I wanted to kill him. I swear I did.

We lived together in a mobile home on a plot of land in Central Florida. In my defense, he was a jackass, an abusive prick who sat on his ass all day while I worked myself to the bone. I split my time between my internship at the morgue, classes at UCF, shifts at this little diner on Rouse Road, and home. When I would get home, I would already be tired and sore. When I was home, I was either cooking dinner or being subjected to one of Hal's little tortures. The rape and beatings-- I couldn't take it anymore.

So, I did the one thing every sane person could agree on doing.

I plotted to kill him.

The only question I had was how I was going to go about that.

The idea came to me while I was in the morgue's bathroom, tending to a bruise and cut on my ribs with the place's massive first aid kit. Before lifting my shirt, I made sure the door was locked, then double-checked it.

The skin there was tender and red, pickered from the sweat and grime from the time between acquiring it and arriving at work. I couldn't escape the thought that I couldn't keep living like this.

The thought was deafening, all-consuming. And it was true. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to go about it, but I knew that I couldn't do this anymore. As I treated it with watered-down rubbing alcohol and thick, greasy triple antibiotic ointment, I thought of my mother, and her mother before her, and my matrilineal ancestry.

I'm a woman of strong Southern stock, dammit! One of my ancestors, a poor white woman with wide hips and too many children, went out of her way to oppose the popular politics of her area and sabotaged Confederates, despite the threats to her family. My mother was the first in the family to go to college, despite all odds. There was a weird king of strength baked into my DNA, in every part of my being. My body was an amalgamation of the women who came before, from my first ancestors on this continent to my own great-grandmother, who killed her husband, moved out West, and came back when things blew over.

And that's when I got the idea.

I could kill Hal.

While I did my work in the morgue, filling out paperwork and assisting in autopsies, it was in the back of my mind, racing like cars on a track. How could I do it? When? How would I cover it up? How would I escape? This world was different than it was in the 1930s. This was 2019, for crying out loud! Cameras were everywhere.

Still, I didn't see another way out, and the answer came when I went to the lab next door to put away some chemicals. Two people were in there.

One was Roland, who was another intern and a medical student who was kind of a creep. He was a real chemistry whiz, though, and he was fine if you didn't look at him directly or try to talk to him. The other was Nika, a CSI who specialized in blood spatter but helped out in other areas of the lab, as well. She was on her tip-toes, stashing one of her bottles of fake blood on a shelf in a cabinet where her equipment was stored.

When I looked at Nika...

There are times where I have suspected I might be bisexual. Even then, I wasn't really sure if I had loved Hal. I had been attracted to him, sure, back in high school when we first met, but had I ever loved him?

I felt that same attraction to Nika, though, for different reasons. She was kind and always asked me how I was doing. She was small, curvy, soft, with coarse hands. She always dressed in black. When I was there for lunch, she always offered me a part of her orange. There was a certain type of morbid intensity to her that piqued my interest.

I didn't think there was much of anything I could do about how I felt about Nika, so I pushed down the feelings and entered the room.

The idea of what to do came from Roland, though. I saw my solution in the cabinet he was putting chemicals into. On the middle shelf, there was a small bottle made of dark glass, labeled prussic acid. I knew what that was. Hydrocyanic acid. Cyanide. Rapidly-acting, lethal. I wasn't sure why it was being stored in this cabinet, of all places, but there it was, and I was glad for it.

So, when I was locking up the lab before leaving, minutes after Nika and Roland were both gone, I traversed the unobstructed walkways to the cabinet, unlocked it, and slipped out the bottle. As I held it in the dim light, I swear to God that it glowed a faint green. The mirage faded quickly and I set the bottle on the counter. I snapped on some disposable rubber gloves, washed out a half-empty bottle of lotion, and poured some of the poison into it.

Still high on the adrenaline of what I had done, I hurried out of the room. I had a husband to kill.

And I wanted to do it before dinner.

I went home and started to take care of things. I brewed the coffee. I spilled a little almond extract on the counter. I knew it would probably make him flip out, but that was a risk I was willing to take to cover my tracks, to make myself seem unsuspicious.

