Owner of a Lonely Heart

Goddamn flies.

Balfour has seen a lot of dead bodies, too many to count. She’s seen bodies without heads, bodies gone fat and soft as mushrooms, bodies puffing out gases as if they were still breathing, fleshless bodies decomposed enough to reveal the yellow skeleton within – suicide, murder, accident, she’s seen it all, and nothing much fazes her.

Except for the goddamn flies. Something about their glistening blue-black bodies, the incessant hum of their wings, and their filthy children – fucking maggots, the way their roil and spill like rice boiling over out of a gunshot wound, lined up like tiny soldiers on the edge of a laceration, their little mouths in their eyeless faces gumming away flesh gone green with rot – makes Detective Balfour recoil. She doesn’t show it, of course – she’s notorious for her composure. Unlike her fellow officers, Balfour has never once done the following at a crime scene: vomited, blanched at the site of a body torn to pieces and scattered across a room, cried, flinched, quivered, or Taken it Personally.

The job gets to her in other ways, of course, ways that other cops will never guess at. Some nights she sits in front of the TV and stares for hours, bathed and warmed in its toxic blue light, flicking from channel to channel in time to the metronomic blinks of her eyes, so that when she opens them all she sees is the black between stations.

Open. Close. Open. Close. Black. Blue. Black. Blue.

It’s worrisome, to say the least, these evenings spent dumb as a zombie, but she has much bigger things to worry about.

This, for instance.

She was not expecting to find a family, not out here. None of them were.

A couple of kids (not so brave now; noses dripping snot, red-faced from crying, their thin voices hoarse from all the screaming) wandered a bit too far out, right onto the edge of the Borderlands. Before the tree-line went up in earnest, before the abandoned factories and warehouses, some signs of life left out here: a few row-houses staggering against the Darkness, an unpaved road or two, a rusty bicycle, one rib-thin dog (or coyote, Balfour wasn’t sure; there was something undeniably feral about the thing), nosing through a bag of trash on the road. She shot at it, just in case; no goddamn way was a dog was going to sift through her evidence before she did. Before it ran away, it turned its long muzzle, lifted its yellow eyes and gazed at her, for just a split-second longer than she would have liked.

She could have sworn it sneered at her – a particularly human sneer - before it turned its head and loped away into the shadows.

That wasn’t the worst of it, of course.

Inside the row house (three steps up onto a porch that listed drunkenly to the left), and through the door (splintered, ajar, splattered with blood inside and out), down a hall (the floor tacky with blood, the walls shiny with it), and into a kitchen. It wasn’t much of a kitchen, really; these row houses were built well over half a century ago, so there was no microwave, no stainless steel appliances, just a scratched porcelain sink, an old fridge, a gas stove. All of the cupboards were open, their doors hanging askew; there were deep gouges in the wood. Claw marks, Balfour thought.

When she first walked in, she thought that the heap of skin, fur, and oddly twisted limbs on the floor belonged to a large cat, a bobcat maybe, or a lynx – the creatures were rumored to prowl the Borderlands, especially at night. After bending down and examining the stinking pile – goddamn motherfucking flies drowsily circling her head as she did so – Balfour came to the conclusion that she was looking at three separate bodies arranged in a triangle; three bodies, three sides. Two female bodies, one male. The two adults - one male, one female – were laid out with their heads touching, their twisted and mangled bodies pointing down. All four legs and arms were bent at unnatural angles; Balfour glimpsed the absurdly clean whiteness of bones in the folds of flesh and fur.

At the feet of the two adults was a small girl, the base of the triangle. Her eyes were open, glassy green cat eyes staring up at Balfour, staring up through the cloud of flies that circled the girl's head. An upside-down cross was carved into her forehead; the blood had dripped down her face, staining the downy white fur.

Their hearts had been torn out. There was nothing clinical, nothing surgical or deliberate about the wounds. The hearts had been ripped out using only teeth.

All three bodies were covered in grey and white fur, a soft dusting that grew thicker on their arms and legs. Their thin cat ears had been ripped off and tossed into the center of the triangle, along with three long striped tails. One heart rested in the pile of cartilage and vertebrae and fur, partially chewed, the gristle and flesh seething with maggots.

Fur.

It was a trans-family. Balfour had never seen an entire family of trans-creatures before; she had never even imagined that they came from families. In Balfour’s mind, trans-kids sprung fully formed from the filthy back alleys and even dirtier floors of the City clubs. She’s seen plenty of them, both dead and alive, and all different kinds: cats, birds, bears, rabbits, even a lizard or two. They were casualties of the City, these kids, unnatural creatures, who almost invariably came to a bad end. It wasn’t a shock to find a dead trans.

But a dead trans family. That was something different.

The photographer and forensics team were on their way. It was going to be a long night.

***

Balfour shrugs off her clothes and steps into the shower. The crime scene washes down the drain, all of it – the coppery-sweet taste of blood, the cloying stench of rotted flesh, the heady buzz of flies. The eyes of the little girl, her tiny pink nose. Half of it had been eaten away already – whether by her killer or the maggots, Balfour doesn’t know. Doesn’t matter.

She closes her eyes and lets the water wash over her face. It’s hot, almost too hot.

Doesn’t matter.

Balfour washes her arms, her breasts, her feet, her legs, between her legs. She washes her face, scrubs too hard. And last, she reaches behind her to the small dip above her buttocks, in the small of her back, to the soft nub there. She can’t see it – she never, ever looks at it; that’s a rule – but she can imagine it, three inches long, spotted black and white, flicking stiffly back and forth.

She washes it, gently.

Balfour hears a noise and she stiffens. Below the roar of the water, a low growl. Claws clicking, something is padding on soft feet towards her.