The first time Larry set out to kill his girlfriend, he planned on poison.
He’d read about the sweetness of antifreeze, and that it worked pretty quickly. Considering the fact that Jolene was a party girl with a taste for high-octane fruity cocktails, it should be reasonably simple. He bought a jug (with cash, he was no dummy) and stashed it in the garage, after topping up both their cars, just to make it look good. A few days later, he bought an eye-dropper that he could pre-fill for when they hit the Paradise Nightclub. If he was lucky, he could get her drunk enough that the ethylene glycol would do its job before she recovered from her inevitable hangover, make it appear that she drank herself to death.
He imagined the scene, one lemon meringue martini after another. The bartender, that playa-wannabe Marco serving her an extra dollop of meringue and a wink like he always did because she “was so damn sweet.” Don’t think Larry hadn’t noticed how she leaned low over the bar just to get that somethin’ extra from the smarmy bastard, every time.
Anyhow, he’d load her up on those, until she was completely wrecked. Let Marco have one last look before she went to the great dance floor in the sky.
It would be fitting for Jolene to pass like that, since she never let off ragging him about his own wandering eye, as if she didn’t give him the need to every other day with her “What kind of man are you, working at a cupcake shop?” and her “I could have twenty men in an hour if I wanted.” She probably had.
No thanks. Swipe left. Next!
So he took her out that Friday, the eyedropper tucked into his watchband. He had only a couple of drops, just to see if it would work. If it did, Marco worked most nights, and Larry would have plenty of opportunities.
The place was packed, the techno beat throbbing, lights flashing, and plenty of writhing reasons for Larry’s eye to drift, but he was the perfect boyfriend. He ordered her drink with a straight face (though Marco was clearly disappointed, accidentally-on-purpose breaking the graham cracker garnish so the crumbs would tell her of his broken heart), and he even splurged on ordering her favorite potato skin app, with bacon bits and everything.
As Larry maneuvered through the lurching crowd, he nudged the eye dropper and a perfect pearl of poison slipped into the meringue, dragging a graham crumb with it. Jolene would never notice, especially in the dark with the plate of tater skins in front of her. He gave her the drink, and she raised it to her patron (Marco, not Larry) then downed it before Larry could sit. It left a streak of white across her lip. When she licked it off with an eyebrow raised just for him, Larry had a moment of hesitation. She was talented in that area, and it had been some time. Maybe what she needed was for him to suggest a night out, as he did this time, and not to die?
But then she shoved the glass toward him, ordered another, and his heart was at peace.
This time, the dropper was empty, so he gave it to her straight. But by the third, she told him in that sickly way he hated, that she needed to tinkle. Dejectedly, he ate the last couple of skins while he waited for her to come back. He watched a redheaded woman in cowboy boots on the dance floor, the way she kept turning to face him while her oblivious partner jerked against the beat. When the guy headed off to the men’s room, she crooked a finger at him, and Larry couldn’t refuse.
He had just started to grind his way close enough to get a whiff of her perfume when her date returned and slugged him. The other dancers pulled back, like that old experiment when you put a drop of soap in a bowl of pepper-covered water. He was wrestling with the dude when Jolene came in screaming a few minutes later. She kneed the guy and yanked Larry to his feet. The redhead hustled her man over to the bar.
“We gotta go to the hospital,” Jolene slurred. Good, he thought, she’s already showing the effects.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Another second, and it would’ve been him in an ambulance.”
“Not you, me! I’m radioactive!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
“There’s like this blacklight in the girls’ room, you know, that makes a white shirt turn blue? And when I stood up, my pee was glowing!”
“Who the hell looks in the toilet when… oh, never mind. It was probably just a reflection. Let’s just go home.” He glanced one last time at that redhead in the cowboy boots, wondering what might have been, and they left.
No way they were going to the hospital. He couldn’t risk them doing some kind of drug tests on her. He hadn’t given her enough to do long-lasting damage, more dumb luck, but if he was going to put an end to her, this wasn’t going to be it.
When they got home, she puked up the rest of the lemon meringue martinis, and he took the opportunity to look up glowing urine and antifreeze. There it was, on like the fourth page of hits. Who knew they used it to find leaks in the hose? Jolene continued to hurl up the last of his great plan. He shattered the eyedropper in the counter, swept up the pieces, and when he went to hold her head over the bowl, he dropped the pieces in with everything else.