I couldn't help but flinch when the door slammed and the trailer filled with the scent of cigarette smoke. Despite the fact that I knew he was home and that I was brewing up coffee with some almond-flavored creamer to disguise the poison, I jumped. It wasn't like I had been caught. I only ever came into the kitchen for popsicles and beer. Hal wasn't the kind to spend more time in there than he needed to.

I slipped the bottle into the cabinet like it was a spice and poured more creamer into the cup that I intended to be mine. If the coffee was light, milky, and topped with a bit of whipped cream, it would be easier for me to tell the mugs apart. I always made my coffee with plenty of those things. Hal said it was frivolous, that I was wasting money and it wasn't worth it. My happiness, even in the little things, was never worth it.

This time, he did come into the kitchen. He wrapped his arms around me like he loved me and-- I don't want to talk about that part. When Hal was done doing what he did, he asked me about what I was doing before.

"What's with the coffee?" he asked.

"It's a... special occasion," I lied. Hal was never one to drink coffee in the afternoon unless he had a reason to.

He took his mug and held it close to his mouth, then paused and raised an eyebrow. "Shit. you're not pregnant again, are you?"

"No, no. Just-- take a seat, and I'll tell you what's going on."

We sat in the living room and I made up some lie about how I was going to get promoted at the diner and he told me he was proud of me. For a second, I wondered if I had done the right thing but, by then, it was too late.

The fact that I wondered that at all...

That's the thing about it. There were good moments that made me question whether or not the worse ones were all that bad. Because that's the thing-- they're not abusive until they are, and then they pretend like they love you, like they care. I don't know how to describe it or talk about it. It's a very bittersweet thing, when it should just be bitter.

And then he was gone.

I couldn't quite believe what I had done. That it had actually worked. That I was capable of killing someone. That he was on the floor of the kitchen, skin against linoleum, in a puddle of coffee that spilled when he died.

That's the thing. You don't think you can do it until you do. Until it's over and the blood is on your hands, and he's choking and asphyxiating, and the room reeks of coffee and almonds. And then he's gone, and it's over, and the only question left to ask is What do you do with the body?

Well, there was a swamp nearby, so that was the answer to my question. I grew up around those parts. I was always warned to stay away from the edge of the swamp, to watch where I stepped when I was in the trees. There was a particularly deep part a few minutes away, down at the edge of the property. My mama always said that it was a thousand feet deep. I wasn't sure about that, but I did know that it was easy to love things there-- things like the dead body of your dickbag husband.

I should say that Hal and I weren't technically married. Legally, I mean. The marriage license expired before the ceremony. Still, we tied the knot. I guess I should refer to him as my partner or my boyfriend or something to that effect, but husband was always easier for me to wrap my head around and to justify his overall actions through.

I've read the Bible. I know how he justified it. I know how I allowed it to continue to happen. I know it's not my fault, not really, not when he would beat me to next Tuesday and scare me into submission. It's hard not to feel that it was, though. It's hard not to blame myself for what happened to me.

I could say that killing Hal was an act of self-defense or of taking back my power, but it was neither. It was an act of survival. It was desperation. It was like clawing my way out of a grave I was put into while I was asleep.

I waited until night fell and the bugs began to sing. Then I dressed myself in dark clothes, dragged his body to the bed of our truck, and drove to the edge of the swamp. I didn't want to get caught. I didn't want anyone to see me, to catch footage of me removing my husband's body from the bed of the truck, to get us on camera while I was taking the corpse to the swamp. It was close enough that I could have dragged him, but I wanted to be safe.

Once I got there, I dumped him into the water. His body was heavier than I expected. All the muscle on him had gone limp. It had gotten heavy with some supernatural weight I couldn't quite fathom. You would think that a forensic science student with an internship and a morgue would know that dead bodies were heavy. In my defense, I had other things on my mind.

He was heavy, but I managed to throw him into the water. As he sank under the surface, I swear I saw him glowing with that same green light I saw in the lab. I tried to ignore it and the sound of the bubbling water that drowned out the crickets and weeping palmetto bugs as I looked out at the horizon, but that was impossible. I couldn't turn away from what I had done.

