CW: violence against women, references to sexual assault.
She found the first man on Tinder, or maybe on Hinge, and the restaurant where they met was glowing with antique lamps and green brocade wallpaper and velvet couches, everything soft and inviting, not a single hint of what was to unfold in an hour or two. The raspberry lipstick coating her mouth left a perfect kiss on the bar napkin that he stuffed into his coat with a smile, crumpling it under his hands. She was all smooth and shiny and bright, her pink pencil skirt keeping her steps quick and small, and in his dark bedroom she slipped off her blush-colored sweater like a cape. She was ready when his heavy hands began to grope without permission, when he stopped asking if this was okay, when his hand clamped over her mouth in a way he probably told himself was just part of a game. One he’d never asked her if she wanted to play. That was when he felt it, her body collapsing under his hands, crumbling into whorls that tasted like damp sugar and sent his body into convulsions as he took it in. It coated his lips and his tongue, and his fingers, that he then rubbed into his eyes, and on contact they began to scream in pain. When he slumped onto his unwashed sheets it brought his end faster, as he breathed more of it into his nose and his mouth, this crumbling stuff he had thought was a girl, a slim fresh girl with perfect wide eyes, joyful and sweet as cotton candy.
• • • •
The next man’s friends swore to the detectives that he never used dating apps, that he had a girlfriend at home. None of the staff of the bar actually remembered seeing her come in, the girl whose sharp nails gleamed against her shot glass, the color of a hot pepper, one bartender said. None of them noted anything unusual as he leaned over her on his bar stool, wet mouth grinning as he asked: “you ever get tired of being called exotic and spicy?” That wasn’t what wrote his demise, nor were the shots of tequila he kept sliding her way, or the way the worm wriggled in his teeth, pickled and white. By the time he pulled her into the alley and pressed his lips over hers, by the time the burning sensation spread through his mouth, by the time he fell to the ground and clutched his pounding heart, his nearly purple face frozen in a rictus of pain, he had shown her full well he deserved it.
She was long gone, of course, by the time the paramedics and then examiners and then pathologists took over his body, trying to understand the story it told. None of them could explain how he had managed to ingest enough capsaicin to cause cardiac arrest, in a quiet alleyway with no restaurants for blocks around. Or why the napkin tossed over his chest bore the marks of a mouth painted the color of a ghost pepper, shining and ripe, but yielded not a single trace of DNA except the victim’s own.
Stories began blooming all over the map, flowering three or four times in a single town then perhaps miles or entire time zones away, strings of bodies like bite marks on an exposed neck. The college boys who grinned and elbowed each other at what looked to be pliant prey, their own laughter the very last sound that they heard. The ones who used their own awkward fumblings to conceal the danger they brought. The ones whose friends swore up and down would never harm a soul—“he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body,” they loved to say—and whose bodies erupted in bruises precisely the size of their own hands. Sometimes investigators would find a bar napkin imprinted with lipstick, but even as that calling card began to attract attention it led nowhere at all. The color might be candy-apple red, blushing peach, black licorice, and yet the shape and even the size of the lips themselves always changed. And nobody could explain how the only biological evidence—hair, skin, anything—came from the victims themselves.
• • • •
If she had to explain it, she would say that she willed herself into being with nothing more than the power of her desire. Her favorite appearance so far had been all tattoos and muscles and boots that reached to her knees, catnip to the type of men who said they liked their women strong. When she sipped the drink he’d shot through with a white powder in a white envelope, it soaked into every one of the veins, the ones that were so close to real, thrumming and liquid and hot. He guided her stumbling feet through the door of the bar, winking when a stranger’s eyes widened at the weight, the heft of the body that he wrangled into a cab. The arching snakes on her thigh, the unsheathed knife inked on her shoulder, that he half carried, half pulled into a room where he had done this before. But this time, when he pressed his mouth over hers, he drank it in—just what he’d poured into her glass, but stronger, spiked with the fury and shame of the women who’d lain just where she was now.
If she’d wanted his body to spasm, to writhe out of control, she got what she wanted. His hands clawed at his closing throat, as if he could bleed out what he’d already drunk in. When he was found the next morning, the sheets were soaked in his foaming spittle and a substance precisely the same as what he’d put in her drink. The drink of a perfect girl, the girl of his dreams, a girl who didn’t exist.
• • • •
The girl who does not exist owes her existence to all the times I rewatched Reservation Dogs and its scenes with the Deer Lady—a mysterious creature who’s deadly to violent, predatory men. This story also owes a debt of inspiration to Promising Young Woman and, of course, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. You could say I have a thing for stories of female rage and revenge.