The second time he tried to kill her was about six months later. Jolene had kicked her martini habit, and started living hard-core vegan. “No more tater skins,” she declared. Suddenly, there was nothing in the apartment except kale, tofu, and hemp seeds. Larry thought at least he’d get high on the hemp, but nothing doing. And then he got a warning when he had to give a sample at the worksite he cleaned after the cupcake place hadn’t panned out.
She started reading anti-meat articles at him. “Those poor baby cows,” she whined, as if they weren’t born to be made meat in the first place. “They can’t turn around and they eat the nails on the pen just to get some iron.” Larry sympathized. He took to hiding stashes of Doritos and beef jerky in the glove compartment of his car. Just like those calves with iron, he craved meat, and he’d gnaw on a stick of whatever flavor he could find when he was anywhere Jolene wasn’t.
Every damn meal was disgusting piles of spongy jackfruit and unpronounceable grain bowls shoved under his nose like he was a pig at the trough. But that’s not what renewed his pledge to drive her to extinction.
It was Jolene’s ever-loving habit of making TikTok videos of the ghastly meals she made, and of him trying to eat them. She thought that the two or three comments from her girlfriends would launch her into being something she called “an influencer,” as if that was some kind of job.
So when she told him she was going to a vegan conference—they actually got together to talk about those inedible concoctions?—he knew it had to be done. She’d be gone for three days, staying at a hotel almost two hundred miles from home. The way she drove, Larry knew it wouldn’t take much to engineer some kind of roadside emergency of the fatal type. He did some more searching online, and discovered water in the steering fluid should do the trick. He took care of the job the night before her departure.
The next morning, Jolene made one last video.
“Hey, y’all!” she crooned into her phone. “Gonna see you real soon. I made my man days and days of grain bowls so he won’t starve ’cuz I love him so much!” She turned the camera towards him, as he glumly sat in front of a plate of avocado grits. They didn’t even live in the south. “Now don’t you go cheating, sweet thing, on me or on the diet. I wanna fatten you up like the kids in the story!”
She made a bunch of kissy noises that made him want to shove the plate in her face, right on camera, but he thought of the sluggish steering and her 100 mile-an-hour highway habit. “I’d never cheat,” he said, and scooped up a spoonful of sludge. “I love you!”
A few minutes later, she was gone, and he waited for the water to work its magic. Meanwhile, he raided the fridge, hoping to find some semblance of actual edible food. It took some doing, but there, in the back of the freezer, he found a cache of kielbasa, from their old grilling days. The loop of meat beckoned to be cooked immediately, no matter that it was only eight in the morning.
Mouth watering, heart free, Larry sliced off the plastic packaging and reached for the tongs. Whistling, he paraded outside to the gas grill, putting the plate of kielbasa on the folding table they used to eat at when things were good. He lit the grill, then realized he needed a beer for the occasion. While it heated up, he’d cool down.
But as he leaned into the fridge, he heard something go whoomp. Outside, the entire grill was engulfed in flames. As he watched, the white tank shot in the air like a bottle rocket, shattering the grill and landing two houses over, crashing through a fence. Thank God his porch was concrete and metal, or the whole house might’ve gone up.
Luck was with him, though. When the flames died out, he saw that the kielbasa was safe on the folding table. No sense wasting the food, so he skirted the smoldering wreck and brought the sausage in to cook in the oven instead. He hoped the neighbors wouldn’t call the fire department and ruin his morning. There was too much happiness in the world for that. And in the end, the kielbasa was delicious.
He was disappointed that he never got a call from the state police that afternoon. Had Jolene really made it all the way to the hotel? He was considering calling her, or checking her TikTok, but the damn vegan diet she’d put him on had its revenge. After months of spirulina and almond milk and amaranth, the pound of Polish sausage disagreed with him—violently. He spent the next several hours exploding from both ends, almost wishing he’d never heard of meat. And to kick him one last time, in between bouts of cramps that stretched from his belly to his toes, Jolene called to say she’d made it to the hotel, and she already missed him. He listened to her message as he retched out last week’s jerky and part of his lungs.
He was still recovering in bed two days later, when Jolene came home. He could barely form words, he was so sick. But dammit if she hadn’t learned some beans and nuts recipe that got him feeling human again. She never mentioned any trouble with the car, or the charred remains of the grill, for that matter. In a few days, he was standing again, and he’d sworn off anything resembling animal parts. He was fully committed to the vegan way of life. And, apparently, to Jolene, too.