Once I was sure he was gone, entirely under the water, I allowed myself to breathe, I climbed into my truck and went home. I was going to sleep well that night, without any tears or new bruises. I was sure of it.

About a week later, I was having trouble sleeping and chose to sit in the kitchen instead of sweating in my bed. A mixture of nightmares, flashbacks, and restlessness was keeping me awake. I opened the fridge with a sigh and, my paranoid skin crawling, pulled out a styrofoam container of chicken tenders from the diner. I closed the night before, and I was going to open the next day. I guessed that it was technically that day, since it was around two in the morning.

I nuked the tenders for a minute, poured the bottom of a bottle of ranch into a little plastic bowl, and brought both dishes back to bed with me. Or, at least, I planned to. I was on my way back to my bedroom-- my bedroom, now, which I didn't have to share with him when I was in it.

First, though, I have to say: I was stuck in this weird place of guilt and vindication. I fluctuated between the two emotions like they were two ends of a pole and I was a ribbon, stretched thin, wrapped around the splintering wood. Sometimes the guilt overtook me and I was stuck in place, terrified about what I had done.

What I found, though, was that nobody cared that the bastard was missing. They knew he was a sleazebag. They knew that he had hurt people-- past girlfriends, old coworkers before he lost his job, me. I think a lot of people assumed that he left me. That's what I went with-- that he moved across the country, that he was living with someone in California, that he had left me and I was here, in our trailer, grieving. Nobody cared to look for him. They were willing to swallow the excuse.

And maybe I was grieving. I wasn't really sure. There was a veneer of guilt that held me in a vise grip until it was loosed by the butter thought of I was right to do this. I was right to kill him.

So, like... I was guilty. Maybe what I saw was a side effect of that. I'm not sure, because I think it was real. I don't like to think that my mind could be going.

As I walked through the small hallway to the room, I saw something through the window. The swamp just beyond was glowing gently. I peeked at it, and I could feel my chicken tenders getting cold in my hands, and that's when I saw something I couldn't unsee. That's why I'm here. What I saw... It was horrible. I hated to look at it, but I couldn't look away.

It was Hal. I knew it was by looking at him. I had seen his silhouette enough that I could spot him from a while away. His gait, the way he pulled himself out of the water, all of it... He was disgusting and terrifying. The water was green behind him, glowing and bubbling like something out of an old horror movie.

Hal was a corpse. He was rotting. Skin and meat was already sloughing off of the bone. There were little fish in his hair, flopping and drowning without water; there was algae all over his body like he was the side of a dock. I couldn't tell if this was all him or if he had become a swamp thing. More than the swamp did, he looked like something out of those sci fi movies they show at old cinemas as part of retro nights. He was dripping, he was disgusting-- I couldn't look away. I couldn't stand it.

The worst part of it all was that he seemed to be aware. He knew where he was. He recognized his surroundings. I could see it in his eyes-- he knew that he was in the swamp just outside the trailer park.

The worst part of it was that I wasn't thinking about how he was back, or why, or what the implications of that were. I was thinking about what he would do-- not in terms of zombie activities like biting and converting the dead to his little band of the undead. I was terrified that he was going to find me, that he was going to hit me and yell at me and that I would never be free of him. I was afraid that he would be the one who meted out punishment for my actions. Not consequences-- him being back, being alive, being undead, and dripping with filth, that was consequences. Those were earned. Anything he would do to me was punishment. Not revenge. Punishment.

My instinct was to flee. I wanted to stand there at the window, and lock up my hands and arms, and stay in place until what he wanted to do to me was over.

Something was overtaking me, though, like killing a man had unlocked some urge I couldn't understand. I wanted to protect myself. I wanted to be free from everything he had ever done to me.

And I knew where he kept his gun, so I did what felt natural. I acted based on my second instinct: self-preservation. Survival. Rage. The need to see Hal back in the ground, to see him sink into the swamp once again.

I didn't register what I was doing as I was doing it. I know that I dropped the chicken tenders on the ground. I know that the ranch landed on my feet, that it got between my toes when I ran to the bedroom.

The thing about Hal-- one of the many, many things about him-- was that he kept a gun in the bedside drawer, next to his lube and some condoms. It wasn't the safest place to keep a gun, but it allowed him to hold that as a threat over my head and it allowed me to not have the hassle of opening a gun safe or jiggling locks.

