a drink of coffee, and though it wasn’t very good—he suspected the Folgers can he’d discovered in the pantry was long past its prime—he could still feel it doing its work, surcharging him with energy, readying him for what he was about to do. He breathed deeply of the musty den and the fragrant spring air coming through the window, commingling scents that fused the best of both worlds, the realm of thought and the realm of nature.
    He exhaled, scooted under the desk.
    He stared at the paper.
    And wondered what to write.
     
     
    Julia walked to work in tears. She thought fleetingly of Watermere, of the new owner. Though both mind and body were numb, she was able to speculate about her new neighbor. She scanned her memory for the few details she could from her conversation with…  
    ( Ted Brand, his name was Ted Brand, the man you killed )
    …the lawyer, the fact that Paul Carver was in his thirties, had lived in Memphis until recently, and that he had a girlfriend, but no, they weren’t yet engaged. Julia tried to picture him, and in this she was moderately successful, the tears in her eyes that blurred her vision actually making it easier to focus on her inner sight, the man similar in build to Myles Carver, perhaps even possessed of similar features. She thought of Myles Carver’s handsome face, his piercing blue eyes. His insatiable libido.
    Which brought her back to Ted Brand.
    It fell on her like a leaden blanket: dead, the man was dead , and she was his killer. Julia choked back a sob. God, she hadn’t even recognized herself last night after showering off the blood.
    Murderer .
    The word sounded obscene.
    It was the way she felt after the adrenaline of the fight drained out of her and she was left to gawk at Ted Brand’s still, silent form on the basement floor. Seeing the ants crawling over him, biting his corpse, made her sick, sick at the sight and sick with herself, her shocking barbarity.
    Who was this person, she wondered now, who was capable of murder?  
    What terrified her was how little she’d thought while doing it. It was another pair of hands lifting the axe. It was another woman, one without a conscience, who ended a man’s life.
    The sight of his body, the bloody back and shit-caked legs, hand sent her up the stairs to the shower, her whole body trembling wildly as she tried to deny what she’d done, tried to negate the act.
    Even after, staring in the mirror, her hands still sticky and her victim still dead, she couldn’t believe she’d killed him.
    At that point in the morning, and well into the day, she told herself if Sam Barlow paid her a visit, she’d tell him everything.
     
     
    Paul sat staring at the paper. On it were scrawled the words PIZZA, BEER and POPCORN.
    He tore off his grocery list and set it aside for later.
    He stared at