That lasted another few months. But soon enough, Larry had had it with Jolene for real and for good. She had won some kind of prize for inventing recipes, and her videos were in fact going viral every few weeks. Of course, there was no mention of the many, many failures that he’d been forced to eat, so much that he started again to yearn for a plate of ribs—though one memory of the day of the flying propane tank made his belly churn with refusal. She was simply unbearable, and it had to end. This time, it had to work.
Larry decided, no more clowning around. No messing with poison, with accidents. Time for the direct method. Jolene was famous enough now that she got recognized on a regular basis. Larry thought about what kind of attention that would bring, if she just got killed. Of course that would point to him, so he needed something to distract any snooping cops.
What he needed, Larry decided, was a stalker. She wanted followers? He’d make one up, with a vengeance. He went to the library and used a computer there to start a new account and social media pages. He thought up a lonely, vegan soul who would fall in love with her, before turning to murder.
He started slow, making flirty comments on her videos. Jolene was happy to respond, and as the weeks went on, “Veg4Life 345” grew more and more bold in his advances. Not content to just comment about her food, he moved on to admiring what she wore, where she’d been. She stopped replying to his comments, though never said anything about it to Larry. Of course, she refused his invitations to meet “IRL,” but that was the point—to leave a trail of gluten-free breadcrumbs that would lead to the spurned lover’s rage. All he needed was an opening, a time when he could reasonably be out for a while, when Veggie boy would have his way with her.
The chance came on a Tuesday night. Jolene was experimenting again. The kitchen was a mess of bowls and pots and chopped stalks and soaking legumes. The whole place smelled like a spice market.
“Damn!” she shouted, while he tried to watch the game. “I’m out of sumac. Lar-ry!”
He made his way through the aromatic clouds of steam. Sumac was poison, wasn’t it? Maybe…But no, he’d already gone that route.
“What?” he said.
“Can you go to Richardson’s and get me some dried sumac?”
“Richardson’s is on the other side of town,” he whined, though secretly he knew it was perfect. “I’ll miss the game.”
“Listen in the car,” she said. “I have to get this done tonight. And make sure you get the cured kind. It’s very important for this recipe. Hurry! I promised I’d post the video tonight!”
Muttering as if he was angry, Larry gathered his keys and a ball cap he always wore, then drove off in the direction of Richardson’s. He stopped in a parking lot halfway there, and took out of the trunk a different shirt and hat and a coat he’d bought secondhand that looked nothing like anything he’d ever been seen in. His plan was to actually go to Richardson’s and get the sumac, whatever that was, and make for himself a perfect alibi. On the way home, he’d change into his stalker outfit, and break in the back door and do the deed. Third time’s…
Richardson’s was a storefront in a rundown block in a sketchy neighborhood, with no easy parking. He found a spot a one street over, and made his way to the health food store. He’d been there often enough with Jolene that there was a good chance he’d be recognized. All the better. It was late, and most places in the area were closed. In fact, the woman at the counter was already starting her closing routine when he walked in, asking her for the sumac.
She seemed put out that he’d interrupted her, but she pointed the way to the Middle Eastern aisle, and he found the right kind and she rang him up. He pocketed the jar and strolled back to the car.
As he approached, he noticed someone lurking in the shadows, leaning against a mailbox. He gripped the jar as a weapon, just in case, but Larry wasn’t about to show his fear. He had his keys in hand when the point of a knife pricked him right by the kidney.
“Hey, there, Larry. Long time, no see.”
He recognized that voice. The slimy bartender Marco. But before he could turn, the knife pressed deeper. He heard his shirt ripping before he felt the sting and the tickle of blood snaking down his back.
“Sorry, Marco, we’ve been on the wagon. Are times so tough you need to rough people up to get them to buy a drink?”
But Marco didn’t laugh. He pushed the knife deeper and said, “You’ve been a royal pain, you know that? Why won’t you just die?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You should’ve deleted your search history,” Marco crooned.
“So you and her, from the start…”
“That’s right,” Marco said. “The bar fight fizzled. Jolene tried a two-fer, poisoning your food, and that grill didn’t just explode on its own. We had the perfect alibi, at that conference, but you’ve been lucky. No more screwing around. No more mistakes, Larry.”
The knife slid home, and Larry felt the burning of the blade as he dropped to the ground. The jar of sumac shattered as he fell on it. The last thing he was aware of was its citrusy scent, and his last thought was of the lemon meringue martinis Jolene used to order, so long ago.
“Yup,” Marco said. “Third time’s the charm.”
[Image Credit : Photo by Joakim Nådell on Unsplash]
by 
JM Taylor
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