I got the gun. My fingers shook as I loaded it.

I had to think of something as I did so. What would happen if I didn't get out of this alive? Who would miss me? Who could save me? Could I ever save myself?

So, with my fingers shaking, I dialed up Nika. She was one of the only people in my contacts list I knew who wouldn't call me insane, who wouldn't try to hurt me or make this worse. My mother would tell me I'm crazy. Either of my parents would try to come over and slap some sense into me, then baby Hal until it was time for them to leave. Any of my sisters would laugh in my face. I wasn't sure why, but I felt like I couldn't tell Roland or Dr. Marlow (our boss). Something about them... Nika was the only one I felt like I could tell.

She picked up on the second ring. Her voice was hoarse, groggy in an I just woke up kind of way. "Who is this?"

"Nika, it's me," I whispered. The panic came through in my voice. "It's Luanne. I-- I'm terrified."

While I spoke, I tried to load the bullets into the gun. I kept dropping them everywhere. They were on the floor, on the bed, on the ranch between my toes. The sound was deafening and it was obvious that Nika picked up on it.

"Luanne, what is that?" she asked. "Are you loading a gun? Is that what I'm hearing?"

"Um... No."

"Are you lying to me?"

"Yes."

"Okay, let me try to talk you through this. What's with the gun?"

"It's Hal."

"Is he hurting you again?"

"He never stopped, but that's not what's happening here." I told her everything. I didn't even care to ask how she knew that Hal had been hurting me in the first place.

In retrospect, it was kind of obvious. I would show up to the morgue with random bruises. I would use the excuse of "I fell down the stairs" even though our mobile home didn't have any stairs except the two makeshift steps leading up to the front door. It was no wonder that Nika caught on. I was sure everyone at the diner knew, too.

She promised to be there in five minutes. She promised that she would be right there.

In the meantime, I was preoccupied with Hal and what remained of him. I checked the window that faced the swamp. He was closer now, charging across the lawn, still dripping with muck and dark water. And I was still in the bedroom, with the gun in my hands. I finished loading it, and I readied myself.

I had a man to kill.

Again.

You have to understand-- my mother didn't raise a pussy. A lady, sure, but one that could finish a fight. My father may have raised a girl who took things lying down, but my mother sure didn't. She raised a woman who could hold her own under stress. Sure, that stress came from being in the kitchen and not necessarily for killing a man, but she still taught me to keep my head cool.

Sure, I was flipping the fuck out, and why wouldn't I? My husband had come back to life after I killed him. I think I was allowed to freak out a little.

Anyways, I got my gun, and I went out back to meet him. If I was going to get killed by this bastard, I was going to do it on my own terms. I was going to go out fighting. Preferably, I wouldn't go out at all. You know what I mean, though.

So, I went out back, with the ranch on my feet and everything. Let me tell you, the sugar ants and palmetto bugs sure loved that. Hal, not so much.

My hands shook around the gun as I raised it. I wanted to act like I was calm, collected, like none of this bothered me, but the reality was obvious. My hands gave me away. My hands told Hal that I was still afraid of him. That I would always be afraid of him.

There was a piece of dead fish fused to his jaw. Its scales and bones and flesh held his mouth in place until he reached up with rotting fingers to remove it. His skin was puckered, pruned, falling off the bone. Where it was still intact, it was discolored. Where it was broken, there was movement, like bugs and little creatures and maggots and worms were living there, writhing just under the surface of what remained of him.

"You did this to me," he said, looking me in the eyes. Neither of his eyes lined up correctly, like something had forced them out of place. His voice sounded like he was pretending to be sad, like he was disappointed in me.

I knew him well. I knew this was a manipulation tactic. I knew that he was aiming to get me to apologize, to let him punish me. I knew that. This was all a part of his cruel little game. He wanted me to give myself over to him, the same way my father gave me to him, the same way an obedient, traumatized child with tears in her eyes presents her bare bottom to her father for a spanking.

I didn't want to let myself be manipulated. "No I didn't. I didn't do this to you. You did this to yourself."

