Dark Secret

“I guess you’re going to have to kill me too now,” she said. She was pointing inside my bottom drawer.

“Why?” I asked.

Heidi again. “I’ve been reading,” she said. “The whole punk thing. South Street.”

“So?”

She showed me another of her snapshots.

“It’s all a lie,” she said. “St. Nuke never killed the Duke. You did. And there was never any such thing as the Shuteye Train. It was just you. With this icepick.”

“We all looked alike to them,” I explained. “Nuke was badly wounded from the debates. I just did my part.”

“Murder,” she said. “And there never was a band called The Shuteye Train? Right?”

Which is when the night went kind of funny. There was a rumbling. Then a growling. And a barely discernible whisper. Strictly speaking, nothing happened. Only Heidi, in the interim, had peed her pants.

“You’re not really real, are you?” she said. “Any of you.”

“Yes, I am,” I told her. “Real as the day is long.”