"That's a lie," he said, his voice still soft, still mournful.

I shook my head in defiance. I could feel tears coming to my eyes, burning my nose on the way up. They have always done that. I wanted to look away, so he wouldn't see that flash of weakness on my face.

That wasn't enough. The yell that tore out of him was chilling. I don't know how to describe it. If you were yelled at by someone who was hurting you, while they were hurting you, you'll know what I'm talking about. It makes the blood go cold. It makes your shoulders tense up, your hands lock, your heart weak. For me, the tears were inevitable.

"Don't you lie to me!" he screamed. It was somewhere between a bellow and a shriek. It was worse. Even in his undead state, he yelled so loud that I thought his vocal chords might tear. He reiterated, "Don't you ever fucking lie to me!"

The speed with which he moved toward me was unexpected and terrifying. Needless to say, it took me off guard. I yelped, jumped up onto the back steps, and readjusted the gun. I didn't pull the trigger quick enough, though, because then he was on me, on me, holding me to the back door. His face was close to mine, rotting and sneering. Hal's teeth were exposed, falling out, untethered. His breath was hot, wet, hellish-- like the smell of sulfur water on a hot Wednesday morning.

I struggled for the doorknob and the two of us fell through it. I tried to free myself, to run through the house, to shake him off in our tiny little mobile home. He still had a grip on my wrist, and he was twisting it painfully as I tried to get away. In this state, I couldn't shoot him. I couldn't hold the gun straight enough to try. He could definitely destroy things in the house, though, and he did. He broke a vase, a chair, and the front door as I fell out of it, all trying to get me on the ground so that he could have his way with me. I was pretty sure he wanted to choke me out, to leave me as dead as he was.

I finally got myself away from him and stumbled onto the road. He followed me to the asphalt, though, and he looked like he was ready to tackle me into the trees beyond, to hurt me like he still owned me. He technically already had. My wrist was still throbbing. The delicate bones inside weren't broken, but they sure felt like they were.

I didn't know that Nika was going to hit him with her car.

I wasn't even aware that she was driving up until the front of her Saturn Ion hit him and he went down, crumpled on the hot, wet asphalt like a piece of paper. The sound that his body made was simultaneously dull and wet, like somebody threw a balloon from the top floor of a skyscraper and it hit the concrete below. His bones crunched, and his entire body seemed to sigh as he fell to the hot concrete.

And then, once he was down and out, seemingly unconscious or undead, I shot him. I blew his goddamn brains out. I don't feel any remorse for doing so, not after what he did to me for so long.

I wasn't exactly sure what came out of the back of his head. It was an odd mixture of blood, bone, brain matter, water, algae, and fish meat. It reeked to high heaven and it turned my stomach to the point where I was sure I was going to ralph right next to him.

At first, Nika and I weren't sure what we were supposed to do. I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but, once his brains were all over her tires and hood, I also fell to the ground. All the guilt and tension I had been feeling for the past week and for my entire life with Hal flowed right out of mr in the form of hot, wet, salty tears that I couldn't stop. I was vaguely aware of Nika holding me. I was vaguely aware of the fact that my ears were ringing from the sound of the gun going off.

By the time I was okay-- minutes or hours later, I wasn't sure and the sun wasn't up yet anyway-- we had to come up with something to do.

"The body?" she asked, when I finally lifted my head from the space between her shoulder and her chest. She was staring off in the distance, at the trees and the swamp and my home. She wasn't looking at me. I think it may have been shock but, hey, I'm no paramedic. I work with the dead, not the living.

"We could put it back in the swamp," I offered.

"I guess so. And my car?"

We decided that I would pay for the car wash, and that we would both be okay-- eventually. It was odd, dumping his body in the swamp once again. It was weird watching it sink under the water.

We were going to skip town-- she was just as entrenched in this as I was-- but we decided against it. Our roots are here, in Central Florida. I have lived just outside of Orlando my entire life. I wasn't about to change everything about me for Hal. Not after everything he did to me-- and everything I did to him.

I still know where his body is. It still haunts me. I swear to god, when I leave my windows open, I can hear him calling to me from the swamp, in his watery little grave. I will not leave flowers there. I will not visit his corpse.